Photo Albums

PHOTO ALBUMS

SHAW FAMILY ALBUMS

Many of the photo albums of the families of my great grandfather Herbert Shaw and my great grandmother Caroline Mary Shaw (nee Hale) have survived and until the late 1990s were in the care their daughter, my great aunt Mary Shaw. When she moved to a nursing home they were distributed around the family. Over a few years I've scanned most of them and have recorded what captions were available. Many of the photos now appear on this web site and the intention is to make them available to anyone who is interested and to seek help in identifying the people and places they show.

They include the personal albums of Alfred Shaw, Herbert Shaw, Caroline Mary Shaw and Lavinia Shaw. The photos begin with a few from the 1860s and span four generations of the family until the 1920s. Apart from the many of early Melbourne there are views of rural Victoria, Perth and Collie in the west and Tasmania. Included are shots of a number of Melbourne houses still standing, some of which are now considered of heritage value. There is a comprehensive record from around 1890 of the interior and exterior of Chevy Chase in Brighton. Its neighbour Hiawatha (also Ratho Park then later St John of God Hospital) also appears. There are views of and from Ercildoune (formerly Segovia) in Auburn Road, Hawthorn shortly after it was built.

The restrictions of my web hosting arrangement haven't allowed me to put all the photos on the site but this will probably change as time goes on and storage gets cheaper. For the time being the I've had to reduce the resolution a bit but can provide higher-res copies on request. I'm also slowly adding the captions and any other information to the metadata of each photo which should help save them from falling into the sink of unidentified sepia.

DOAR FAMILY GROUPS

My father's mother was originally a Doar. The name spelt in this way is not a common one and it's pretty easy to trace nearly all of today's Doars back to a few locations. Ours are from the Sandiacre area on Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire boundary in the UK. From early on there are Doars on and around the Isle of Wight. There are Doars in the US mostly originating from a couple of southern states but with a few later ones the result of Sandiacre area migration.

This link is probably misnamed as an album. This is really just a collection of Doar photos from a number of sources. I had a few from my grandmother but not many. When she left the UK in 1927 she doesn't seem to have taken much in the way of photographs although there is the one used in an advertisment for Boots the Chemist showing her and her siblings in the early 1900s (I'm yet to put this on the site).

For years my UK cousin had talked of a 19C Doar family group portrait vaguely remembered as hanging in the hallway of one uncle or another. Unsuccessful in tracing it we were resigned to it having being lost forever. In early 2008 I received an email from a woman who thought she recognised a trellis and wall in the background in a very blurry photograph I had identified as a ggg uncle, Urban Doar. Unlike my identification, hers turned out to be correct and she sent me a wonderful photograph of a group in front of their Sandiacre home in 1872 or so (not the missing portrait) It included my ggggrandfather and ggggrandmother and all their children (Urnban included although not my Urban - he turned out to be a bachelor uncle also in the photo).

Almost as an aside my web correspondent mentioned she had another I might be interested in, an panoramic family group of 29 people from 1887. This was the missing photo and it is now on this web site with most of the sitters identified.

BINNIES at CHEVY CHASE

This group of photos was drawn from the albums of my great grandfather Herbert Shaw. They were taken in the early 1890s and show the family of his neighbour John Binnie and his home Chevy Chase in Hampton Street, Brighton.

It's not really clear who took the photographs but there are some indications that they were taken by John Binnie himself.

HAYBALLS at the BEACH

My gggrandfather Thomas Mitchell Hale was married to two Hayball sisters. Possibly fortunately for him this was not at the same time.

My gggrandmother Annie Eliza Hayball died shortly after the birth of her fourth child and shortly afterwards Thomas married Annie's sister Elizabeth. Annie had died from a chest complaint and although not confirmed this seems likely to have been connected to her living for her final in the Lonsdale Street tobacco factory where her husband worked. After his second marriage the family relocated to Anderson St, Emerald Hill (just around the corner from where I am now).

Annie and Elizabeth's Hayball family was large (about 10 children who survived infancy and about half that again who didn't). They lived close by the beach in Brighton where their father Robert had been a builder since the early days of the colony. Theses photos suggest that in the 1880s and 1890s the family would all traipse off to the wilds of the Sandringham foreshore to celebrate public holidays dates significant to the Empire.

SHAW (FLASH)

This set of albums will be a replacement for the Shaw albums above. All images are from master copies of full photographs scanned at 600dpi and with no image enhancement(back and front where required). I'm adding a set of descriptions with links to other pages where appropriate.

THE HAYBALLS