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I've been tracing things back from my paternal grandad, both he and his parents died in their fifties so family history on that side isn't very good. His mother is turning out kinda funny. She has a very distinctive name, but it has four variations in spelling, so everything has to be searched extra times. Her birth certificate is from 1881, but I've also seen D.O.B.s of '85 and '83. Her true age would be the same as the guy she married, so maybe she didn't want to appear older than him? Perhaps they just didn't really track it. Today I got my Grandfathers military record and the on the enlistment paperwork he stated that she was from Ireland! (Actual birthplace: Surry Hills, Sydney) She was already dead for 10 years by then, so who knows how that misinformation came about. Anyway, I'm compiling it all and giving it to my dad for christmas.
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Nov 12, 2016 02:17
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I'd love to do more, but it's getting pretty expensive. I got the 4 most important certificates and bam, that's $80 down the drain. Ancestry has electoral rolls behind another paywall (Just descovered that I might be able to access them via the library) and I tried the shipping records to get when they came over to NZ, but I can't really ID them properly if I don't know the destination port.
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Nov 12, 2016 04:58
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I had a quick look at rootschat today, looks like a potentially very useful site, so thanks for that recommendation! Got lucky earlier in the week. A g-g-grandfather was a member of a the foresters friendly society, a sort of insurance co-op which probably also had a heavy social element. Probably because of this, he got a 500 word obituary instead of a typical death notice in the paper. So suddenly I'm able to narrow down searches in virtually every respect and flesh out a whole branch of the family tree. For example here's the ship they came out in, the Woodlark.(courtesy artuk.org) There were two couples, the guy I mentioned and (almost certainly) his brother + their wives and one child:  The arrival of the ship caused a stir because it arrived under the flag of quarantine, scarlet fever had broken out on board and there were 18 deaths over the 4 month journey. The child I mentioned died the day before landfall, virtually all the fatalities seem to be children.  I think this was when the emmigration bandwagon was well underway and they would pretty much pack ships to bursting with immigrants, in this case the departure was very hurried and a family that was recovering from the disease was allowed on board.I've learned a lot about searching in NZ and NSW, so hopefully I'll be able to do a bit of a post on the resources available before the end of the year. There's still a few more things I want to try before I call it a day.
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Nov 16, 2016 23:36
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I'm still gonna do that post about the antipodes, I'm just still finding more things to search! Tomorrow I'm going to try and find the birthplace of a couple of people in Ireland and then I'm going to concentrate on presenting what I've found. Great-great-great grandad shot a bushranger! I thought he must have been a convict, but he was a soldier who became one of the first mounted policemen in New South Wales. His son's slum house got torn down and replaced by police station that is a true monster of the brutalist art. I wonder what he would have thought of that. Good work on the land records. I've ben using a bunch in Sydney to plot where all these people live.
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Dec 10, 2016 13:25
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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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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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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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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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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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  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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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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Genealogy chat in the historical facts thread reminded me of this snippet. This is one of my ancestors icing someone: A thrilling story, but John Coffee was probably not a nice man at all. The Hunter river valley was the scene of warfare between the settlers and aboriginals where a lot of nasty stuff happened, and would be optimistic to believe a mounted policeman would not have been involved. He'd probably been in battles in the war of 1812 and a roll from about the time of discharge notes he was an alcoholic, so I think it's likely that he seen some poo poo. But good or bad, he settled in Sydney and eventually one of his grandchildren made it across the Tasman, so he's an important part of my family history.
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May 4, 2017 22:09
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hahahahaha that must have so many spurious links. My Granddad died recently so my Grandmother showed me one of those circular flower style family trees. Someone else also did an ancestor list that goes back 11 generations as well. That side of the family appears to have been upper middle class since it emerged around 1700.
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May 30, 2017 22:15
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I was clearing a bunch of papers left over from last year's project and finished off some stuff I meant to make:: (Open in a new window and delete the H near the end of the URLs for full size)  Rygate & Fletcher's survey, 1888.  Modern Sydney with all the places. The red lines are former roads that were destroyed during a slum clearance in the 1920s. Shows how great the City of Sydney Archives is, they have fantastic map coverage of the old city. Rygate & Fletcher's survey assessed buildings on the south central side of the city for insurance purposes, following on from other surveys in previous decades. The addresses were mostly found from Sand's Postal directory, also from the archives.
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Jul 18, 2017 00:26
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Search for 'old trades' to find lists of potential matches. 'Polentier'(Poulterer)i.e. A chicken dealer, is the closest I've found. Rootshat.com also has a subforum devoted to handwriting that might come up with something different.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:40
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Are electoral rolls available in your country? They don't have as much information as censuses, but they generally contain a contact address and can provide a means of tracking someone's movements through the years.
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Sep 7, 2017 22:11
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Apparently a lot of Irish families followed this convention: http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cregan/patterns.htm It certainly makes for a lot of repetitive firstnames.
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Dec 2, 2017 01:15
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Oracle posted:I think some people might find this bit quite interesting: drat, missed this by a day.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:14
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Cards (in England anyway) were taxed from the 1700s to the 1960s. For a long time the first card in the pack was stamped, usually the Ace of spades, which is why they are more ornate than the rest of the pack.
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Apr 9, 2018 13:07
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Schott's Gaming and Idling miscellany p. 62 contains way more than you'd ever want to know on card tax. The english one started with that type of stamp but in 1765 the stamp office began printing an official ace of spades instead, which was known as 'old frizzle'. Just thought you'd like to know.
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Apr 9, 2018 13:57
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Oracle posted:Every drat time I have plans I swear. WHY DOES ENGLAND HATE ME
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Nov 11, 2018 10:35
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Great-great uncle Gibson Roper, which would be a fantastic name even if I didn't have the maturity of a 12 year old
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Jun 21, 2019 08:56
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Perhaps your ancestor had a leasehold or sub let and someone else owned the freehold? Or perhaps the property had been subdivided with a very subtly different or identical appellations? This is the trouble with land records, they evolve differently everywhere, they're old enough to not be very standard and people invent dodges and workarounds all the time to avoid paying taxes etc.
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Jul 24, 2019 11:07
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Have you found the cadastral map from the area and time? I found ones dating from 1817 (which should have later annotations until the next edition was drawn since they were live documents that were updated) They're at http://kort.plandata.dk/spatialmap?, click the GST button in the top toolbar and you should be able to click anywhere on the main map to see the relevant maps. https://eng.gst.dk/danish-cadastre-office/cadastral-archives/
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Jul 25, 2019 01:26
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I'd agree, and the shape of the eyes matches better too.
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Sep 8, 2019 07:43
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I would probably look a lot like that guy if I was 20 in the late 19th century.
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Sep 8, 2019 10:25
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I just found an old obituary for the guy who started my company. Talk about bad luck. In WWI was at Gallipoli until he contracted Typhoid. In WWII he was a civilian who escaped from Malaya on foot but was captured at Singapore and sent to work on the Siam railway. (In between the wars he caught malaria)
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Jan 23, 2020 01:45
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There's a bunch of genealogical type investigation going on here at the moment, some of you may be able to shed more light on it, or at least have a bit of a laugh at the quality 1940s horniness: Found an old letter from world war II
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Jun 2, 2020 06:08
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Why would someone be entered into a baptism register twice, a day apart, with the same baby name and parents, but different sponsors? I'm inclined to think it's a mistake that wasn't crossed out but are there any reasons not to conclude that it's a duplicate entry?
Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 05:02
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Thanks! They're Irish, but these are among the earliest records available so their parent's marriages may or may not be recorded, hopefully I'll find out soon. Here's the entries: Entry 1: 27th John Coffee son of John Coffee, Sponsor Catherine Coffee Entry 2: 28th John Coffee son of John Coffee & Catherine Nolan (Something common to other entries) of Listellicky, Sponsors Andrew Coffee, Ellen Kelly This is less important, but I'm interested in what the last word here is and if the phrase is a standard one for Illegitimate children? 
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Sep 11, 2020 06:15
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Cheers. I figured it was something to do with the mother but I haven't anything to do with latin or churches at all. Yeah the whole double thing is a little bit unfathomable, it seems extremely unlikely that two Johns Coffee son of Johns Coffee turn up within a day of each other when the whole of County Kerry 1790-1799 only turns up six results [and only four that I'm sure aren't duplicate]. Carthag Tuek posted:Perhaps the first John without a named mother is illegitimate, with John the elder's wife as the sponsor, and the second John is legitimate? I can't really think of anything else
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Sep 11, 2020 08:12
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lol yeah, I keep telling myself it could be worse, there's a lot of Johns and Marys but I've been able to pick out a few family groups and I found a (low quality) record on ancestry that might eliminate one of the four candidates of interest if I can validate what it showed. The low population i think is working in my favour. On the other hand, my guy of interest left Ireland earlier than most so the records I'm working off are like a little island of knowledge in a sea of black that's just emerged out of the mists of time. I'm conscious that he could well have just never have had his baptism recorded or the records were destroyed, meaning all the work I'm doing might show nothing except that he's the first of person of record. p.s. Thanks again for your replies last week. I was hoping to show some work and maybe get help drawing conclusions but the magic of spreadsheets works more slowly than I thought and it's going to take a while before I have anything worth effortposting about but I will get back at some point with whatever I end up with.
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Sep 15, 2020 06:37
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Genealogy name of the week: Honora Harrington
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Oct 25, 2020 01:10
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Brennanite posted:Pfft, I see your Honora and raise you a Scholastique ("Scholastie" on census records) and a Frozine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse#Protagonist If the teminator goes back to 1790s Ireland looking for John Connor, there's going to be a real bloodbath
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Oct 25, 2020 02:37
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The more data you get, the more connections you can make and test, which helps you out when you're deciding whether a contradiction is important or not. e.g if you have baptisms for a family of six kids that give an address in a nearby village, but one of the middle kids middle is addressed in town, the balance of probability is that they lived in the village the whole time and the recorder just didn't feel like writing out the name or couldn't remember where they lived writing after the fact or something. You can't prove conclusively that they didn't move into town and then back out, or that another couple with identical names didn't have the kid, but you might be able to conclude based on your previous researches that the area is too small for a new family unit to just appear out of nowhere for a single record, or the sponsors are from the little village, and so on. The Irish records I've been using recently are pretty unreliable, they even get the mother's names for legitimate children inconsistent sometimes, but having worked with it a fair bit now, I have some idea what sort of mistakes they make and therefore what possibilities might be open for whatever I'm pondering. You want to test them as much as possible and note when a conclusion is uncertain, tempting as it is to declare that something happened one way and work off that basis forevermore. e: For example, the visitor's center at Ronald Reagan's ancestral origin is located based on some pretty flimsy evidence Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 01:38
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Carthag Tuek posted:Sounds like you're doing what you can. Hey, from a while back, but what tool are you using for this? I'm at the point where I'm trying to do the same type of thing and should really be doing something like this instead of scrawling on reams of paper.
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Oct 30, 2020 09:33
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hmm. How hard would it be for someone who's only vaguely heard of LaTeX to figure out? I've been thinking a bit on automation and if I had made even the most primitive tool to get entries from search results to spreadsheet I probably would have saved weeks of work. If I could find a way to get my spreadsheet info into some form where I can have people in boxes and tie them into family units and flick them around to experiment like what you're doing above that would help a lot.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:27
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I did these by using a paint program with layers. Just add the text on a new layer, shift it where you want it and then draw the boxes and arrows on a third layer underneath the text but above the map. The old map is an insurance survey, most cities conducted them from the 19th century on and older ones are sometimes available in open achives, early cadastral (boundary) surveys are sometimes useful and available too. Jaguars! posted:I was clearing a bunch of papers left over from last year's project and finished off some stuff I meant to make::
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Nov 3, 2020 21:31
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My Easter project was to unravel the sequence of events that lead to my Great Grandfather, a bombardier in the Artillery, being court martialed while on convalescent leave in London right at the end of WWI. He was delivered to the custody of NZ forces HQ on the 9th Nov 1918 and court martialed on the 26th, so probably spent the Armistice either CB or in the cells. His offence seems to have been to accompany some drunken mates who started harrassing an officer in his dress blues travelling home on the tube. When a nearby captain ordered the troops arrest, one of them said "You're not going to let them turf us out for this bloody rubbish, are you?" G-grandfather said "No". The officers then ordered a nearby Aussie corporal to arrest them, who also refused in an abusive manner. Subsequently, one offender escaped, another was scratched from the proceedings for unknown reasons and G-Grandfather was tried and found not guilty of offering violence to an officer and conduct to the prejudice of good order. Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 11:33 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 11:29
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Alright, here's the rest of this chapter of the glorious martial history of the Jaguars! clan (The rest isn't much better). Bombardier Hobbs is my Great-grandfather, Gunner Waite has his name crossed of the documents and there's nothing on his personnel file so it's a bit ambiguous how much he was involved, in fact I would guess that the whole thing foundered on the lack of positive identification.quote:12.40AM 8-11-1918: 2Lt Paterson of 5/Grenadier Guards and about 10 NZ troops are on the subway platform at Earls Court. Paterson is wearing his dress blue uniform, which impresses the Kiwi soldiers. The smaller of two accused soldiers (Waite?) talks to Paterson. [Paterson]: "I saw they were trying to be a little familiar, so I moved away from them."
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Apr 10, 2021 02:22
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