History buffs are to find it easier to access South Australian Railways (SAR) employee history sheets from now on as State Records prepares to wrap up a multi-year digitisation project.
Announcing the digitisation, State Records said the SAR records showed the working history for over 53,000 of its staff members from the 1880s to 1975.
“Before we started this project, finding an ancestor who had worked for the SAR was very difficult,” State Records said.
It said the digitisation project’s first stage began in November 2018, taking almost two years to complete, while the second stage began in August 2020.
It said it found many interesting stories of SAR employees during the project.
“There were even some famous names, including Arthur Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (a youth labourer at St Leonards, not a secret agent!),” it said.
“The records cover the years of the First and Second World Wars and record details of workers who enlisted in the armed forces.”
State Records said many women are included in the records, especially during the Second World War when the SAR took on the construction of aircrafts and munitions.
It said the final stage in the project was to digitise the sheets and make the copies available online.
“Many staff at State Records and volunteers were involved in this project and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their hard work to improve access and preservation for these records,” State Records said.
The SAR records index can be accessed at this PS News link.
