From fairly early in the history of the Colony of New South Wales there have been counts made of the number of people living in it. People were named individually, making censuses and musters useful to us when trying to find out where a person was living and what they were doing.

Here is a rather poor copy of a page from the 1837 Muster of Convicts:

Page from the 1837 Convict Muster

In the early days of the colonies of Australia censuses involved nothing more than gathering every person together in one place and counting them. This was called a ‘muster’, and is similar to the process used to count sheep before herding them off to the stockyards.

The first census as we know it, where people were counted in their homes, was in New South Wales in 1828. It had been brought to the Governor’s attention that free settlers could not be forced to attend a muster…

As more information was required, more questions were asked. An important consideration in the beginning of the new colonies was whether there was enough food to go around, so the early musters indicate whether each person was dependent on government stores for food. Only heads of households were listed by name, with dependent wives, children and servants counted but not named. As the inhabitants started to grow their own food it was important to know what they were growing, so these questions were asked.

Here is a list of the early censuses and musters available for New South Wales with their availablity to researchers.

1800-1802

A muster was taken between Jul and August 1800, when Governor Philip Gidley King assumed control of the colony. Additional musters were taken at the same time of year in 1801 and 1802.

Baxter, Carol J. Musters and Lists, New South Wales and Norfolk Island, 1800-1802. Sydney: ABGR, 1988.

Governor King’s Lists 1801 can be found on PRO Reel 10 and the Norfolk Island Victualling Book 1802 on PRO Reel 14.

1805-6

A general muster of prisoners and freemen was taken on Tuesday 12th August 1806, with the landholders mustered on Thursday 14^th August. The muster gives information on ‘how employed’ or ‘with whom lives (females)’, which is information that is available nowhere else. A Land and Stock Muster was collected on the same day, containing acreages of the different crops, numbers of horses, cattles, sheep, goats and hogs, numbers of bushels of wheat, maize and barley on hand, and the numbers of persons and whether victualled by the government, with remarks about residence.

These musters have been transcribed in:

Baxter, Carol J. Musters of New South Wales and Norfolk Island, 1805-1806. Sydney: ABGR, 1989.

The Norfolk Island Muster of 1805 has been transcribed in the same volume, as has Samuel Marsden’s Female Muster 1806. The Reverend Samuel Marsden collected information on the females of the colony, probably from the original 1806 muster. This muster classifies the women as ‘concubine’, ‘married’ or ‘wife’, and records, where possible, where the woman was married and numbers of legitimate and ‘natural’ children.

Images of the 1806 muster is available on PRO Reel 72 and on Ancestry. Marsden’s muster is at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

1811

The muster was taken between 5 February and 5 March 1811. Individuals are listed alphabetically within category – male convicts, female convicts, free men and free women. Information listed:

• Name
• Ship
• When convicted
• Where convicted
• Sentence
• Remarks

There is a transcription in:

Baxter, Carol J. General Muster of New South Wales, Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land, 1811.Sydney: ABGR, 1987.

The NSW version of the 1811 census can be viewed on SRNSW Reel 1252, and the British version on PRO Reel 61 and on Ancestry.

1814

The 1814 muster was taken between 17 October and 16 November 1814, and gives a brief description of occupation and whether on or off the stores. A transcription is available in:

Baxter, Carol J. General Muster of New South Wales, 1814. Sydney: ABGR, 1987.

The original records can be viewed on SRNSW Reel 1252.

1819

A general muster taken in November 1819 can be viewed on SRNSW Reel 1252. There is no index or transcription.

1822

A general muster was taken on the 2-13 September 1822, and a Land and Stock muster taken around the same time. The General Muster gives:

• Name
• Age, including an indication the parents of children
• Arrival Status
• Present Status
• Ship of Arrival
• Colonial sentence
• Sentence
• Occupation
• Employer
• Where

The Land and Stock Muster gives:

• Residence
• Name
• How land held
• Whether resident on farm
• Acres in wheat, maize, barley, oats, peas/beans, potatoes, garden or orchard
• Numbers of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs
• Bushels in hand of wheat and maize

Both the General Muster and the Land and Stock Muster have been transcribed:

Baxter, Carol J. General Muster and Land and Stock Muster of New South Wales, 1822. Sydney: ABGR, 1988.

Images of the General Muster is available on PRO Reel 72 and on Ancestry. The Land and Stock Muster is only available on SRNSW Reel 1252.

1823-25

In 1823 a General Muster was taken in September 1823, and a muster book compiled by the Colonial Secretary’s office. Subsequent musters in 1824 and 1825 were taken at the same time of year, but instead of compiling new lists the decision was made to update the 1823 list instead, resulting in a much more complete and more accurate list. Additional details were added up to 1832.

The muster includes:

• Name
• Age
• Status
• Ship of arrival
• Ship year
• Sentence
• Occupation, Employer, etc

The 1825 muster was the last muster. Free settlers were increasingly unwilling to attend musters, and the government  realised it had no power to compel them.

A transcription can be found in:

Baxter, Carol J. General Muster List of New South Wales, 1823, 1824, 1825. Sydney: ABGR, 1999.

Ancestry has digitized images of the muster books, which are also available on PRO Reel 66.

1828

The 1828 Census was taken in November 1828, although returns straggled in early the next year. This was the first census to be taken in Australia and the only census to survive in its entirety to the present day. About a quarter of the householders’ returns survive.

Both colonial and British copies survive, as do most of the householders’ returns. There are differences in each, so it is important to check them all if possible.

Malcolm Sainty and Keith Johnson (editors) have compiled a database on CD 1828 Census Revised Edition which collects data from both the Australian and British versions of the census together with the returns of the householders themselves. This is the most complete list available, as there were many transcription errors in the compiling and copying of the lists, and some people were left out of the lists completely.

1837

The 1837 Convict Muster is more of a compilation than a traditional muster, and as such is more accurate. The new governor, Sir George Gipps, needed to establish an accurate count of the convicts in the colony as it was likely that transportation would soon cease.

The muster includes:

• Name
• Age
• Ship
• Year
• Where Tried (often not filled in)
• Master
• District
• Remarks (such as ‘Ticket of Leave’ or ‘Married’)

The muster has been transcribed:

Butlin, N.G., C.W. Cromwell and K.L. Suthern. General Return of Convicts in New South Wales, 1837.Sydney: ABGR, 1987.

Images are available on PRO Reels 71 and 72, and on Ancestry.

The 1841 and later censuses will be covered in  future post.

When we say that our ancestor only went to 3rd Year of high school (or whatever), what do we mean? It’s important to understand what was being taught in schools in those days before we pass judgement on the education our ancestors were given.

I was driven to think about this topic by a post I saw in Psychology Today entitled Can You Pass This Final 8th-Grade Exam from 1895? Admittedly, a lot of the terminology has changed since those days. We don’t measure wheat in bushels or coal in pounds or distance in rods or area in acres. We also don’t study grammar and orthography as they did then.

Here’s the exam in full:

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA. These questions were taken from the original examination on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , Kansas.

Take the test and see if you would have graduated with the eighth grade class in 1895.

GRAMMAR (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie,’ ‘play,’ and ‘run’
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation..
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

ARITHMETIC (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet Long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs, what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent per annum.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft long at $20 per metre?
8… Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. HISTORY (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus .
3.. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States …
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

ORTHOGRAPHY (Time, one hour) * Do you even know what this is?

1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7 Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

GEOGRAPHY (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America .
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St.. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco .
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each..
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

We can see the emphasis on the rules of grammar and orthography. We can also see the emphasis on the knowledge that an adult in Kansas was likely to need.

I’d love to be able to find an equivalent exam for New South Wales. If I find one I’ll be sure to post it here.

What do you think? Would you pass this exam?

Photo of Greghamstown School, taken by the author in 2008.

MyHeritage has bought FamilyLink and WorldVitalRecords. MyHeritage is a social network for sharing family history and family trees, and it does it very well. FamilyLink is an attempt to do something similar that never really worked, in my opinion, and WorldVitalRecords is a source of genealogy-related records, like Ancestry, that also never really made it, at least in Australia.

FamilyLink has/had a Facebook application for creating and sharing trees that I could never manage to get to work properly, which is a shame as I think there is a market for such a thing. I had a subscription to WorldVitalRecords that I haven’t used for a long time, and now that I’ve gone in there again I can see that it looks exactly the same as FamilyLink:

My subscription to WorldVitalRecords was most useful for its Australian content from Archive Digital Books Australasia, which has since moved to FindMyPast.com.au, and so I haven’t been in there for a long time.

It all sounds like a particularly messy family tree, doesn’t it!

I will be watching to see what MyHeritage does with its new purchase.

This is the press release from MyHeritage:

MyHeritage Acquires FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com

Significant move into US and addition of historical content mark major evolution for world’s most popular online family network

PROVO, Utah & LONDON, UK & TEL AVIV, Israel-- MyHeritage, the most popular family network on the web, announced today the acquisition of FamilyLink.com, Inc., maker of the family history content sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com. This is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. The purchase marks a significant move into the US market commercially and operationally, and will boost MyHeritage’s offering to families with the addition of a vast database of more than 3 billion historical records. With offices and staff in Europe, Australia and Israel, MyHeritage will now be adding its first US-based office in Utah, the home of FamilyLink.com and often cited as the family history capital of the world.“We are delighted to join forces with the talented FamilyLink team in Provo to deliver meaningful value to families across the world,” says MyHeritage CEO and Founder Gilad Japhet. “Combining close to one billion family tree profiles on MyHeritage with FamilyLink’s massive library of historical data delivers a perfect one-stop-shop for families looking to discover and share their family history”.Founded in 2006, both FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com are subscription services which provide access to a huge database of historical content, covering several billion individuals within census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as the web’s largest archive of historical newspapers. This content will deliver new insights and value to the 60 million people who have signed up on MyHeritage in 38 different languages, creating more than 900 million profiles in 21 million family trees. When brought together under the MyHeritage umbrella, the company’s innovative Smart Matching technology will automatically match any of the new historical data to the relevant users’ ancestors and relatives within the family trees.

“Our team of family history veterans couldn’t be more excited about joining forces with MyHeritage”, said FamilyLink.com CEO Paul Brockbank. “This acquisition creates new horizons in exploring family history. People will receive the opportunity to search the most comprehensive historical content sources and make exciting new discoveries; share this information with their close family and save it into their family tree. Combined under the leadership of MyHeritage, the service will continue to flourish and add more value to millions of families”.

MyHeritage Founder and CEO Gilad Japhet adds: “The establishment of a US base for MyHeritage in Utah, the international center for genealogical research, is an important milestone in our growth and brings about an exciting opportunity for the company and the families we serve. MyHeritage provides the perfect service to collect the family’s treasured archive to share and keep for future generations in a setting that is friendly and secure – and now we’re excited to top this off with vast amounts of content that will add more color and life to family trees. Through our powerful search engine and automatic Smart Matching technology we’ll find your mother’s yearbook, your great-grandfather’s will and your ancestor’s immigration record, leaving you with the time to marvel at, enjoy and share your family heritage. We’ll do that on a massive, global scale, as we live in a world that is smaller and more tightly connected than ever before”.

This is the latest in a series of strategic purchases by MyHeritage since 2007 which have included Pearl Street Software, makers of GenCircles.com and the Family Tree Legends software; free family tree backup service BackupMyTree.com; European family social network market leader OSN (Verwandt) GmbH; Dutch family network ZOOOF; British family network Kindo.com and Polish family network Bliscy.pl.

The majority of the FamilyLink.com employees will join MyHeritage, based out of the company’s new US office in Provo, Utah: bringing the benefit of their collective expertise within the family history and North American genealogy market. The CEO of FamilyLink.com, Paul Brockbank, previously CEO of Logoworks and GM of Hewlett Packard Web Print Solutions, will play a key role in supporting the transition over the coming months and will later join the MyHeritage advisory board. FamilyLink.com founder Paul Allen, previously a co-founder of Ancestry.com, and FamilyLink.com’s “We’re Related” Facebook application, will not be part of the merger with MyHeritage.

In the short-term, MyHeritage will continue to operate the two sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com, with the intention of achieving full integration within MyHeritage in 2012. With immediate effect and for an introductory period, loyal subscribers and users of MyHeritage will be entitled to discounts of up to 50% on FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com subscriptions, and vice versa.

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the most popular family network on the web. Millions of families around the world enjoy having a private and free place for their families to keep in touch and to showcase their roots. MyHeritage’s Smart Matching™ technology empowers users with an exciting and innovative way to find relatives and explore their family history. With all family information stored in a secure site, MyHeritage is the ideal place to share family photos, and celebrate and preserve special family moments. The company is backed by Accel Partners and Index Ventures, the investors of Facebook and Skype. For more information visit www.myheritage.com.

If you are a resident of New South Wales you are entitled to a library card, and if you have a library card you can now borrow eBooks from the library online.

Go to http://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/databases/athome.cfm and find Ebook Library (EBL). Once you are signed in you can access EBL and choose from over 2500 books. I found Noeline Kyle’s Writing Family History Made Very easy (2007) and I can download it to read at my leisure:

As you can see I can borrow it for a maximum of 14 days. I wonder if it is unavailable to others until I return it?

You need Adobe Digital Editions to read the book that you have downloaded, and so far I have not the patience to do this, so if you have a go for yourself please let us know how you go!

Postscript

I have downloaded and installed Adobe Digital Editions, which is eBook reader software. When you sign in you can open books. I had to double-click on the book I downloaded from the State Library NSW website, and it opened in the reader.

I have an Asus eeePad Slider, and I can’t use Adobe Digital Reader on it. Yet.

I have been playing with an interesting calculator on the BBC News website. You can see the rise in the world’s population and find out where your birth came on the graph by entering your birthdate. They don’t store any of your information, they just use it to calculate the numbers for the display for you. Here’s mine:

Of course this is only an estimate based on the date; it cannot be exact. When I went through the same exercise for my husband, who was born nearly four months before me, the difference in our numbers was over 18 million. 18 million people were born in four months around the world!

You can then enter your country to find out about your country’s population. Make sure you watch the world population counter rising steadily before you enter your country; it’s astounding!

It is almost beyond comprehension to imagine 15,000 babies born every hour around the world. I wonder when the counter will get to 7,000,000,000?

Here is Australia the numbers are not quite so staggering, but they are still surprising:

You can then watch the population counter of your country tick over. Even in Australia, with 33 births per hour, you will see some action there.

I clicked to find out why Qatar has such a rapidly-growing population. This is what I was told:

In developing nations, where improvements in health care and sanitation are seeing death rates fall, birth rates still remain relatively high. This is leading to rapidly rising populations. In fact, 97 out of every 100 new people on the planet are currently born in developing countries. Qatar – which has a large immigrant workforce – has seen its population rise rapidly in recent years.

Moldova is shrinking because of emigration.

Then you can find out your life expectancy based on the country you entered previously:

Finally you are shown a summary of what you have just seen:

It is staggering to think of how quickly the population is rising and how much higher our life expectancy is than it was for our ancestors. How many of your ancestors lived past this age? My two Australian grandparents both lived past ninety so my odds are good!

The website is http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515. What number were you in the world’s population?