This index was compiled by Miss Mollie Bentley from various records she has used relating to the police. These include: Almanac listings, Colonial Secretary's Office Records, Police Gazettes, various police department occurrence books and letter books, police journals, government gazettes, estimates, York police records etc.
Entry is by name of policeman. Information given varies but is usually about appointments, promotions, retirements, transfers etc.
The Western Australian Biographical Index (WABI) is a highly used resource at the State Library of Western Australia. A recent generous contribution by the Friends of Battye Library (FOBS) has enabled SLWA to have the original handwritten index cards scanned and later transcribed.
The dataset contains: several csv files with data describing card number, card text and url link to image of the original handwritten card.
The transcription was crowd-sourced and we are aware that there are some data quality issues including:
Some cards are missing
Transcripts are crowdsourced so may contain spelling errors and possibly missing information
Some cards are crossed out. Some of these are included in the collection and some are not
Some of the cards contain relevant information on the back (usually children of the person mentioned). This info should be on the next consecutive card
As the information is an index, collected in the 1970s from print material, it is incomplete. It is also unreferenced.
It is still a very valuable dataset as it contains a wealth of information about early settlers in Western Australia. It is of particular interest to genealogists and historians.
