Mining my family stories

Unearthing family history gold in Trove

I can't remember exactly when I began using Trove but I had heard what a great resource it was for family history research. I thought I would do some searching to see if I could find any information about my ancestors in the mounds of digitised materials that I knew it contained. I began with a character that I needed to know more about and it led to a very interesting story.

Trying to strike it rich

On my father's side there is an American, Henry Alexander Walker, my great great grandfather, who married an English migrant Sarah Anne Wheeler in Tasmania in 1860. They had 12 children, born in Tasmania and all over the goldfields of NSW as Henry was trying to strike it rich. When I first searched Trove for information about him I didn't find much but on a closer inspection of the search results I discovered a NSW police gazette from 1880 mentioning him along with his son Christopher Henry. They had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to 3 years and 6 months hard labour respectively. Christopher was just 15 years old.

New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime showing the Walker's arrest
Government Gazette Notices 12 May 1880, New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime, p. 179, trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/251642468

Hitting the jackpot

When I first tried searching for Christopher Walker on Trove I wasn’t able to find much more. But when I returned a few years later and tried the same search terms again, however, I hit the jackpot. It is good to remember that coming back to a search at a later date is a great strategy for family history research and can often uncover newly digitised or catalogued materials that were not previously available. The jackpot was finding a link in Trove to a recently-published book that features the transcribed diary of a gold-prospecting expedition across Western Australia and the Northern Territory led by Christopher with his younger brother Arthur back in 1913. A physical copy of this book was deposited in the National Library of Australia’s collection and is available for viewing in the reading room, something I did on my first day at work!

The catalogue record is linked to Trove and that is how I found it. The NLA also holds a copy of a sketch map of the journey and the digital image is linked back for viewing on Trove.

Sketch map of the route taken by Walker Bros prospecting party 1913
Christopher Henry Walker & Walker Bros., Sketch map of the route taken by Walker Bro.s prospecting party, 1913, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-232138506

The original diary of that trip including maps and other documents is available at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and has been digitised for viewing online.

Mining for mentions in newspapers

Another wonderful aspect of Trove is the ability to search the millions of pages of digitised newspapers from as far back as 1803.

a news article from 1934 titled Epic Trek in Search of Gold
‘Epic Trek in Search of Gold: Prospectors tell their own story’, 1 December 1934, The Daily News (Perth), p. 17, trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/86016864

I figured out a bit about the story of the 'Walker Brothers expedition' by using “walker brothers” as a search term as that is how they are often referred to in the newspaper articles. Once I had done this, I was able to search newspapers for information about their endeavours and was rewarded with a plethora of digitised articles recounting their various gold mine leases as well as their prospecting expedition of 1913.

One of the articles features the only picture of Christopher as a grown man that I have found as well as a lengthy description of “native” artwork found in caves in the NT as well as encounters with local Aboriginal people and discoveries of burial sites.

black and white portrait of Christopher Walker from 1914
Christopher Walker, Vast Lake Found, 20 March 1914, The Herald (Melbourne), p.9 trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/242149773

It really is amazing to see how collection holdings from around Australia are linked to Trove and how useful a resource it is for finding information about your ancestors. There were family stories about two of the Walker brothers who had gone to Western Australia to find gold but I never had any information about what they had done. Now I have proof of their exploits in WA and beyond as they tried to strike it rich on the gold fields. They also spent some time mining in Madagascar but that is a story for another time...