Like a Message in a Bottle

We all love to hear those stories of finding a message in a bottle on a remote seashore and how it changed lives. We don't expect to find a message in a bottle ourselves.

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But when you think about it, family history discoveries can sometimes be like finding a message in a bottle from a long-gone person. This was brought home to me last week when I found a short notice in the "Missing Friends, Messages Etc" section of the Argus running on 16^th, 17^th and 18^th July 1857. It reads:

CATHERINE DORNEY acquaints her sister Margaret, wife of John Brown, blacksmith, of her arrival. Mr. O'Hara's, Prahran.

Tragically, Margaret had died three and a half years before that optimistic notice was published.  I am left wondering if John Brown, or someone who knew of him, read the notice and delivered the sad news of Margaret's death to Catherine.

Margaret Dorney was my third great grandmother. She had married John Brown, a blacksmith, in Cork, Ireland in 1841.  They immigrated to Australia in 1842 and lived in Melbourne and Adelaide.  Margaret died of consumption in Melbourne in 1853 leaving a family of four children, one of whom was named Catherine and known as Kitty.  

Until now I knew nothing of Margaret's family in Ireland.  But that little notice, so full of joyful anticipation, led me to her sister almost 161 years after it was published. I've learned that Catherine was just 17 when she arrived in Australia and so may not even have been born when Margaret left Ireland.

I'd like to find Catherine's descendants, if any exist.  Perhaps we can meet one day and remember our Irish grandmothers who were sisters - destined never to know each other. And then I'll feel that Catherine's notice in the Argus, like a message in a bottle, has found a destination and played its part in the Dorney family history.

Three Ps

Most serious family historians are unashamedly pedantic. That's fine – family historians need to be accurate. 

However, being overly pedantic can lead to becoming impatient and intolerant. Sometimes irritation with information that is not strictly correct in one part of a story can lead to missing vital clues in another.

Those public family trees scattered around the internet can be frustrating when they contain information that is obviously incorrect (i.e. WRONG!).  I can understand mistakes in choosing the wrong "John Smith" but find it difficult to figure how an ancestor could become a parent at 4 years of age. You get the picture. 

For many years, I've been looking for one of my families who lived in Uxbridge. They had 17 children and lived in abject poverty in the first half of the 1800s.  Many of the children died in infancy but some just disappeared, seemingly into thin air, between one census and the next.  My breakthrough came when I discovered a public tree on Ancestry.com.  Some of the information didn't agree with my findings and normally my pedantic, impatient, intolerant side would opt out with a swift click on the back arrow -  but this time I hung in there.  

Persistence paid off and lead to finding three of my missing people living in New Zealand. Whoo-Hoo!!

So while it's good to be pedantic, this example shows that family researchers need to be patient and persistent too.

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