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Dead Persons' Society Aims
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- To promote an interest in genealogy via the use of
computers and the internet in a social environment ...
- To promote the production and distribution of genealogical
indexes and other research tools ...
- To foster cooperation, personal development, and
entertainment through genealogy.
 Who Are We ...
In Western Australia, the Perth Dead Persons' Society was begun by a group of local family researchers who communicated on the FidoNet Bulletin Board service known as the Dark Closet. It was operated by Sue and Tony Down until it's closure in late January 1998.
Murdoch University's Teaching and Learning Centre came to the rescue and
offered to host the PerthDPS web site and a mailing list called DPS-chat.
The PerthDPS were a perfect candidate for Murdoch's interest in how the general community was embracing the newly emerging World Wide Web.
Roger Atkinson was their driving force and he hosted PerthDPS on their Cleo server and extended the offer to The Western Australian Genealogical Society (WAGS) and AFFHO on their Carmen server.
Just over 30 years later ...
This PerthDPS web site and its associated DPS-chat mailing list are still being moderated by Rob Nelson ... although they have changed form and moved house several times over the years.
In mid 2024, DPS-chat stopped running as an email list and re-appeared as a private Facebook group ... DPS-chat
The Bigger Picture ...
The DPS movement began in Melbourne, Australia in August 1992 when twelve interested people met in the home of Leone Fabre. The slightly irreverent choice of name was inspired by the popular Robin Williams' movie of that time ... The Dead Poet's Society.
The Melbourne DPS continued to grow since those early days, and since April 1994 it met in a local community hall capable of accomodating the fifty or more people who attended each month.
After the Melbourne experience, groups soon sprang up in other major capital cities and in each case the DPS members gravitated around a Fidonet BBS which specialised in genealogical conferences and files.
In fact, by the late 1990s, DPS SOCIETIES were located throughout Australia and New Zealand ... and it was not uncommon for computer genealogists who were travelling around Australasia from interstate and abroad, to try and attend a DPS meeting along the way.
Real Meetings 'in-the-flesh' ...
Meetings allowed regulars to finally put 'a face to a name'.
They provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and skills, and apart from regular hands-on workshop sessions, guest speakers were also invited to speak on special topics of interest.
The DPS was a loosely affilliated movement of on-line Family History Societies where the membership was often much younger, and was keen to explore and advance the use of computers in the geanealogical world.
'Reciprocal Research' ...
Unlike the more self-centered approach witnessed today in on-line users ... back then, in the spririt of cooperation, DPS members adopted a philosophy of 'Reciprocal Research' whereby at any time and in any place around their home city or interstate or abroad, members would do a 'look up' in their personal library, their local family history society or State library or archive.
Computer-based genealogy programs were beginning to evolve and in many cases members were making personal connections with other members and were constantly on the look-out for others' research interests as they trawled through the records ... One-Name-Studies were not uncommon.
The production and distribution of genealogical indexes and other research tools was the second of the DPS aims listed above.
It was already an established practice in more conventional societies and was idealy suited to the DPS model ... especially giving free access to the results. As a result, many indexing projects were begun and in many cases, continued on until a useful end product was produced.
At the same time, various government bodies were seeing the benefit of digitising their BDM resources and releasing them on the newly arrived CD-ROM format. As they became available for sale, it was not uncommon for individuals to add them to their personal libraries and offer look-ups or bring them along to meetings.
The Story Today ...
Sadly, these days Perth DPS seems to be the only surviving group, and it's main presence is through the maintenance of some of its on-line indexing projects and the DPS-chat group on Facebook.
John Graham's highly successful Ryerson Index was founded in 1998 and is the only other relic ... its origins lay with the Sydney DPS group.
The demise of the fido-net bulletin board systems is marked by the universally popular take-up of the world wide web coupled with the heavy involvement of various government organisations and profit-making commercial web services with their pay-for-view approach to family history.
In the mean-time, the Perth DPS is still alive and well and is doing its best to keep their various offerings up-to-date and relevant to our modern times.
Please enjoy our efforts, appreciate that everything is still done on a voluntary basis, and enjoy our work that is still free to all ... If you like what we're doing, feel free to join in and help us maintain the three aims set out in those heady times, thirty years ago.
We acknowledge all of our past members who worked so hard over the years and who are now living in the cemeteries that they once researched ... Hip, Hip ... Hooray !!!
The 'Convicts To Australia' Project ...
Since the Convicts to Australia website was launched on June 30, 1998, it has proven to be just as popular with students and their teachers as it has with novice and experienced researchers.
Bearing our target audience in mind, we have taken care to provide varying depths of information, while at the same time, endeavouring to make the visit to the site as enjoyable as possible.
Our goal has always been to provide an overview of the settlement of Australia during its formative convict years while providing information on a wide range of themes. To further that aim, we have provided a wealth of on-line databases and have linked to many more elsewhere.
Originally, these web pages formed the Project component of a Virtual University course: Introduction to Online Genealogy. The course began online in October 1997 and encouraged students to select a topic and create a web page. The Australian Time Zone Links and Guide Study Groups combined for this project.
Convicts to Australia has always been updated, expanded and maintained by Perth DPS.
The site has expanded remarkably from its initial concept and much more original data has been extracted from Primary Sources for the Western Australian component of the site. Many of those primary records were held in the Battye Library and State Archives of Western Australia.
Special thanks go out to Joan O'Donovan for her innovative and progressive web design and for the use of her Old-Fashioned Clip Art collection.
The 'WA Reverse Marriages' Project ...
For many years, the only way for a genealogist to find when an ancestor married in Western Australia was to search through the Registrar General's Microfiche Index.
The name would be used to look for the year of the marriage. If the name of the spouse was not known, a painstakingly-long search was needed to find an entry with the corresponding registration district and number for that year to "match" the couple.
Some years ago, the LDS Church came to the rescue by indexing the early microfiche from 1841 to 1905 and adding them to a searchable database which they produced on CD-Rom. Eventually this information was released in a searchable database on the Department of Justice website.
This was certainly a very welcome addition to resources available to genealogists but still meant that the old painstaking process for finding marriages after 1905 still existed.
WHY REVERSE MARRIAGE ?
Continually frustrated by time-consuming searches of the microfiche index, genealogist Liz McLennan and her husband John decided to start their own indexing project. Over a period of years, they transcribed the years 1906–1920, producing a limited number of microfiche of their work which they called the Western Australian Reverse Marriage Index.
For those who have wondered about the name, it was coined because of the need to search for a surname of one partner of the marriage and then, when found and the registration district and number was known, the process needed to be reversed. The index was again searched, this time by registration district and number to find the name of the matching partner.
As time passed and the internet developed as a medium that was embraced by genealogists, Liz felt that this may be the answer for her growing database. She therefore posed a question to the Perth DPS who she knew had the same ideals of indexing and sharing WA genealogical resources freely with genealogists the world over.
Perth DPS members were quick to appreciate what a wonderful project this was and offered their support ... (especially those members who were spending hours trawling through entries on fiche looking for the corresponding Reverse Marriage)
It was quickly organised for the Reverse Marriage site to be born ... hosted and maintained by DPS list member Mark Snell in Canberra.
Shortly after this, we were contacted by Adrian Norris, who unknown to Liz, had also been doing his own indexing project on the next fifteen years of the difficult-to-use microfiche index. We were extremely pleased when Adrian offered his work to be added to the index.
Volunteers from the Perth DPS group were then called for to continue the work and years were added at regular intervals as the work was completed. Eventually all years up to and including 1965 were added to the site for the benefit of all those searching out their Western Australian roots.
About the same time, another indexing project came to our attention when the Albany Regional Family History Society contacted us. They had done their own indexing project for WA marriages in country towns. The society kindly offered their data for inclusion on our Reverse Marriage site and for a long time we included a link to their Country Marriages database for 1951–1965.
After all of 1965 was completed and uploaded, we no longer provided a link to their work which was incorporated and cross-checked as our volunteers transcribed each year from 1951 onwards.
Since our Dark Closet days, Shirley Brown in Geraldton had made reverse marriage look-ups her reciprocal research speciality ... she has continued that committment throughout the years, and apart from helping with the indexing project, has hosted the completed database on her sever in Geraldton.
In early 2026 the database and website was reconfigured and should remain popular with local, interstate and overseas genealogists for many years until the Ministry of Justice adds the last fifteen years to it's website.
(All graphics used on these pages are copyright
and should not be used without permission.)
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