tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-213747732012-02-16T19:10:42.463ZMy journey of discovery into the Perry, Little, Lumtin and Wall branches of my family treesghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.comBlogger121100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-66196511100138494832006-10-08T11:50:00.000Z2006-10-08T11:54:50.298Z

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I last updated my family history site.Still, the good thing about a history site is that at least things don't become out of date.So today I am giving it a good spruce up - adding photos I collected from my mum when in Australia in June, sorting through snippets of information I've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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1152441314409169972006-07-09T10:27:00.000Z2006-07-09T10:35:14.420Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1146985794836704312006-05-07T07:04:00.000Z2006-05-07T07:09:54.853Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1145095254824165832006-04-15T09:53:00.000Z2006-04-15T10:00:54.873Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1143881778003729712006-04-01T08:37:00.000Z2006-04-01T08:56:18.033Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1142103036008186532006-03-11T18:50:00.000Z2006-03-11T18:50:36.906Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1140950566798403402006-02-26T10:27:00.000Z2006-02-26T10:42:46.853Z

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),

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1140257871521249892006-02-18T10:08:00.000Z2006-02-18T10:57:42.413Z

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,

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1139757296928086312006-02-12T15:14:00.000Z2006-02-12T15:17:48.360Z

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,

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1138438076048483632006-01-28T08:47:00.000Z2006-01-29T09:43:24.440Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1138437021255068442006-01-28T08:30:00.000Z2006-01-28T08:30:21.263Z

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 itI found a great shareware program called GenoProCreate a web site to populate

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21374773.post-1138003707125814842006-01-23T07:35:00.000Z2006-01-23T08:09:30.233Z

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

sghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00161399842148118497noreply@blogger.com0