East Gippsland Family History Group members Debbie Squires and Teresa Collis scanned the original bank ledger from the Bank of New South Wales Ararat branch during a visit to the museum last week.

Dating back to 1857 when the bank opened in a tent on the Ararat goldfields, the ledger was the original used to record specimen signatures of depositors.

The ledger was discovered in a safe at Ararat's Westpac Bank by manager Tony Hamann, who instead of sending it off to the bank's museum in Melbourne, donated it to Ararat and District Historical Society.

Society president, Tammi Munro said the ledger was an extraordinary record of Ararat's early years.

"The Bank of New South Wales was the first bank to open in Ararat, so most residents had an account with the bank," Mrs Munro said.

"Their names and signatures are written in this ledger."

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The ledger forms the centrepiece of a display cabinet at the museum, alongside the original lock from Westpac's current building and old photographs of the bank from the past 165 years.

The display caught the eye of Ms Squires and Ms Collis while researching family history in Ararat.

"When Debbie offered to digitise the ledger, we jumped at the chance," Mrs Munro said.

"The society doesn't have access to scanning equipment, but after seeing how quickly Debbie scanned the entire journal, we have added a book scanner to the top of our wish list."

Ms Squires, who has been involved in heritage groups and projects for the last four decades, said the book reader was capable of scanning an entire book in 30 minutes and had become a treasure for the East Gippsland community.

East Gippsland Family History Group members are taking the machine "on the road", to help preserve the history of their region." Ms Squires said.

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"The region lost a great deal of historical documents in bushfires a couple of years ago.

"Consequently, a lot more people are now more aware of the need to digitise important papers, but we still have elderly residents who don't know about these things.

"We can copy things for these people so there is a record should another fire or disaster occur, while also preserving our history for future generations."

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