Back again

I was amazed to see that it had been three months since I last updated my family history site.

Still, the good thing about a history site is that at least things don't become out of date.

So today I am giving it a good spruce up - adding photos I collected from my mum when in Australia in June, sorting through snippets of information I've gathered via emails and leaflets and doing a general tidy up.

And once its brought up to date, I'll try - again - to fill in some of the gaps. Winter is coming so it will be too cold to do much else.

Ancestry websites

There was an interesting review in yesterday's Guardian of family history web sites.

Personally, I think ancestry.co.uk is indeed the best one out of all that I have tried. I have found loads of information on it.

Another good one is onefamilytree.com. This one not only gives you info on individuals (e.g. their birth info) but it also gives you stuff on some of their ancestors. e.g. not only them but their parents and grandparents names, which helps in building family trees, of course.

Having just got back from Australia, I have a bit more info to add to my family history site. Hope to do this in the next few weeks as things return to normal at home.

Having a rest

Now I know why most people who do family research tend to be retired.

If you're not careful, you can end up spending every waking hour on it - if not researching, then checking details, updating information, dealing with email, etc etc. Its never ending.

Even people in some of the genealogy newsgroups I'm a member of take breaks. Mind you, many of them have been doing research for years.

So though I feel like a bit of a lightweight, I have decided to park my family history stuff for a few weeks while I sort out various other things on the home and work fronts.

But I will come back to it - to my inbox full of emails from helpful people (who have sent me even more information on the likes of Mary Wade!), to my web site with lots of gaps glaring out at me whenever I look at it and to the mystery of my ancestors, especially the Littles.

I feel I've broken the back of it, anyway. The rest is now fine tuning, chasing up a few loose ends and preparing for the second phase of research - actually trying to visit some of the places in order to look at parish records.

Until next time.........

No such thing as a "dead end"

The great thing about doing your family history is that it really never ends. You never get to the final page of it, to the point when you have no more leads whatsoever to follow or no other information to find to add colour to the story.

Like a computer game or a novel with no ending.

You think you have a dead end, with no hope of gaining any more information, and then some helpful stuff just appears.

And so it happened last week.

Out of the blue, a work colleague mentioned that he had seen my family history site. Great, I thought - welcoming his feedback on it.

Then he said that he also had descendants from China, and in fact he could speak Cantonese. And he knows loads about the migration of Cantonese people to countries such as Australia.

So what I thought was a dead end when it came to my grandad Lumtin's parents has now become live again. Through my colleague, I can perhaps paint a portrait of how these people might have come to Australia and what they probably did in China before arriving.

Excellent - thanks Andy, I just need to find time to sit down with you and chat more about it!

Getting back to source

Last weekend, I discovered I had another convict in my family tree. Excellent, that makes 13 so far.

But what was particularly great about discovering that this new chap, John Randall, was an ancestor was the fact that all the information people had provided me with - before I obtained his death certificate - suggested that my ancestor, Alice Randall, was not his daughter.

Alice was proving quite a tricky person to find out about - her death certificate claims her father was John Randall but there just doesn't seem to be a record of her birth anywhere. Given she was born around 1804 in Penrith, NSW, this is perhaps not unusual.

But I figured I could at least confirm who her father was, using the info from her death cert. After all, it was not uncommon for records not to include the names of fathers, so if Alice's did include hers, all the more likely that it was accurate.

So I started investigating the possible John Randalls. (There were a few of them.) Two were quickly eliminated but one seemed to fit the bill. But all my enquiries to other researchers about the children of the most likely John Randall suggested he absolutely didn't have a daughter called Alice - he only had 3 children and she wasn't one of them.

Scratching my head, I started to wonder whether all these people were in fact wrong. So I bit the bullet and ordered a copy of John's death certificate. Another $24 down the drain, quite possibly. But I had a hunch.

I finally received it from Australia last weekend. And sure enough, listed on John's death certificate are the names of his 4 children, including his eldest, Alice.

Brilliant - and it just proves that even researchers can sometimes get it wrong. It really helps to get back to the original documents.

Now if only I can find out a bit about him...............

Creating a community

Over the many weeks that I have been spending doing my family research, I have sent and received hundreds of emails from people who, like me, are descendants of particular convicts or individuals.

Its been really great and has helped me to capture so much information, stuff it would have taken me years to discover on my own.

And then just recently I received an email from someone who simply wanted to tell me that her daughter was a descendant of the one of the same convicts as I am. I pondered how to share this information - it didn't seem right to put it on my web site but at the same time, I felt I should do something with it.

And then, eureka, an idea. Install a free message board on my web space and allow people such as this lady to "tell the world".

So I have done it. Its here and I invite you to add to it if you are also a descendant of one of the same convicts or other ancestors as me. Who knows. If lots of people add their details, we might have the making of a community around certain ancestors.

Why not - crazier things have happened.

You can't do it all on the Internet.........

but you can do a hell of a lot of it!

You can't do it all on the Internet - the message we were given when we attended the free talk about family research a couple of weeks ago at the Family Records Centre.

Well, all I can say is that so far I have done almost all my research exactly through that channel.

Through a combination of web sites (small, large, free to use and via trial subscriptions), email and mailing lists, I have probably tripled the amount of information I had when I began this project.

Here are some of the web sites I have found particularly useful:

NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages I would have been facing an impossible task researching my NSW ancestors had it not been for this excellent web site. Good to see the NSW Govt putting tax payer's money to good use, for a change. Lists all births, deaths and marriages registered in NSW since 1788 (excluding recent stuff.)

Free BMD Another gem for family researchers. Allows you to search for births, deaths and marriages registered in England and Wales since 1837.

Ancestry.co.uk Available only via subscription but really good for searching through UK census information. Register for a 14 day free trial and use it as much as possible!

Claim a Convict The place to go to not only check if your ancestor was possibly a convict, but also to find other people who are claiming them. Through this site I have made a number of good contacts, including one or two new friends.

Granted, the information I have been looking for is relatively "recent" in genealogy terms: 1800's and later. Once I get back further, looking into births in the 1700s is probably going to require visits to places like Shropshire and so on, digging through dusty old church and parish records.

You might not be able to do ALL of your research on the internet, but you can make pretty good inroads.

Ethical dilemmas

In doing my research, I have so far encountered 3 types of ethical challenges, where I have had to think about issues connected with the information I have obtained and whether to publish it or not on my web site.

Firstly, now and then I uncover something new about an ancestor. Usually this is classic stuff like their parents' names and places of birth.

But sometimes I discover under age marriages, illegitimate children, mysterious early deaths, backyard burials and other snippets about their lives.

And therein lies a dilemma. Do I publish it on the web for all to see or not? Is it exposing family scandals or simply adding a bit of colour to the black and white information (names, dob, etc) I have ?

Then there is the issue around what to publish about living ancestors - I guess that means they are relatives. Do I publish recent photos of them, information about their dates of birth, marriages etc?

What are the risks of doing this? Is identity theft really possible just with a few pieces of information published about them on my web site?

Finally, there is the issue around what I should do with information sent to me or shared with me by another researcher. Do I just assume that I can put it on my web site? Is there such a thing as copyright over publicly available information??

All interesting things to grapple with as I continue my research, and here's my take on them:

1 - I feel comfortable publishing ANY information that I discover about ANY ancestors prior to my grandparents.

Two reasons: I don't feel any shame at all about them, they are part of my history, part of my make up and in fact I feel proud about their struggles. It can't have been easy being extremely poor, transported to Australia or banished from their families.

And it is unlikely that any living relatives will have strong memories of them and so feel offended by anything I might publish. This is why I don't include my grandparents in the above (not that I have anything that I would have otherwise published anyway).

2 - I am happy to publish on my web site any information that a living relative is happy to share with me, knowing it might end up on my site.

This boils down to their dates of birth, maiden and married names, names of children. I am yet to be convinced that anyone can steal someone's identity just by having this information. Surely they need documentary evidence to support their claims. Besides which, this info is easily obtainable from many public offices anyway.

3 - If I think any information shared with me by another researcher would be of interest to visitors to my web site, I ask before publishing it and I credit the source.

To me this is just plain old good manners. Most people so far have been happy for me to publish pieces of what they have shared, though some have preferred I didn't. So I don't. In addition to betraying their trust, it is a little like "biting the hand that feeds" and I value the relationships I have struck with many of these people.

So they're my dilemmas and how I deal with them. People probably have other views on how they would handle them but as long as I stick to these principles, it is clear to those who share info with me or visit my web site, where I have drawn lines.

Who do you think you are?

To go with the BBC's popular tv series of this name, today BBC London ran a Family History day at the British Library.

[note to self: Add a visit to the library itself to my list of London things to do]

We collected loads of information about family history: pages of web links, details about what the National Archives holds (lots, apparently!) and leaflets about places we hadn't thought to visit, such as the Museum of Docklands (didn't even know it existed) and the Imperial War Museum (to look at merchant shipping records).

Well worth checking out: and interesting to see just how many people are interested in their family history (judging by the crowds.)

I hear that the BBC are helping create a series of WDYTYA for Australian tv. Hope it is also shown in the UK.

What do I want to know?

Fine - so after working through what I knew, I then needed to decide what more I wanted to know. Or rather, how much information I wanted to try and discover about my ancestors.

In project management terms, think of it as the scope.

I'm no genealogist (more on that later!) so I don't know the term for it but basically, I decided to trace only my direct ancestors along the four branches of my family tree.

Never mind their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, distant cousins and all that stuff - if I was ever going to have a life outside this project, I needed to draw the line.

Besides, there is a limit to how many people I can hold in the family history software and I already have enough living relatives, thank you, so there's really no point unearthing any new ones.

The next thing to decide was what to find out about them. I went for the basic stuff: when and where they were born, when, where and who they married and when and where they died.

Three historical records: births, deaths and marriages.

Except for the convicts, of course.

Ya gotta have a plan

My day job involves project management and like any good project manager knows, if you want to achieve something, it helps to have a plan.

So the first thing I did was to make a plan of how I was going to research my family history - and here it is:

• Get some software to hold my family history information as I gathered it
• I found a great shareware program called GenoPro

• Create a web site to populate with information as I found it (so I can share it)
• I used some of my server space at funnelweb
  

• Work out what I already knew
• Most of this was about the Perrys and the Walls
  
• I reviewed all the information I "inherited" from my grandmother, compared it with the information on Dennis' website and discounted some of it as things just didn't fit

• Work out what I needed to find out and where I needed to look
  
• The ongoing bit
  

The last step is where I am at now. It may never end - how far back I go will probably depend on how much time I want to spend digging into records which naturally will get more difficult to find (if they exist at all), the further back in time I go.

But at least I have a plan.

Getting started - thanks

Many years ago, my grandmother gave me a folder filled with a mixture of old documents and letters. Apparently, one of my father's cousins had "done the family history" and the evidence was literally all "in the bag".

Years went by. Every now and then I'd dip into the folder to read one of the nuggets of information - three, four convicts, an illegitimate child, etc. Sometimes I'd make a half-hearted attempt at finding a bit more information to fill a gap, but would soon give up due to the amount of effort required.

Until recently.

Last year, a very good friend from Sydney came over to stay with us. Kimberly is a qualified archivist with many personal connections in the Mitchell Library, NSW State archives and other such places.

She showed me a wonderful new web site: the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The NSW government really ought to be congratulated for doing their bit to make genealogy much more accessible for people.

The web site lists all NSW-registered births from 1788 to 1905, deaths from 1788 to 1975 and marriages from 1788 to 1955. All the information is searchable and unlike many genealogy web sites, you can get enough information not to need to purchase the underlying certificate for it.

With Kimberly's help, I was able to trace another of my family lines back through several generations, all the way to more convicts.

So many thanks to Kimberly, the internet and the NSW government.

They have inspired me to try and fill in some gaps in the great work that my father's cousin has done into the Perry line of my tree and to also start finding out about the other branches of my family tree.

The first thing I did was to sift through all the information in the folder and set up a web site as a working tool to show what I have discovered and what I am researching.

And now, this blog - to tell the story of how I discovered the stories of my ancestors.