Thursday Talks are held 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm in the GSV Meeting Room, Level B1 257 Collins Street, Melbourne

Members Free, Visitors $5.50Founders & Survivors: building Australia's biggest family history from our Convict and AIF records.

Founders & Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context will become one of the world's great longitudinal studies of a founding population and their descendants. The Australian Convict Records, in particular those from Tasmania, are the most detailed and intimate records of men and women from anywhere in the world during the nineteenth century. Their world heritage status has been recognised in the UNESCO Memory of the World.

This project, involving universities across Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada and funded by the Australian Research Council, seeks to discover what happened to the 72,900 people transported to Tasmania between 1803 and 1852. How many survived the ordeal of transportation and penal servitude well enough to start a new life and leave descendants? And for those who had descendants who served in the Great War, how can we measure the impact of their forced emigration to the Australian colonies on how well they were nourished (height), how well they had integrated Australian society after two or three generations (education, training, family property), how resilient they were? Indeed there are countless questions.

But this is not just a university project. It is a partnership with the global community of family historians and the descendants themselves. So what can you do? What will the family history community get out of it? How will we make available new findings about our convict ancestors?

http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/