Technology Special Interest Group Meeting - This Week

Our next meeting is on Thursday 14th November, this week, at 1:30pm. All members are welcome to join us in the Society Rooms.

• We are a Collaborative Group
• There is no such thing as a silly question
• No-one takes centre stage
• Don’t hide your light under a bushel

Our planned agenda (but we may stray) is :

1. Recap of last meeting

2. Main topic: Apps, Free software

3. New resources/sites

• KHS on Twitter
• Google + Hangouts on Air
• What have you found?

4.Questions for Discussion

5.Topic and date for next meeting.

The blog post with notes from our October session is at http://kuringgaihs.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/technology-sig-10-october-2013-notes.html.

If you have a great piece of free software that you use please be ready to tell us about it. Please come along with your questions.

Jill Ball jillballau@gmail.com

Remembrance Day - Some local lads

It is almost the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and many of us in Ku-ring-gai Historical Society have more soldiers to remember than we did last year - because of working on our WWI biographies project.

Here are some more local lads we have not been able to identify, but who deserve to be remembered by their full names.

Can you help us identify them and their links to the area?

F FOGDEN 

on the Killara Hall War Memorial at the Marian Street Theatre

AH DILLER and 

AJ DOUGLAS 

on the Wahroonga War Memorial

FG DANIEL 

on the Turramurra Park Gates Memorial

P BROWN 

on the Warrawee Public School Memorial

WL COOPER 

on both the Killara Uniting Church Memorial and 

the St Johns Church, Turramurra Memorial

If you have any information on these soldiers, please leave a comment on the blog or email us at khs@khs.org.au

LEST WE FORGET

An Invitation from Eryldene

Our friends from Eryldene have issued this invitation to our members.

A Night to Remember

NSW Premier, Barry O'Farrell, with local MPs, Ku-ring-gai Mayor, Jennifer Anderson and members of the Society Executive at the dinner last night.

150 members and guests gathered last night at Roseville Golf Club to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of our Society.

Thanks to the Dinner sub-committee, chaired by Don Nicholson, for organising such a splendid event.

In the coming days we will be sharing, here on this blog, some of the many photos taken at the event.

We're Celebrating Today

Members and Friends of the Ku-Ring-gai Historical Society will gather this evening to celebrate out 50th Anniversary

Among the guests will be Life Members of the Society, Local Parliamentarians, the Mayor of Ku-ring-gai, Councillors and Council Staff members.

Please stop by the Society Rooms to see member Jocelyn's new display that details the history of our Society.

New Display

The Society is mentioned in Hansard

Hansard which is the official record of the proceedings of The Parliament of New South Wales is an excellent resource for local and family history research. The Hansard Records for New South Wales are available to search online. 

This extract from NSW Legislative Assembly Hansard and Papers Thursday 31 October 2013 is of a speech given by The Member for Davidson, Jonathan O'Dea. 

Mr JONATHAN O'DEA (Davidson) [6.46 p.m.], by leave: Dr Harriet Biffin is not a household name, but thanks to the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society she will never be forgotten. Dr Biffin is just one of the thousands of colourful characters brought to life by the Ku-Ring-Gai Historical Society, which celebrates its fiftieth birthday in one week's time. Dr Biffin practised in Lindfield from 1904 to 1928 and was notorious for doing house calls in a dogcart, wearing a straw boater and a suit, while exercising her flair for the Greek language. One can only imagine the impact she would have had on Ku-ring-gai's rather conservative establishment: a woman dressed as a man offering medical advice peppered with Greek.

Dr Biffin also joined with Dr Lucy Bullett to found the NSW Association of Registered Women Doctors. The pair then went on to open the New Hospital for Women and Children in Surry Hills, which became the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children in Redfern in 1921, a bastion of women's health. She was not only a great contributor to women's health but also a wonderful personality in Ku-ring-gai's rich and colourful history. That history has been tirelessly documented by the volunteers and members of the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society.

On 7 November the society turns 50. I am looking forward to joining its members and volunteers on the night for an anniversary celebration dinner at Roseville Golf Club. The Ku-ring-gai Historical Society was formed in 1963 when Ku-ring-gai Council cast a wide net to find a team of local residents willing and experienced enough to document their municipality's history. It was the remarkable foresight of Mayor George Nicol that brought together representatives from business, schools and service clubs, genealogists and members from the Royal Australian Historical Society to collate Ku-ring-gai's history.

Councillor Nicol was elected first president and Sir John Northcott, a former New South Wales Governor, was the first patron of the society. One of the society's first decisions was to invite each newly elected mayor of Ku-ring-gai to be patron of the society, a tradition that is still in force today. Archibald and Nancy Gray, both prominent genealogists, were among the first members. It is because of these dedicated founding members, with their enormous wealth of experience and passion for the past, that the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society has catapulted from strength to strength, offering maps, heritage listings, water board sketches, land titles, an enormous database on local people and places and more than 10,000 local photos.

Today it boasts more than 600 members and 90 volunteers and it is housed in the old Gordon Public School, adjacent to the Gordon library. Volunteers offer their expertise in research to the public every day except Wednesdays and Sunday, when the database is built. Queries from the public range from questions about the origin of their street name or Aboriginal art they glimpsed in the bush. A local resident may be curious about Ku-ring-gai's famous sphinx, the 110-year-old former Killara post office, or how a gentleman with the name of Eccleston du Faur was responsible for creating Ku-ring-gai's much-loved national park.

These days, computers make the job of research so much easier. In the early days of the society its volunteers often travelled to the Mitchell Library in the city to research information. One of the most popular meetings hosted by the society occurs on the first Saturday of every month when the family history group meets. Help is on hand to newcomers who want to explore their family tree but have no idea where to start. The society has also produced publications about Ku-ring-gai's colourful history, including Focus on Ku-ring-gai, Women of Ku-ring-gai and its annual research publication The Historian, which combines local history, built heritage and family histories.

At the moment society volunteers are scouring local honour boards and war memorials to assist them in writing a World War I compendium which will list and provide the history of all Ku-ring-gai residents who served during the Great War, including nurses and ancillary staff. The society has inspired thousands of local residents to connect with each other and their pasts. It is a marvellous interest, in particular, for retirees, with their research assisting the whole community to understand a little more about what has shaped Ku-ring-gai. It has been a fabulous and productive 50 years for the society. I hope the next 50 years of recording and documenting the times we live in now prove just as fruitful.

Remembrance Week - Our local WWI soldiers

Remembrance Day (11 November) marks the anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First World War. Each year Australians observe one minute silence at 11 am on 11 November, in memory of those who died or suffered in all wars and armed conflicts.

As next Monday is Remembrance Day we thought, this week, we'd post some of the names of our local lads who went to WWI.

We are currently undertaking a large project to identify and write biographies of all those on WWI memorials in Ku-ring-gai.

We are having some trouble identifying some of the names and wondered if any of our readers could help.

Remembered on the Roseville Honour Roll (above):

PT Chamberlain

SW Connell

AC Fenton

On the Pymble & St Ives War Roll of Honour (below):

W Collins

J Cook

   De Latour (no initial given here)

RH Edwards (also on the Gordon Public School and St Ives Park memorials)

HC Fraser

Although many of our lads have strong links to the area - born, lived, schooled, parents, etc, some of the links to Ku-ring-gai we have identified have been quite tenuous: 

Sometimes they never lived here but :

- their parents moved here during the war or 

- they worked here, or 

- their next of kin lived here, or

- they went to school here.

Others were born here but moved away before the war.

If you can help with any of these names, please comment on the blog, or email us at khs@khs.org.au

They all deserve to be remembered - by their full names.