Convicts and Diggers database

Full description

This service is a web-based database application which enables researchers to record the genealogies of approximately 15,000 Tasmanian born AIF WWI enlistees. It is a particular application of the software developed by the Founders and Survivors: Genealogical Connections project which will enable the Convicts and Diggers project to record and manage its research data.

Each Tasmanian born WWI enlistee (basic data for each enlistee is provided by the National Archives of Australia) will exist in this database as a person with a WWI enlistee event. These people form the base population of interest. The service will allow data related to each person's birth, WWI service records, illnesses, death and any arbitrary events of interest to be accurately recorded as life course events (with date and place) and cross-referenced back to the supporting evidence. The service will support recording of each person's genealogy ie. their immediate ancestry (mother and father) as relationships to other people, and so on for the parents, back through multiple generations (typically one to three), and potentially linking up to convict ancestors which have been extensively researched by the Founders and Survivors project. In some cases events and relationships can be loaded from other sources using automated processes. Otherwise the service provides a web-based interface for approved researchers to manually record events and relationships of interest.

The service will enable researchers to assign enlistees to various groups, forming cohorts, using arbitrary data or the presence of certain events. For example:

• enlistees who were rejected for service (possibly sub-grouped by the grounds for rejection);
• enlistees who served at home;
• enlistees who served abroad (possibly sub-grouped by battalian);
• enlistees who enlisted at a place outside of their native Tasmania;
• enlistees with convict ancestors (possibly sub-grouped by the convict ancestor's convict ship of arrival to Van Diemen's Land);
• enlistees without convict ancestors;
• enlistees with unknown ancestors;
• enlistees who sufferred illness/injury of particular types during service at home or abroad;
• enlistees who died in action;
• enlistees who served abroad and who survived WWI;
• enlistees who sufferred illness/injury of particular types after service;
• enlistees whose death has been traced (sub-grouped by cause of death);

For the whole population and/or known cohorts, the service will allow name and faceted data searching to locate individuals or smaller groups of interest.

The service will allow a range of report types and outputs to be generated from selected records. Outputs will include visualisations such as time-aware maps of aggregated life course events presented by Google Earth and genealogy diagrams. Other outputs will be narrative life course reports for each individual and exported data (and metadata) to support specific analysis such as demographic life expectancy.

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