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...............