Visiting Public Record Office Victoria

Public Libraries Victoria Local Studies staff recently met at Public Record Office Victoria and were given an update on what’s new at Victoria’s State Archives by Access Service Officers Sarah and Heather.  Their role is to assist researchers in the reading room, the online help desk, answering emails, retrieving records (picking and returning) and monitoring the physical collection, alerting if necessary the conservation team to related issues such as mould in the paper records. They also assist with digital projects.

The permanent records collection is housed at the Victorian Archives Centre, North Melbourne, a building which they share with National Archives of Australia. Open and Closed records are held according to the Public Records Act. Various Places of Deposit (PODs) repositories are also scattered throughout the state including Bendigo, Beechworth, Geelong Library and Heritage Centre and Ballarat. PROV works with government agencies and provides recordkeeping advice, transfer of permanent records and more.

With over 160 volunteers, projects undertaken include indexing, describing records, digitizing and re-housing records. PROV works with the large genealogy giants Ancestry.com and FamilySearch which promotes PROV collections on their platforms. FamilySearch have digitized wills and probates up to 1950.  The Koorie Records Unit provides research assistance to Aboriginal people wishing to access records relevant to their personal and community histories.

PROV publish an interesting newsletter, blog posts to their website and also maintain Facebook Twitter, Instagram and Linked In accounts on social media. Users of the collection are encouraged to write up their research to contribute to the Provenance Journal. The website is often the first port of call for visitors and researchers. Topic guides are arranged by subject, replacing the old “Finding guides”. Each topic page includes a search form imbeded on that page for direct access to what is in the collection.

PROV are redesigning their catalogue and have been testing new functionality for searching the PROV collection via a Beta version. Users are encouraged to use this and offer feedback.
The aim is to have less clicks and for a search to be simpler and to integrate series / agencies / functions. More topic pages are also to be developed. A user once signed in will be able to curate their own collections as well as leave comments. Terminology is being updated and there will be permalinks created so that users can bookmark finds and also share on social media.
Some content is digitized and available immediately on the site via an image viewer. There is a plan to be able to download documents as a PDF.
A separate image viewer is being built for users to access born digital material.  Information from the now retired PROV wiki will be linked to relevant information on item pages (such as material relating to the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games).

Public Records Office Victoria

Public Records Office Victoria hold a number of records relating to the Victorian State Government.  Think about how your ancestor interacted with the government and which department that may have created a record. Records date from 1836.

The researcher landing page is a good introduction.

Free online indexes  include passenger lists, wills and probate, education and more.

New Victorian Probate and Shipping indexes

PROV's volunteers have been busy again this year preparing the next instalment of the outwards immigration index 1887-1896 adding another 290,348 names to the index (total range now 1852 to 1896 with 797,460 outward passengers named). The volunteers are continuing to index the series which ends in 1923.
Volunteers from the Victorian Association of Family History Organisations (VAFHO) and FamilySearch have completed the first stage of a collaborative project with PROV to index probates in Victoria. The first stage 1841-1925 is now online and allows researchers to search for wills and probates by family name, place, occupation and date and then to link to the digitised
image of the will and/or probate file. There are 214,545 names in the index and in 2008 the FamilySearch volunteers digitised 4,724,965 pages of will and probate files which are progressively being made available to the website free of charge.
Both the shipping and probate indexes are available online (see links under New Features) and also via the How Do I? section on the home page.
Source: News from Public Records Office Victoria (eNewsletter)

Pre-release index to Victorian wills

Public Records Office Victoria have released a Pre-release Index to Wills, Probate and Administration Records 1841-1925, the database is currently undergoing pre-release testing and will be available late December 2008. Further details will be available via the PROV website.

An initial surname search will result in information including alternative name, occupation, residence, death date and more.

If the actual document is digitized then it is possible to access it as a PDF image.

If you have success here, it may eliminate the need to purchase a death certificate.

Vist the Pre-release index