Paranormal Research:
The Manning Index of South Australian History
What is the Manning Index?
The Manning Index is a database of South Australian history,
owned by the State Library of South Australia. The Manning Index is an index of
Adelaide newspapers from 1837 through to 1937, together with extracts from the
published works of G.H. Manning, and essays written from 1982-2002.
It also contains a list of place names in South Australia.
The index is incredibly useful to paranormal researchers as
it allows us to find significant information about crimes or deaths or facts about
a location. It gives us the newspaper, the date, and the page of the newspaper so we
can then go to the National Library of Australia’s, “Trove” newspapers section <
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/?q= > to cross
reference our research or find the article in its entirety.
The index also overlaps with the State Library Of South
Australia’s catalogue to some extent, and features many of the newspapers
available in the State Library, such as: Adelaide Times, The Advertiser, The Chronicle,
The Critic, Express & Telegraph, Frearson's Weekly, The Herald, Illustrated
Adelaide Post, The Irish Harp, The Lantern, The Mail, The News, Observer, Register,
SA Gazette & Mining Journal and the Southern Australian.
The index is divided into four folders, which can be found
in the top left-hand corner of your screen, these folders are:
- South Australia: includes coverage of a number of 'State
level' topics.
- Adelaide: includes a number of topics which predominately
relate to the city and the metropolitan area as a whole.
- Port Adelaide: includes references to Port Adelaide.
- Place Names of South Australia: an alphabetical list of
South Australian place names (including suburbs of Adelaide).
Each folder contains several sub-folders, which themselves
may contain more subfolders.
Some subjects are indexed extensively in more than one
section. Generally, biographical references can be found on pages dealing with
the place or activity a person is associated with. A few place-names also
contain obituaries of people associated with the place name.
ALL place names are inverted, so 'Mount Gambier' will be
found as 'Gambier, Mount'.
There are two ways to use the Manning Index:
You have the option
to search via the “Searching folder”, which allows you to search the State
Library Catalogue and the Manning Index.
If you click on the yellow folder, you will see both
options. If you click on the Manning Index subfolder, you will see it takes us
to a Google search engine.
If you write Adelaide Arcade in the provided search engine, and press
search, you will see that it brings up everything with the words “Adelaide” and
“Arcade”.
To make your search more specific we can add inverted commas
to the search; “Adelaide Arcade”. We now get three results. If you look to the
right-hand side of the screen you will see a drop-down menu that says “sort by”
which allows us to look at our findings via relevance or date.
The second way to use the Manning index, assumes you know a
little something about your topic already. We know that the Adelaide Arcade is
in Adelaide, and is a building.
Go to the yellow ‘Adelaide’
Folder and click it. Scroll down the list and find the subfolder, “Buildings”
and click on it. Next, we see a list of buildings, written in blue.
The Adelaide Arcade
stands by itself, whereas other buildings are grouped into types. If we click
the Adelaide Arcade hyperlink, we are giving a small list of pages where the
Arcade is mentioned in local newspapers.
We can make note of these newspapers as a starting point for
our next searchable index, the National Library of Australia’s Trove. So you
can either write them down, highlight them with your mouse and copy and paste
them into a Word File, or screen capture them for later reference:
Adelaide Arcade
Sketches of the Adelaide Arcade are in the Pictorial
Australian in
August 1885 (supplement),
January 1886, page 12.
Also see Register,
30 April 1885, page 6g,
1, 14 and 15 December 1885, pages 7a, 4h-5b-6e and 6g,
Express,
7 May 1885, page 4a,
12 and 14 December 1885, pages 3f and 3g,
17 December 1895, page 4c.
"Death of the Arcade Beadle" is in the Observer,
25 June 1887, page 27a.
Researched and written by Allen Tiller ©2017, for the 'Haunted Buildings in Adelaide' research project at the City of Adelaide Libraries.
