National website to help care leavers find lost childhoods

The University of Melbourne and the Australian Catholic University will develop a new website to help Forgotten Australians, former child migrants and members of the Stolen Generations find their records and reconnect with their pasts. The Find and Connect Web Resource will comprise eight state and territory websites and an overarching national website. Each will contain historical information about past and present providers of out-of-home care, details of where personal records are held, how to access them and links to support services. Professor Cathy Humphreys from Melbourne's School of Social Work said the resource would be a highly developed information source. 'The website will be of great help to groups which support care leavers. It gets information into the public sphere which is accessible to everybody in a standardised way. 'The records are also preserved.