Better Together - Keeping Find & Connect Updated With the Help of Care Leavers

Here at the Find & Connect web resource, we do our best to keep everything up to date: information about Homes, what records are available from where, and how to contact organisations who hold records. If we know something needs to be updated, we can go away and do some research into the issue and then update the site with the results of that research. Where we’ve been sent photographs, we can update the site quickly so other former residents can also share those memories.

We also rely on people getting in touch and letting us know that something needs to be updated! You can do that through the website: click on the Feedback link available on the bottom of each page to get in touch with us directly.

Once we receive this feedback, we will spend some time doing research and consulting various sources before updating the site. In many cases, a feedback email has resulted in a much more comprehensive entry than we had before.

Some entries we’ve updated in the last year following information provided by former residents of Homes, record-holding organisations, support services (who find new information as they’re assisting people search for records or family), or members of the public include:

• Wolston Park, Queensland, which also prompted this blog post
• Sight saving School / the Bruce Hamilton School, Tasmania, after a former student contacted us to say that they remembered helping at the school after we had the school listed as closing. We were also able to update the records information about this school.
• Nazareth House, Western Australia: we were able to add more information about the experiences of the girls who lived there after a former resident got in touch.
• St Joseph’s Cowper, New South Wales: after a staff member contacted us, we updated the entry to reflect its merger with MacKillop Family Services, and updated the records information and access conditions to show that people need to go through the Heritage and Information Service at MacKillop Family Services to request records.
• Lots of updates for contact details for current record holders and archives: phone numbers, email addresses and information about how to access the records they hold
• And of course, the Records Access Documentation grants enabled widespread updates across the site from all successful grant recipients, including the listing of many records series previously not recorded, as detailed in this blog post.

We also want to say a big thankyou to everyone who has provided us with feedback so we can improve the site. In particular, thanks to the former residents who so generously share their knowledge and experiences with us, as well as former staff and others associated with Homes. Thanks also to the record-holding organisations who get in touch to tell us about new records or better ways people can access the records they hold. We definitely couldn’t do it without you!

While you’re here, you can really make a difference to the future of www.findandconnect.gov.au by taking a few minutes to do our site survey. We’ll use your response to design an even better Find & Connect