Father Brian Maher Collection Significance
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Why is the collection important?
In November 2022, Family History ACT received a National Library of Australia Community Heritage Grant for a Significance Assessment of the Father Brian Maher Collection.
Significance Assessments use an independent qualified assessor to evaluate the collection, determine its national significance, and make recommendations for future collection management. It was a collaborative process between FHACT and our assessors, A/Prof Bruce Pennay (CSU) and Dr Alexandria Dellios (ANU).
Extract from the Statement of Significance
The Father Brian Maher collection has social and historical value for local and national communities. As a historical collection of documents pertaining to the family histories of mainly Irish-Catholic settlers in southern NSW from the 1820s to the 1920s, it has the potential to enrich our understanding of Australia’s colonial and immigrant history.
The collection, taken as a whole, is valuable to family historians with direct connections, regional historians wanting to understand local European settlement patterns, religious historians exploring the importance of denominational supports, and migration historians unravelling how groups went about the task of settling during this period and in the landscapes of southern NSW.
The value of the collection also lies in its convenience and organisation. It brings together sources that would otherwise be disparate and spread across many collections and online platforms, and therefore facilitates the concentrated study of families in the region.
Significance Assessment Document
Significance Assessment of the Father Brian Maher Collection held by Family History ACT
This Significance Assessment was supported by the Community Heritage Grants program.
The Community Heritage Grants program is funded by the Australian Government through the National Library of Australia; the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications (Office for the Arts); the National Archives of Australia; the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and the National Museum of Australia.
Other References
2023 Father Brian Maher Lecture Slides
2023 Father Brian Maher Lecture
Father Brian Maher Collection Significance Assessment, Bollard, The Ancestral Searcher Vol. 46 No.2 P55 (Link for members here)

This project was supported with funding made available by the ACT Government under the ACT Heritage Grants program