One of the many postcards soldiers sent their families from northern France during WWI.
11/11/2013: I have taken down the page referred to in this post because the State Library of NSW has launched a new portal to their WWI collection and now have one page on their website which lists all the transcribed diaries. See my post ‘New WWI Website from State Library NSW‘ for an overview and links to the Library’s WWI pages.
Are the World War I diaries or letters of the person you are researching available on the website of the State Library of New South Wales?
The Library has a collection of over two hundred diaries written by people serving in WWI which they are transcribing and making available on their website. Yesterday I gave a brief talk about my research using the LIbrary’s European War Collecting Project to professional historians from around Australia who were meeting in Sydney. As I mentioned in my last post about Archie Barwick’s diaries, the State Library of NSW collected these diaries in the aftermath of WWI and volunteers are spending many hours transcribing them. This is an ongoing project, there are many more to transcribe.
After my talk yesterday some historians expressed interest in accessing this collection. In order to assist professional historians and family historians access the collection I have created a spreadsheet listing the names of those who wrote the diaries which are held in the collection together with links to the pages on the State Library of NSW website where you will hopefully find the transcriptions and images of the pages of the diary you are interested in.
The spreadsheet is available on a new page on this blog, ‘Search WWI Diaries at State Library of NSW’.
Please let me know whether you find this spreadsheet useful in the comments below.
Happy searching!
Addendum 2/9/2013
The State Library has many plans for the centenary of WWI and is eager for people who are researching any of the authors of these diaries to contact them directly. Please contact:
- Tracy Bradford: tracy.bradford@sl.nsw.gov.au or
- Elise Edmonds: elise.edmonds@sl.nsw.gov.au
if you have any information about these diarists to share.
Stumbling Through the Past 
Sorry to grumble, Yvonne, but the spreadsheet doesn’t come up in Safari. I’ve had this problem with spreadsheets before – and keep a Chrome App for such situations – but it might work if it was converted to PDF? You’re much more computer literate than I am.
LikeLike
Thanks for the feedback Marion. I’ll see what I can do to get around this problem.
LikeLike
I have added a PDF of the spreadsheet to the page (below the spreadsheet).
LikeLike