City orphans in new study

THE history of all who passed through a Ballarat children's home will be part of a major research project launched in Melbourne yesterday.The project will see a digital archive created to bring together records from children's homes across Victoria, ensuring people who were in institutional care can more easily access information about their lives.Co-ordinated by the University of Melbourne, the ``Who Am I? Every Record Tells A Story'' project will bring histories together onto an electronic database and will provide a model for how records should be kept in the future.Ballarat's Child and Family Services heritage manager Sharon Guy, who attended the launch, said the project was fantastic."We've got a reasonable archive for all the records from the Ballarat Orphanage, but this is absolutely essential," she said."Statewide, records probably haven't been kept very well and we also need more education and training as to how to make the information more accessible to people."Ms Guy said the project would include not only records, but personal accounts and memories from people who spent time in care.Frank Golding, who lived at the Ballarat Orphanage as a child, said there would be many benefits from the project."A lot of records are very difficult to find, particularly if people need to go to more than one location," he said."The files can be in pretty bad shape and it is not easy to be confident you are getting all the information."This will also lead to improvements in the current way files are maintained, which is important as we still have 5000 children in out-of-home care and their files need to be kept systematically."It was very, very important to me to find my files from when I was a child, which were so extensive and were still there. It was almost a minor miracle that I was able to learn about my childhood."Academic social workers, historians and archivists will work with the community and Department of Human Services over the next three years to bring the records together. Project leader Professor Cathy Humphreys said poor record keeping had denied many the opportunity to reconcile their past. "Research shows us that having access to records, plays a very significant role in people constructing their identity."