Year in Review 2019 Catholic Diocese of Sandhurst 21 IDENTITY & COMMUNITY GROWTH IN RESEARCH AND DIGITAL CAPACITY Dr Donna Bailey is the Diocesan Archivist and delivers a high level of service to the Diocesan administration, clergy, parishes, the broader Catholic community and members of the public. Requests for information continue to grow each year. In 2019, they included requests regarding church and parish land and buildings, as well as objects of cultural patrimony. Requests for family history are common and are generally referred to the parishes or are answered in liaison with the parish or parishes. Research requests from the tertiary sector are frequent as are requests from other archdioceses and dioceses throughout Australia and occasionally overseas. Often, in answering requests I am able to learn more about the remarkable story of our diocese. Whilst the story of the nineteenth century Sandhurst Diocese and its growth alongside the building of our goldfields towns and cities are prominent in the minds of researchers, so too are more recent events such as the completion of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in 1977 and notable events such as the ordination and installation of Bishops. In 2016, the Aspire Cultural and Charitable Foundation with La Trobe University received an Australian Research Council, Linkage Grant to undertake a study of “Faith on the Goldfields: Rediscovering religious diversity from 1852-today”. This project has been undertaken in association with the City of Greater Bendigo and aims to interpret and share knowledge about the role and value of faith during the Gold Rush, on the goldfields, up until the present day. This project will finish during 2020 and the outcomes will be presented via seminar and publication. My role in this project, along with Dr. Charles Fahey, has been to research the predominantly Irish Catholic cohort arriving on the Bendigo goldfields from 1852, their associations with Henry Backhaus and their practice of Catholicism within the diocesan community. Prefacing this, we have researched their Irish county of origin and their migration to Australia. The Irish who arrived both before and after the effects of the famine shape this fascinating story. To date the Sacramental Registers of the parishes of St Kilian’s, Eaglehawk, Shepparton, Dookie, Beechworth, Benalla, Echuca, Heathcote and Numurkah have been digitised. The registers hold a wealth of information, allowing glimpses into the story of Catholic settlement across Victoria from as early as 1852. It is my aim to digitise more parish registers in 2020, giving preference to the historical and/or more damaged registers. This project aims to make records more accessible for researchers. In 2019, the office purchased a camera copy stand and other equipment so that digitisation work will be undertaken in-house rather than off-site. Other archival resources will be digitised and made available to the public as per demand. The database continues to grow and includes over one thousand entries of objects, books and paper records. This represents only a fraction of the objects in the collection and thus, is a work in progress. A database recording every church built in the diocese since the 1850s is close to completion, including many entries with photographs.
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