We lived in a house at North Creswick which was a miners cottage and when I look at photo's of it, there really wasn't very much room. I also have a lovely photograph of my great grandmother Grace Vingoe Whitfield standing outside a miners cottage at Red Streak North Creswick. This cottage looked even more basic than the one we lived in. I'm part of a team at the Ballarat Public Record Office indexing the inward correspondence from the old Ballarat Council. In the 1860's the council were trying to get people to transfer their homes from Miners Rights to actual titles, I would presume so the council could charge them rates. Also a number of these cottages were built in areas which were surveyed as streets so the cottages were either destroyed or moved. A number of householders asked the council for compensation to move their cottages. Dianne Hughes