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Some stuff about my family, since I too don't want this thread to die. This unremarkable little street in Stavanger, Norway (Kaisegata) is interesting because it was named after a shipbuilder named Knud Johannes Kaisen (1809-1902), whom also happens to be my great-great-great-great-grandfather (my great-great-grandfather's maternal grandfather and the father-in-law of the guy below). He managed to acquire satisfactory wealth but his trusting, naive personality caused him to be taken advantage of and he died poor but managed to live long enough to know he had a street named after him.   This is Sivert Jacobsen (1830-1908). He is my great-great-great-grandfather. When he was fifteen he went to sea as a cabin boy and sailed mostly between the US and the Mediterranean. The ships carried marble blocks for buildings to New York and wine from Spain and Portugal. After sailing with the same ship for several years and advancing to the position of Third Officer, he deserted the ship in NY and went into hiding until the ship departed port. He then shipped out with an American vessel for several years, mostly from NY along the coast to the southern states. When he decided he was away from Norway for long enough that it would be safe to return without being arrested for desertion, he found that he had lost his citizenship and had to take out citizenship papers in the town in which he was born (Stavanger), since he had literally became "a man without a country". After studying navigation, he became a sea captain for 15-20 years and commanded two ships, the "Sir Robert Peel" and the "Aquarius". The ships traveled all over the world - to South America to load coffee, mahogany logs, etc., and he sailed to Constantinople about the time of the Crimean War. His last trip was to Pensacola, FL after pitch pine mast timbers to be unloaded at Stavanger. After arriving in Norway in May 1874, he decided to retire after sailing the high seas for 30 years. During that time his only mishap had been the loss of a young seaman in the North Sea during a storm. Sivert, his wife Karen Kaisen, and children moved from Stavanger to the US (arriving in NYC aboard the "Kong Sverre" on August 13, 1874) and settled near Gilman, Iowa. The family stayed in Chicago for about a week, then came to LeGand and bought a farm with a house. His son, my great-great-grandfather, Knudt, was 13. His wife, Karen, was from Copenhagen and her father the ship builder is the one the street is named after. Sivert came to Iowa because he had heard that other Norwegians had settled there. Karen was also born in 1830 and the two died within a month of each other. They are both buried in the same cemetery as my father and the rest of my paternal family. My mother and I moved to Marshalltown, Iowa not ten to fifteen minutes from my paternal ancestral roots where they have been since 1874. I grew up in Vegas and Kansas City and I find it fascinating that, in a way, I am back "home". It certainly makes doing research a lot easier. bean_shadow fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 16:44
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Some great posts all! My mother has been tearing into genealogy, will take decades to confirm what she has found. One lineage she has back to pre English invasion Normandy in the 10th century :duckpop: On topic, she has our Norwegian roots traced back to a farm in Modum (from which the family name is taken). This was only 3-4 generations ago. One of the neatest things for me is to take virtual google streetview tours of the places in Norway and Sweden (and England for that matter) the ancestors came from. Its remarkable to have this information so easily available.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:23
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I love the image of your mother tearing apart the fabric of genealogy, leaving a wake of rippling of half-truths and spurious connections to be cleared up or confirmed by a grumbling family history chain gang  OK, so one of my ancestors has a rare surname - Legass. Presumably this is an anglicized version of a name from somewhere in Europe. Any good sites to find out where the name originates or predominates? I think maybe the most likely transliteration would be french - Le Gasse or similar. She married into an Irish family but Irish BDM records didn't really show anything. I think this will be a bit of a dead end, unless I get extremely lucky and find the right passenger list. Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 06:25
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Jaguars! posted:OK, so one of my ancestors has a rare surname - Legass. Presumably this is an anglicized version of a name from somewhere in Europe. Any good sites to find out where the name originates or predominates? I think maybe the most likely transliteration would be french - Le Gasse or similar. She married into an Irish family but Irish BDM records didn't really show anything. I think this will be a bit of a dead end, unless I get extremely lucky and find the right passenger list. I don't know about the rest of the continent, but The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland was published about a month ago, and is kind-of-searchable for free. The closest match it has is Legassick, which is "unexplained, possibly Huguenot". (Index page, you can get entries from the search preview if you're cunning/patient) Ancestry.com records look like probably French, but I don't have access to those sections from my home computer. And I never really know how trustworthy these kinds of sites are: https://www.houseofnames.com/legasse-family-crest No developments with my tree - father has got distracted with rebuilding his old car, and I'm busy with work. I guess it's never too late for my mother to have a turn...
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Dec 13, 2016 07:58
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I'm now in absolute awe of the rootschat forum. I posted the details I had and in half a day they had places of birth and death, the ship she came over in, and a file number for her husband's military records. She made the flannels for the first english cricket team to tour Australia! I can't believe that they found so much, in particular things like obits that I thought I had already scoured pretty thoroughly.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:07
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They're crazy good.
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Dec 15, 2016 08:43
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Jaguars! posted:I'm now in absolute awe of the rootschat forum. Thanks for mentioning this. My father passed away earlier this year and it's got me interested in genealogy since we didn't know much about his side of the family. I learned way more than he ever told me just by finding his birth certificate and old passports, for example. My mother had mentioned he was born near Stonehenge, which I wasn't entirely sure about. His passports all list Devizes as his birthplace, and it's somewhat close. But sure enough, his birth certificate lists a street address in Netheravon which is only a few miles away from Stonehenge. I'm looking at scanning in a lot of family photos. What systems for organizing them have worked well? I found this open source tool called Gramps, is it any good?
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Dec 15, 2016 18:52
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Jaguars! posted:I love the image of your mother tearing apart the fabric of genealogy, leaving a wake of rippling of half-truths and spurious connections to be cleared up or confirmed by a grumbling family history chain gang That is not too far from the truth! She has plugged into some sort of Norwegian genealogy group focused on the county our ancestors hailed from, and has helped a scad of people fill out missing parts of their trees too. So, now she is spreading like a plague outbreak 
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Dec 16, 2016 16:12
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This Norwegian forum is good, it's run by the sister-org of the Danish genealogical society that I'm a member of. http://www.disnorge.no/slektsforum/index.php?language=engelsk Also this one, run by the Norwegian State Archives: https://forum.arkivverket.no And for completeness, the one run by the Danish society: https://www.slaegtogdata.dk/forum/index.php/board,3.0.html And a Swedish one that I know is good: http://forum.genealogi.se/index.php They all have free guest accounts. There's a lot of facebook groups for Scandinavian research too, but I can't vouch for them.
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Dec 16, 2016 18:36
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Cpt.Wacky posted:I'm looking at scanning in a lot of family photos. What systems for organizing them have worked well? I found this open source tool called Gramps, is it any good? fake edit: Oh boy why do I always write so much. I really didn't mean for this to be so long and didactic, sorry about that, please enjoy my drivel! I use and like Gramps - if you know what an open source program is you'll probably find it straightforward enough, though properly citing every tiny fact seems to take too many clicks. I particularly like the mapping/geography component, though I haven't checked payware stuff for a long time so maybe that's widespread now. But the purpose of the media component isn't a photo album, it's fairly specific, i.e. adding photos to people or events, or linking documents as evidence for specific facts. I wouldn't think of using it as the primary catalogue for a large photo collection. Apart from the limitations of the program, it stores information entirely separate from the images, which didn't work with the system I had for all my other photos. I prefer to put the information into the photo metadata (date, location, caption, people tagging, etc.) and duplicating some of that in Gramps seemed pointless or impossible (you can't add the location of a photograph, only attach it to a record at the location). The only particular benefit IMO is that it allows for less specific dating ("about 1908", "estimated before 1930", "February 1962"). I've sketched out out my system below, but nobody I know has bothered to get anywhere near as detailed. It depends on the size and quality and meaningfulness of your collection, whether you want to treat it separately from the digital photos that you surely already have, whether you know anything about the photos or just have a shoebox of undated & uncaptioned portraits, you get the idea. 90% of my collection is post-1950s 4x6-or-smaller prints in envelopes and albums, mostly already sorted by event or theme by my parents, so following their system worked well for me. When I scanned my photos I assigned them a unique code based on their physical location (usually as simple as A13-22 for the 22nd image in the 13th album, putting a tiny sticker on the album to identify it later, but generally not writing on the photo) and made a spreadsheet/database with information about the physical copy - what Album 13 looks like, its current location, what format A13-22 is supposed to be (film/transparency, color/B&W, size), if it's one of the photos that was printed on textured material and won't scan properly, if it's damaged, any information written on the back, a one-line description of the image, etc. - essentially, it's a focussed-but-lazy replica of the local museum's catalogue system, which is not free to use and would be massive overkill for this kind of project anyway. I entered this information as I scanned them, and stored the files in the same layout (e.g. filename A13-22 in a folder called A13). Then I just treat them like all my other photographs and add metadata eventually where possible with Lightroom and GeoSetter (beta version, not the years-old "stable" one), referring to the database for reference instead of the original. It's not the quickest process, but I end up with a digital album full of information about its contents and a database of information about the physical originals and not too much overlap between them. Personally, a bigger mistake than anything to do with my cataloguing was sticking with my "home-office" scanner - it worked fine but saving for a few months and spending much more initially would have probably been faster and easier. But that's maybe because I was spoiled by the museum's equipment, which was definitely out of my price range. P.S. Get some gloves, disposable nitrile or washable cotton or whatever.
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Dec 17, 2016 01:33
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Bilirubin posted:That is not too far from the truth! What county in Norway do your ancestors come from? My relatives came from Stavanger, Rogaland.
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Dec 17, 2016 02:21
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bean_shadow posted:What county in Norway do your ancestors come from? My relatives came from Stavanger, Rogaland. Modum, Buskerud. Apparently the old family farm is still there and still in the family, from my uncle who went there 20 odd years ago. e. Swedish side are from Karlskrona, Gamleby, and the Gothenberg area Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Dec 20, 2016 |
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Dec 20, 2016 06:54
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uvar posted:fake edit: Oh boy why do I always write so much. I really didn't mean for this to be so long and didactic, sorry about that, please enjoy my drivel! That's all helpful, thank you. Gramps looks like the average open source project with a less than ideal UI and should be useful for the actual genealogy work. Was your issue with the scanner the speed of each scan or the quality? I'd be nervous putting photos through an autofeeder like a ScanSnap in case it mangled them. I got a nicer Canon flatbed scanner for this project and I can already tell I'm going to need to dust and clean the glass pretty often. Do you do anything special with the reverse side of the photo? I'm sure some are going to have handwritten notes, and I probably won't be able to decipher a lot of the old-timey cursive handwriting. I could scan it in too, and just give it the same file name as the front side and append -reverse or something. I was a little wary of putting too much info into the metadata for photos so it's nice to hear from someone that it works. How do you go about searching through the metadata, is it just dependent on the features of the software you're using? Have you found any methods that work for getting extended family to help identify people in photos? I can imagine most of mine are not very tech savvy and it could be a real mess when they respond that the one with people by a picnic table has Uncle Bob and Cousin Vinny in it, and there's multiple photos with picnic tables and you can't tell if Vinny is on the left or right. Not to mention sending potentially hundreds of photos as attachments. Now that I'm thinking about it, doesn't Google Photos allow people to add comments? They'd just have to have a google account I think. Some of them are old enough they don't even use computers. I guess I could mail prints of the scanned photos and ask them to write notes on the back and mail them back?
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Dec 20, 2016 21:56
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Why oh why did I decide to hand draft three family trees less than a week before christmas   
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Dec 20, 2016 22:06
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They look really good though! The Danish national archives have put online some of their earliest records now, so I've been transcribing my hometown from the 1500s and 1600s. It turns out that they did not pay a fee to take over the house until 1660, so I don't have the written changeover like "John Jackson takes over his deceased father, Jack Johnson's house" Instead I have a bunch of yearly lists of who lives in the village. Thankfully they're written in the same order each year, so I can see who takes over a specific house. And if their name is a patronymic of who lived there, that's a pretty good indicator that he's the son of him too.
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Dec 27, 2016 00:58
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Welp, it turns out they'll keep writing the house as "Jack Johnson's house" even if he died or fled the country to avoid paying tithes or whatever. So I'll have to go back and go through the actual accountings of who paid their dues and when and try to match those up with my records of the houses, in order to see which houses were empty and for how long. That's gonna take a while, as those records aren't as uniform and not always down to the house level. I did notice that a guy from my hometown was sentenced to beheading & then pardoned for poaching the King's deer though. Unfortunately, the accounting records are summaries of like 1-2 sentences + the fine levied/expenses incurred, so not a lot of witness testimony or anything unless it's been copied as a separate addendum. Also I've gotten in contact with a Swedish genealogist who focuses on the area around where my Scanian fugitive from the 1670s came from, so we've exchanged a bunch of stuff. I have identified one man as a likely father: his age fits, and they have reversed firstname/patronymic names (ie my previously mentioned Jack Johnson/John Jackson) which are usually a pretty good indicator of one being the oldest living son of the other, and there's no documentation of the Scanian guy having a son by the "reverse"/"my guy's name" in the Scanian records – so the assumption is that Scanian guy's son has "disappeared" from Scania to my hometown, if that makes sense.
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Dec 30, 2016 21:03
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Cpt.Wacky posted:That's all helpful, thank you. Gramps looks like the average open source project with a less than ideal UI and should be useful for the actual genealogy work. quote:Do you do anything special with the reverse side of the photo? I'm sure some are going to have handwritten notes, and I probably won't be able to decipher a lot of the old-timey cursive handwriting. I could scan it in too, and just give it the same file name as the front side and append -reverse or something. quote:I was a little wary of putting too much info into the metadata for photos so it's nice to hear from someone that it works. How do you go about searching through the metadata, is it just dependent on the features of the software you're using? As for photo metadata, I was lucky if I actually knew what was going on in the photo, let alone worrying about putting too much in. Standards were important - store everything in EXIF/IPTC, basically. Lightroom worked well for that but I'm sure there are good free alternatives. I used to use Windows Live Photo Gallery for tagging my digital photos years ago, which was very much the opposite, and don't want to have to repeat rescuing my metadata ten years from now. Information shows up in Windows Explorer if the photos don't have any Windows-preferred fields, so search generally works okay. quote:Have you found any methods that work for getting extended family to help identify people in photos? I can imagine most of mine are not very tech savvy and it could be a real mess when they respond that the one with people by a picnic table has Uncle Bob and Cousin Vinny in it, and there's multiple photos with picnic tables and you can't tell if Vinny is on the left or right. Not to mention sending potentially hundreds of photos as attachments. Now that I'm thinking about it, doesn't Google Photos allow people to add comments? They'd just have to have a google account I think. Some of them are old enough they don't even use computers. I guess I could mail prints of the scanned photos and ask them to write notes on the back and mail them back?  Museum-opinions suggest that in-person conversations where everyone is looking at the same photos is the best option, but even that has limits. My parents were nostalgic when I started but there's only so many times you can ask "Okay, do you have any comments about this one?" before it gets a little tiring (even if they do, taking notes slows things down, and recording conversations isn't great and takes up more time and effort later). Because my parents emigrated when I was younger we don't have much contact with the rest of our family anyway (which is the main reason I started my tree in the first place, funnily enough). So yeah, no idea really.
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Dec 31, 2016 16:43
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Woo a genealogy thread! Awesome! I've been into this hobby off and on since high school (a long time ago). I have subscriptions to ancestry and myheritage and have used familysearch extensively as well, and about two years ago got into the DNA testing side, which actually opened up a whole new branch of my tree and led to the discovery of a heretofore unknown great-great uncle. So if anyone has questions or requests about any of those things I'll tell you what I can. Luckily I have ancestors of French-Canadian and/or Catholic and/or Swedish heritage so a lot of stuff is documented really far back and available online, but I still have quite a few brick walls, mostly on my mom's side, two illegitimate males I'll probably never get past though the mention above of Danish newspapers and tax records and such made me curious: does anyone know if there's similar mentioned in Sweden? I know they have seriously extensive church books which is great and it looks like from the patronymics she may have named the kid after who she thought was the father but I have no evidence otherwise. This would've been in the 1840s. Oracle fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 21:24
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I know in Denmark there were child support laws on the books since 1763. Sometimes they solved it in private in which case there will be little to no records, but if the father refused, there would be an official investigation. One of my ancestors was born out of wedlock (actually, several were), and the father was like "nope, these twins born in August 1862 can't be mine. The mother and I were only together once, and that was in December 1861." But the midwife testified that their size was consistent with being born too soon & he was sentenced to pay up. I assume Sweden had similar laws at the time. The patronymic could well be a hint to the father. Perhaps try the Swedish forum I mentioned earlier.
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Jan 10, 2017 11:58
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I gave my research to dad for Christmas and it went really well. We went over it while everyone else was unwrapping presents. This is one of my Great-Aunts in the early 1920s. I love the imitation of adult fashion  
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Jan 14, 2017 01:46
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Awesome! Also that pattern is almost the same as my great grandmother & one of her sisters are wearing in this one!  She's the oldest, photo is from ca. 1905 when she was around 18. Still working on connecting housing records:  Black arrows mean the tenant is the same, red arrows mean unsure, & grey means "moved" (either they were counted in a different order, or they swapped houses; both are possible).
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Jan 14, 2017 02:14
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poo poo's starting to get complex
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Jan 17, 2017 07:58
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I'm starting a new tree for my fiancee's family and I'm remembering why digging into recent history is such a drag. "I know your grandmother thinks her parents were born in the US, but is there a chance she's mistaken?" "Really, your grandfather is absolutely sure his uniquely-named dad never lived in Pittsburgh for a few years?" It's just a headache trying to sort out non-relatives and clerical errors when you can't be sure the information coming from family is reliable. That said, I prefer the methodical pace I'm going at this time, rather than rushing in and filling the tree with dubious connections.
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Feb 1, 2017 22:57
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Yeah handed down family histories can be incredibly misleading. It's super important to verify everything in the original sources. Currently trying to locate the descendants of an English woman who visited my hometown in 1909. My family has a photo album that she sent after her stay & it'd be fun to add like letters or a diary or something from her time in Denmark, and her descendants might want copies of the album too. She emigrated to Canada in 1913, and I'm in contact with a Canadian genealogist who has her out on a side branch on her tree, so she's helping me.
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Feb 2, 2017 17:20
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The Canadian genealogist has helped me a lot & supplied a ton of information. Unfortunately she doesn't know anything further than 1-2 generations after the English woman, so these people are all dead & none of us know who (if any) came after. Oh well. She's not in my tree after all, it would just have been cool to get in contact with a direct descendant and be like: "Hey, here's a bunch of pictures your great great grandmother took a hundred years ago". Maybe someone googles her name at some point 10 years from now and contacts me.
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Feb 12, 2017 17:18
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Also that reminded me of this awesome act of genealogical charity so: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3762966
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Feb 12, 2017 17:24
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Just discovered this thread - my mum's been big into genealogy for a while, and a few months ago I got the bug too. We're collaboratively working on both her side of the family and my dad's side, and I feel quite lucky in that she is very rigorous in terms of not jumping to conclusions and making sure there's enough proof for connections. The http://www.freereg.org.uk/ site (which I only discovered thanks to this thread) seems really cool, parish registers have been so helpful. Has anyone dabbled in the DNA side of things? I've done Ancestry's autosomal DNA test which basically showed about what I'd expect (Mostly British, about a Third Irish, and the rest a mix of Western European and Scandinavian), although to anyone else doing that test i'd say bear in mind that there's a lot of overlap in the areas they designate, for example my "scandinavian" or "Western European" is just as likely to be "British"... and their "Irish" also covers Scotland and Wales. The branch we've had the most trouble with is my maternal grandmother, who was born in Ireland (but would never talk about her family) - we've managed to get to about 1850 with them but sadly due to records either being not digitised or having been destroyed over the years that looks like it may be as far as we're likely to get. The furthest back we've got is I think the early 16th century, although I'm British one of my great great great x whatever uncles was an early settler in Massachusetts so that branch of the family have done a metric fuckton of research. I haven't discovered anything that interesting to an outsider, but you can uncover some really interesting stories. One of my ancestorsdeserved to win a Darwin award... he made a bet to walk a mile, run a mile and swim a mile, which he succeeded at, and then promptly dropped down dead leaving a pregnant widow in his wake. Owlkill fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 17:55
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I've considered doing the DNA thing, but I don't think I would be interested in the results. Like they'd be 95% Scandinavia + some loose ends. Then again, I'm talking to a guy who apparently through DNA knows that he & another guy are both direct male line descendants of some guy who lived around 500 years ago & there's a convenient gap in the records right around then, so they're trying to tie that knot. I've been helping out cause it's within my area of interest & I have ancestors in that area too. So that kind of DNA matching is pretty cool. I just don't think I'll match with so many cause I've charted out so much & if I get a weird match that means my research is wrong and then it's all a waste. heh.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:23
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Owlkill posted:I haven't discovered anything that interesting to an outsider, Ok... Owlkill posted:but you can uncover some really interesting stories. One of my ancestorsdeserved to win a Darwin award... he made a bet to walk a mile, run a mile and swim a mile, which he succeeded at, and then promptly dropped down dead leaving a pregnant widow in his wake. You're disproving that other sentence immediately!
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Feb 12, 2017 18:24
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uvar posted:I don't know about the rest of the continent, but The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland was published about a month ago, and is kind-of-searchable for free. The closest match it has is Legassick, which is "unexplained, possibly Huguenot". (Index page, you can get entries from the search preview if you're cunning/patient) Ancestry.com records look like probably French, but I don't have access to those sections from my home computer. And I never really know how trustworthy these kinds of sites are: https://www.houseofnames.com/legasse-family-crest Huguenots! Fun! My father's side is Huguenot. Our family is pretty well documented in America both in general by the Huguenot Society and specifically in a book written by my relatives that traces my family from me (it was written shortly after I was born) to my ancestor who fled France and arrived in New York in the 1670s-90s. However before that ancestor it gets much harder to find information. His birthplace in France is known but not his birth date or parents. One of these days I want to pick up the search. I'd do it now but I don't have a copy of the book (my dad has it and he is across the country) to start entering data and searching online. Maybe I'll remember next time I go home.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:05
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Owlkill posted:Has anyone dabbled in the DNA side of things? I've done Ancestry's autosomal DNA test which basically showed about what I'd expect (Mostly British, about a Third Irish, and the rest a mix of Western European and Scandinavian), although to anyone else doing that test i'd say bear in mind that there's a lot of overlap in the areas they designate, for example my "scandinavian" or "Western European" is just as likely to be "British"... and their "Irish" also covers Scotland and Wales.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:41
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Zero One posted:Huguenots! Fun! My father's side is Huguenot. Our family is pretty well documented in America both in general by the Huguenot Society and specifically in a book written by my relatives that traces my family from me (it was written shortly after I was born) to my ancestor who fled France and arrived in New York in the 1670s-90s. I've finished my project for now, but at some point I'm going to have another look into this line. The lady in question came from notorious lovely place the Cork Foundling Home and was shipped to Aussie on the emmigration scheme, which was pretty much some politicians shippping out boatloads of single women in the hope that they would find employment and meet husbands. At 25 she was the oldest emmigrant on the ship by a margin and probably was the minder of the group. My Patriarch was from Co Kerry, which was lucky because one of the few places that still has Births Deaths & Marriages information for Catholics going back past 1800. The Irish BDM site has online results for various areas that can be searched for free. And Oracle is right, by far the most detailed information I got on him was his enlistment records.
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Feb 15, 2017 22:01
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Hi all, I'm glad I found the thread. I've been doing the genealogy thing for a few years now and it's immensely fascinating. Here is some of my family dirt: - Great grandfather fled Finland under an assumed name because he was a Socialist and was afraid for his life - His daughter, my great aunt, was recruited by the Canadian govt to spy on Finnish immigrants in order for her to get her citizenship. She said LOL no, and blew the whistle on the bastards. It created a national scandal in the 50s - Family worked alongside Daniel Boone and possibly George Washington as surveyors - Great great grandfather was killed in a family feud (lol Kentucky) Bonus husband dirt: His direct grandfather (I can't remember how many greats) was hung in Salem in 1692 for bring a witch, or warlock I guess. I'm using ancestry primarily but thanks to this thread I will check or done of these other resources. My maternal side is entirely Canadian/Finnish and I've recruited a fellow goon to help me translate the Finnish stuff. A lot of the Finnish records aren't digitized yet so I can't go back that far. My paternal side has been easier since they've mostly been in the US for a while. Someone mentioned it on the first page, but what does Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution status provide?
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Feb 16, 2017 04:32
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  Researching in Australia and New Zealand Researching in Australia and NZ essentially works by cross referencing government certificates with newspaper archives. For Aussie, I’m going to focus mostly on NSW because that’s where I ended up searching. There's a million things referenced here so I'm not going to link them all, but honestly, searching for the key words is how I found them in the first place.  Departments of Births, Deaths and Marriages:Most recent information from these departments are covered by privacy laws designed to protect living individuals. So if you’re trying to trace a relative who moved here in the later half of the 20th century you probably aren’t going to be able to use these as a source. In practice I find the easiest way to find the appropriate site is simply to search “[Aus State or NZ] BDM”. NZ BDM online: Records that can be purchased by anyone are as follows: Births that occurred at least 100 years ago Stillbirths that occurred at least 50 years ago Marriages and eventually civil unions that occurred at least 80 years ago Deaths that occurred at least 50 years ago, or the deceased's date of birth was at least 80 years ago More recent ones need what the NZ government calls a “Realme account” which is an account that is verified for an individual that can be used for government activities (e.g. getting a passport). You need to order non-historic certificates by giving BDM the information, you can’t search them. Historic certificates can be searched online and then ordered. Certificates can be searched and purchased via credit card when found. Searching broadly and narrowing down works best. Results usually only show a few basic name details and a reference number which usually contains the year of the event. You can cheat the engine to work out an exact date by gradually narrowing the search range (E.g. search a whole year, then search the first half of the year and see if the result still pops up, continue until you close the range to a single day) As with everywhere else, you have to beware of variant spellings. Official records start in 1875, but church registers are also included back to the 1840s. Older records are often scans of a longhand certificate. NSW: Works in a fairly similar way to the NZ site. Like NZ, records available date pretty much to the founding of the colony. If you are looking for very early immigrants, remember that the whole country started out as New south Wales, so someone living in what is now Victoria could be recorded in the NSW register. The 1834 certificate I got was a transcription rather than a scan, probably because it was a church register rather than a government book. Other states have similar systems. Most certificates cost $20-$30, so costs stack up fast, but the info gained is usually helpful. Newspaper Archives:  "It was worth crossing the globe and putting up with 15 years of West coast rain just to be able to write today's headline" Paperspast: New Zealand’s national archive. Entirely free to use and has excellent coverage of papers throughout NZ up until 1948. Search seems to work reasonably well even though the OCR transcriptions seem rough as hell. The phrase search isn’t too powerful, but a vague search can be filtered easily by date, publication or all papers in a region. Funeral invitations were usually in the classifieds and Family notices are often also lumped in with other advertisements, IIRC, so if you’re having trouble finding something you may have to search the adverts as well, which tends to produce many more results. Trove Australian National archive. It uses is a wiki system where users correct the OCR text, so large amounts of the papers are not indexed very well. Therefore, this one definitely works best starting vague (e.g. a single last name) and using the search filters to narrow down to one place and time. Luckily, family notices are one of the most frequently corrected items. Don’t forget to search the gazette notices section separately – if your ancestor claimed land or had business with the government, you might find them in there! Ryerson Index: Abstracts of Family Notices from a very large collection of papers. If trove isn’t finding anything, this will give you a list of names with the date and paper in which their notice appeared.  NZ War records (Personnel files):A regimental number a.k.a service number is the most reliable identifier for a soldier. Otherwise try and collect full name, place of birth, and age to make a positive ID. WWI records for NZ are freely available. First stop is the Auckland museum’s online cenotaph, where basics of a soldier can be found. At the bottom of each soldier’s page is a references section that contains a link to primary scans of the personnel file on a system called archway. Aussie records can be found on the national archives of australia site, start here. and search here. WWII records are easily available on request from the NZDF archives. It’s a simple matter of filling out a form and sending it in. There is no charge for a single request but if you request another within a year there is a $28 charge. Again, service number is the best identifier, but if you don’t know it, supply as much information as you can. If they died after they left the services, include a proof of death. In my case, I simply included a reference to my granddad’s record from an online index for a cemetery. Aussies can start by finding their relatives on the nominal rolls for free, then use the recordsearch as with the WWI records, but you'll need to apply to get the record.  Shipping records:NZ records are indexed on familysearch.org. The majority of ordinary workers in the 19th century came over with government assistance, and therefore better records are kept. unassisted immigrants were not required to give as much information. Trans-tasman voyages didn’t have very good records either, as most passengers were already British subjects. Minors might simply be recorded as a number of children next to their parent’s entry. If you can’t find your name by searching, it is possible to browse by arrival port but you really need to know the name of the ship. Also search the newspaper archives as shipping arrivals and sometimes passenger lists were published in the papers.  Electoral rolls:NZ has never kept individual census records, so electoral rolls are used as a substitute. They are on ancestry.com and can be accessed using library subscriptions. Not all years are indexed, but if you can find the right district then you might be able to browse them successfully. They only contain the names of voters, generally the heads of households, and older ones have some info about the property they owned that qualified them for voting. Māori rolls were kept separately as they voted for separate seats. (This continues today, although Māori can choose between the general roll or the Māori one.) Women were included for the first time in 1896, and the voting age was 21 until 1969, when it was lowered to 20, and then to 18 in 1974. There are also searchable copies of the women’s suffrage petitions in 1893, which about a quarter of the female population of New Zealand signed. WWII soldiers overseas were allowed to vote despite the age restrictions, I don’t know if they were included on the rolls. The first Australian censuses were known as musters and were usually focused on convicts. Australia hasn’t retained any household info from censuses since 1900. Some information survives from 1841 and 1891. Australian electoral rolls are on ancestry library edition or if you’re a local you might be able to see them via the National library. City of Sydney Archives: If you had an early ancestor who was a Sydneysider, you’re in luck! The city of Sydney has an excellent archive containing all sorts of information. Use Sand’s Postal directory to find people’s addresses from 1858 onwards. The search isn’t as good as it claims to be, so try looking manually as well, names are often misspelt or inconsistent, so try looking in a few different years to get a feel for what’s correct and what’s not. The map section is very useful for early 19th century stuff, if you’ve found a street address check the insurance plans by Rygate and Fletchers (1888) or Charles Dove (1880) to see what the town was like in that area. The 1855 trigonometrical survey is also very detailed. The Rates assessment books are useful because they record the occupier, not the owner. They also show the rent that was assessed and some structure information. Check the city correspondence to see if G-g-g-grandpa signed a petition to finally get connected to those newfangled sewers or do something about those rats, and check the photo archive, they contain a lot of pre-demolition photos. Never have I been so glad that my ancestors lived in a slum!  Convict records:Early Australian settlers appear in different sources depending on how they arrived. There has been a lot of recent research done on convicts. Claim a Convict is perhaps the most complete list of convicts and includes the boat they arrived on, providing a base for further research. Most convicts would get a ticket of leave once their sentence was over and this would be gazetted. Early free settlers might appear on a passenger list. The search term 'Convict or free settler' pulls up a few useful sites. Guards usually moved on when their regiment redeployed, but some stayed. Many of those who stayed became mounted policemen (Troopers) and in the early days they remained on the payroll, transferring to the next regiment to arrive. Mounted police often appear in admin notices in the Gazette. This site is amazing in both presentation and information for guard troops. Early marriage certificates state whether the newlyweds are free or not. Land Records: Land records are pretty complex (As Powaquatse is finding out!) and aren’t particularly Genealogist friendly as they focus on describing the land and only include basic info about the people involved. There are two separate systems that record different types of information, certificate of title (CT) info and survey records. You will need to familiarize yourself with the state laws as the terms and indexing systems vary by period and location. These types of records always refer to owners, not renters, but certain types of leases may be recorded.
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Feb 16, 2017 11:44
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Nice effort post Jaguars! 
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Feb 16, 2017 20:31
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Cheers! I had to cut a page or more on the land records, they're just completely idiosyncratic.
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Feb 16, 2017 20:58
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Yeah I bet. The ones I'm looking at change a lot over the years, too.
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Feb 17, 2017 09:41
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Speaking of, I just finished organizing the 25k images of accountings & land records 1582–1661 into ~700 folders + mostly marked up which ones actually refer to my hometown. Earliest reference so far is in a list of fines levied for 1582–83: Jens Jutlander was fined 6 marks for "beating Jens Jensen and Little Jep bloody"
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Feb 18, 2017 18:36
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Yes! There was a head tax levied in 1645, and the accountings contain a contemporary transcript of the original "census" which includes the given names of wives! Otherwise, it's 99.99% men in these things, this is super useful.
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Mar 2, 2017 10:01
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Got Swedish ancestry? This weekend ArkivDigital is offering free access to their website!quote:Regardless if you are experienced or are just about to begin to search for your relatives ArkivDigital has all the material you need: church books, estate inventories, military records, tax records and more. (If anyone who reads Swedish wants to help me out digging into other records as I search for the father of my illegitimate 2nd great-grandfather let me know)
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Mar 16, 2017 15:00
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