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Still, the good thing about a history site is that at least things don't become out of date.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