Suffrage petitions enter the digital age thanks to Queensland volunteers
An important piece of Queensland's history has been dusted off and dropped into the 21st century with the help of a group of dedicated Brisbane volunteers.
Election time means brochures, slogans, sausage sizzles and standing in line at the local polling booth.
But as we queue at those booths, there is little reminder of the extraordinary undertaking that led to Queensland women being given the right to vote.
Across the state, thousands of signatures were being collected door to door, at meetings and on newspaper coupons, in support of women's right to vote.
Thousands sign for suffrage in Queensland
The right to vote, known as suffrage, polarised Queenslanders in the run up to Australia's federation.
After a long-fought battle, women were granted the right in Queensland in 1905. Indigenous women – and men – did not get that privilege until 1965.
Three petitions, two from 1894 and one from 1897, are at the heart of that fight for the vote and their pages hold the unique signatures of more than 15,000 people.
Now, more than a century after those names were scribed in support of enfranchising the women of Queensland, there is a searchable database.
Rosemary Kopittke from the Queensland Family History Society was one of those charged with the puzzling task of converting the petitions into digital records.
Indexing historical records is a familiar process for the committed group, who have previously catalogued and published more than 8 million records relating almost exclusively to Queensland families.
We'd indexed hand-written records before ... but none of those could reflect what we found here.Rosemary Kopittke
Despite working their way through school admission registers and shipping lists in the past – including some in German script – Ms Kopittke said the suffrage petition project delivered many new challenges.
"It was hand-written so that in itself provides challenges but we'd indexed hand-written records before ... none of those could reflect what we found here.
"In this case, every entry was written by a different person ... so we couldn't learn the style of the writer.
"Although some signatures were very clearly written, there were many that were not."
In their bid to decipher as many of the petitioners as possible, the group trawled through electoral rolls, birth, deaths and marriage registers and post office directories from the time for clues to the identity of those who had penned their name in support of women's rights.
It was time-consuming work for Ms Kopittke and her team of six indexers, who estimate that they spent 500 hours working their way through 378 photographs of the petitions.
"There were 15,442 names, which was actually a couple of hundred more than the official figures," she said.
To complicate matters further, those charged with administering the petition "did all sorts of funny things" including repeating numbers, Ms Kopittke said.
Working from digitised copies, the group only spied the original petitions for the first time at the database's recent launch at Queensland's Parliament House.
From the parliamentary vaults to the desktop
The hunt for the women's franchise petitions began many years before Ms Kopittke and her crew got to work.
The centenary of women's suffrage in 2005 prompted archivists and historians to search for the petitions but despite their best efforts, the documents remained elusive.
They were discovered years later by researcher and parliamentary librarian John McCulloch in Queensland Parliament's archive.
The antiquated and delicate petitions were photographed prior to being indexed and transformed into the Women's Suffrage Petitions Database.
Hosted on the Queensland Parliament website, history enthusiasts can now search for relatives and view their signatures on scanned images of the petitions.
Speaker of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, Fiona Simpson, praised the efforts of those who have made the petitions accessible "not only for those who are tracing their family heritage … but those who have an interest in history".
"There will be stories people will be able to piece together because of the work of digitising and bringing [the petitions] into our realm," she said.
"What I love is that it is an opportunity for us to reflect on those significant and feisty women who had the vision to change things, who were able to lobby at a time when women didn't have the vote and didn't have many other rights.
"To have that insight into the way things were when these good women were out there fighting the fight provides a different understanding of something that today we take for granted."