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.