Even the most official-looking document can have a deeply personal story.

Today is International Archives Day, and to celebrate Victoria's archives, Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) asked its Facebook fans to tell their stories of when an archival find made them go "wow".

ABC Radio Melbourne's Simon Leo Brown spoke to some of those who responded with stories of amazing discoveries.

Love in the goldfields

Life during the gold rush was hard for Leopold Wallace and his wife Mary.

During 1855 the couple lived in a tent at the Ballarat goldfields, with Mary caring for their newborn son while her husband spent his day on the diggings.

In February 1856 Mary left him, taking their son back to her mother's house in Collingwood.

In an effort to save his marriage a distraught Wallace penned his wife a love letter.

Sara Powter says her great-grandfather's letter is the only known love letter from the Victorian goldfields. ( Supplied )

More than 150 years later, his great-granddaughter Sara Powter found the letter tucked inside the family bible while going through her late mother's belongings.

"[Mum] did say, 'Oh, there are some old letters, I can't remember where I put them'," Ms Powter said.

She said the love letter had inspired her mother to write a series of historical fiction novels, the first of which, titled Mattie, has been published posthumously, with the second due out in September.

In the letter Wallace describes his "utter desolation" at his wife's departure, asks her to become a shoe binder rather than a washerwoman, and tells of how a neighbour's tent was attacked by goats.

The couple eventually reunited and went on to have another five children.

The letter, which Ms Powter said was the only known love letter from the goldfields, is now held at PROV.

Illiterate widowed mum of six wins land grant

Beck Hart shed a tear as she sat in PROV's reading room, holding the government land grant given to her great-great-grandmother Hannah Watts in 1875.

"That document meant her life, her world," Ms Hart said.

Hannah Watts signed the land grant with an X. ( Supplied: Public Record Office Victoria )

At the time the government was granting parcels of land to those who could prove they were working to improve it.

Ms Watts and her second husband William Watts worked hard for their grant, clearing "acres and acres" of the land in Melton, west of Melbourne.

Before the grant process was completed, however, William Watts died, leaving his wife twice widowed with six children.

Hannah Watts, a "feisty, illiterate Irish immigrant", managed to finalise the land grant while juggling children, the demands of the farm and her role as a local midwife.

The document, signed by Watts with an X, sealed the transfer of the Melton land that would stay in the family for more than a century.

"That was the land my grandfather was born on, that my great-grandfather was born on," Ms Hart said.

History hidden online

Growing up, Lisa McDonald was told her great-great-grandfather Henry Keiley was the music critic for The Argus newspaper in Melbourne.

"That was roughly all I knew about him," she said.

One day she put his name into the search engine of Australian archives website Trove.

Among the top results was a copy of the playbill for 1879 musical Alfred The Great, credited to Keiley and renowned Australian author Marcus Clarke.

Lisa McDonald discovered the playbill on Trove. ( Supplied: Trove )

"That led me on to an obsession with exploring online archives," Ms McDonald said.

Soon she found evidence of Keiley's time as an early pioneer at the goldfields of Stawell, his prominence in the Masons and his attendance at a lord mayor's fancy dress ball.

She also found evidence of a lecture he gave in Melbourne that was so popular it forced other planned events to be postponed or cancelled so as not to compete.

"What this actually did was it illustrated who this person was, this very multifaceted character, and the very important role he played in early Victorian history," Ms McDonald said.

She said Keiley's story would have been lost had it not been for Australia's digital archives.