How do you spell that?

I've been doing battle with the New South Wales Birth Marriage and Death Indexes recently.

It is a wonderful resource for family historians seeking people who lived - all or part of their lives - in New South Wales (Australia).  I am truly grateful for free access to this online database offered by the New South Wales Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages.  So my "battle" is not with the providers of the resource but rather with finding the person or persons I'm seeking.

I usually search by name.  I'm pretty sure most people would do the same. Recently I was looking for a Herbert family and you'd think that would be fairly straight forward. Nope. Not all of them were in the database as "Herbert", some of them were "Herberts" and still others were "Hubert".  Perhaps there were other variations I still haven't found.  The search engine doesn't provide a soundex facility but it does provide string matching (*) and character matching (?).  It is up to the user to be creative and look for all the possible variations. It helps to know how both the original records and the indexes were created. 

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Civil registration began in New South Wales 1 March 1856.  Before that baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded by the churches. Most events were recorded by the officiating minister or priest.  He wrote what he heard - and remember that many people could not read and write in those days.  So when William Herbert married Mary Jones, the minister might have written his name as "Hubert". Or maybe he wrote "Herbert" but left a long squiggly tail on the last "t".

The church may have written (no typewriters in the early days) regular lists (called transcripts) of baptisms, burials and marriages to send to the administrative offices of their church. In some cases it is these transcripts that have survived rather than the original church records. And the trouble with transcripts is human error.  If the original writing was messy or the document faded or damaged the transcriber needed to make a guess.  So when William Herbert's marriage record was copied, the long squiggly tail on the last "t" might have looked like an "s", and he became William Herberts.

Civil registration forms were not widely used until about 1918, so many registrations were notified verbally.  The problems emerging here are the same as those encountered with the church records.  Basically, mis-hearing, bad writing and transcription errors.

NSW Registry staff kept indexes to assist in locating records. There may be errors in these indexes created by humans.

When looking for that elusive ancestor, I find it helps to put yourself in the shoes of the person who created the record you are seeking.  This can be applied to virtually all online searches - think who created the record and how they did it.

A detailed explanation of the NSW Registry records can be found here. 

Just By Chance

Have you ever thought about the decisions your ancestors made (or were made for them) that affected your life?

It amazes me to think that my great great grandfather was sentenced to death by hanging for larceny.  A stay of execution saved him from the gallows and sentenced him to transportation to Australia instead.  He subsequently fathered four children, three of whom survived to have large families of their own.

All of his descendants, hundreds - perhaps thousands, exist because of the fateful stroke of a pen that stayed his execution. If he had not survived would his wife have married someone else and had other children?  It is totally mind-boggling to ponder these possibilities.

And this is just one of the historical global and personal events that resulted is each of us being here.

Is it any wonder that knowing our family history is so fascinating?  Not only does it show us who our ancestors were, their stories reveal how the events of their lives and the decisions they made affected us.

One final thought.  Our lives and our decisions will affect our descendants. What a responsibility!

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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Why blog?

These are my thoughts as I stand on the shore of the Ocean of Blogging and contemplate dipping a toe in.

Discovering my past is an exciting adventure. And it is not just the family discoveries - it's also the journeys and adventures that I'm having along the way that are memorable.

I am privileged to have been involved with helping others to discover their path to the past. Every family is different and the path to finding them is also unique.

This blog will include the things that have astounded me, given me a buzz or amused me as I have travelled numerous and various paths to the past ... not only special family finds but the events, characters, places and adventures I have encountered along the way. Even if no one else reads this blog, I am recording these tales as part of my own story.

Who knows what else will emerge. Let's see where the tide takes me. No hard and fast rules about frequency or subject although I expect family history will be the major theme.

So I wonder: Will I sink or will I swim?  I won't know until I try it so ... 

HERE GOES!

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