Recently I was helping a couple do some research on their
house. They were so excited and happy
about their property, and were seeking some information about the family that
built it and lived there for many years.
A usual part of research when we are “hunting up” Ballarat
people is to look at a little book called Citizens
and Sports which was compiled and printed in 1916, by a gentleman named
M.M. McCallum. This book provides brief
biographical details in very abbreviated form, so you have to be up with your
acronyms, to understand it. But it often
provides a clue or a key that leads to further information, and it is very
valuable to us.
On this day I checked Citizens
and Sports, actually looking for the father of the family, but what I found
was information on two of the sons, and it astonished me. Here it is:
 |
| Citizens and Sports, Ballarat 1916 p. 93 |
You can see that the brothers were corporal and sergeant of
the same company of Field Engineers, and that they were both at the Gallipoli
landings. They have both received high
military honours. How proud the Sheppard family of Rowe Street, Ballarat East,
must have been.
The National Archives of
Australia holds records about service in the Australian defence forces from
Federation in 1901, and the Archives have digitised all the WW1 records. I haven’t been able to look at the Sheppards’
war records - somehow I don’t want to know their fates. But here are the links, and I will leave it to
you to check for yourself, if you want to …
