A Tasmanian-based academic who has played a leading role in digitising some of Australia’s most important convict records will share insights from his work at the Genealogical Society of Queensland’s family history conference, Connections 2025, in Brisbane from March 21-24.

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is a professor of heritage and digital humanities at the University of New England and chief executive officer of Digital History Tasmania (DHT). He has authored many books and articles exploring the ways in which digital techniques can be used to shed fresh light on Australia’s convict past.

Professor Maxwell-Stewart has devoted more than 30 years to examining the relationship between technology and family history research and will present a Master Class and two sessions at the conference.

“We now have the ability to see many histories in relation to one another, not just how people are genetically connected but how they are socially connected, giving us the ability to put past family experiences into a wider context,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart said.

“Technology is probably best described as a black box – we don’t always know what it’s doing and we’re trying to find ways to understand. The way to solve it is to be collaborative and work with family history societies and organisations so we can control the quality of data and understand the process.

“In Tasmania for instance, we’ve developed a system for digitising archives. Now we have the biggest collection of digital archives in Australia and among the most in the world.

» Brisbane will host Australasian family history conference, Connections 2025 in March, 2025. Click to download high res image.

“As family history researchers, we hold the key to how AI works. Each of us is collecting data such as family trees, street directories and convict records and that data helps AI make connections. It has the ability to take notices in newspapers and start or build on a family tree. It can generate images of people and roll them back to a younger age. It can feed in our descriptions and pull together an image which is an estimate of how an ancestor might have looked.

“We can decide what and how data is collected (and therefore used by AI). We determine the underlying structure, then use AI to make use of that data on a deeper level. AI is an amazing tool but when it comes out of nowhere, we have no control over it.

"I’d advocate that anyone thinking about doing family history research should join their local family history group as family historians are brilliant at quality control, much better than academics. It is phenomenally hard to link one record to another and no system is better than a human.”

He said key family history technologies developing at a rapid pace included mapping, graph databases, and 3D imaging.

“Mapping is vitally important. In Tasmania, we now have a map of Hobart from 1847 to 1905 developed from using valuation rolls. We can tell who the owner-occupiers in every house were, by linking to births, deaths and marriage notices.”

He said while many of the world’s databases were relational there was an increase in the use of graph databases (commonly used to detect banking fraud).

“Graph databases are very good at working out networks, who is socially related and genetically related and who knows who,” he said.

At Connections 2025, he will reference specific examples from DHT, a volunteer-led organisation that has imaged, cleaned, coded and linked 2.5 million Tasmanian historical records and is now using software to translate images of handwritten certificates into readable texts.

Thirty volunteers had nearly finished transcribing the state’s male convict records and now had 260,000 magistrate bench offence summaries in databases spanning 1803 to 1870, he said.

“We also have an amazing collection in Tasmania on the impact of solitary confinement on life expectancy. It’s important work that everyone with convict ancestors should know about.”

Register to hear Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

Professor Maxwell-Stewart’s sold-out Master Class 'A Guide to Digitising the Past’ (8am, Sunday March 23) will explore techniques used by digital historians to transcribe, mark-up, link and analyse records.

He will also present a session on ‘How is technology changing family history?’ (9.30am, Saturday, March 22) which will look at how big data has the potential to place any individual life within the context of others and a session on ‘Non-European convicts’ (12pm, Sunday March 23) which will explore the backgrounds of some convicts, and how their experiences differed from those of their European shipmates.

After graduating with a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Professor Maxwell-Stewart worked for the Welcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow until 1997 when he migrated to Australia. As a Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania, he co-designed the Lottery of Life exhibition which ran at Port Arthur from 1999-2018. In 2000 he was appointed to the teaching staff in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania where he worked until 2011 when he was appointed a visiting fellow at the University of Texas. The following year he took up the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History at University College Dublin. On his return to the University of Tasmania in 2013 he was appointed Associate Dean Research, for the Faculty of Arts, a position he held until 2016. He joined the history and archaeology team at UNE in 2021.

Connections 2025 will be held at Brisbane Technology Park, Eight Mile Plains from March 21-24. It is the first of its kind to be hosted by the leading Queensland family history society and will combine the 17th Australian Conference on Genealogy and Heraldry and the 5th History Queensland State Conference. More than 400 delegates are expected to attend.

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