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.