When you can’t find the birth, death or marriage in the indexes

 

This post was first published here in March 2008. I think it bears repeating, with some minor updates.

© Phil Date | Dreamstime Stock Photos

The New South Wales Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages has a marvellous online index for searching for these events at http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/Index/IndexingOrder.cgi/search?event=births. It allows searching by surname, given name, year or range of years, and/or district. For births and deaths it also allows searching by parents’ names, and for marriages by spouses’ name. It allows many fields to be left blank. It contains records from before civil registration began in 1856 because the Registry has transcribed the majority of parish registers to include pre-1856 events as well as post-1856 events that were recorded in parish registers but were not reported to the Registrar.

Many Australian States have their own online indexes, and most of these records are available on Ancestry, with much broader search capabilities.

Sometimes, though, no matter how long you search, you simply cannot find the entry you are looking for. Nick Vine Hall’s Tracing Your Family History in Australia – A National Guide to Sources gives an excellent list of possible reasons for not finding your ancestor in the parish registers that I think bears repeating here, as it applies more generally to all index searches.

  1. The index entry is spelled differently than you expect. Phonetic variations were quite common, such as HAWKINS/ORKINS or ANDERSON/HENDERSON, and your ancestor may not have been able to read well enough to detect a spelling mistake.
  2. The index entry was transcribed incorrectly, or the index is not in strict alphabetic sequence. Many handwritten indexes are by the first letter of surnames only.
  3. Handwriting is misinterpreted through inexperience or illegible handwriting.
  4. The index entry was overlooked by the indexer. Marriages may have been indexed under one party’s surname only.
  5. The event took place in a different parish, colony, state or country than the one you are searching.
  6. The event never took place. Not all children were baptised, not all burials were conducted by clergy, and not all parents were married.
  7. The event took place in a different time period than the one you are searching. People lied about their ages at marriage, so you may be looking too late.
  8. The clergyman forgot to write up the event in the register when he returned from his journey around the parish on horseback. Notes were lost or distorted.
  9. The event was never registered. Early Catholic and Methodist burials were not recorded, and in remote districts the mourners could not wait until the parson happened to pass by.
  10. The event was recorded in the church register but was not sent to the government.
  11. The event was unrecorded. Sometimes the deceased could not be identified.
  12. The event was recorded at the time, but the record was lost through fire, flood or insect attack. There are a few cases of deliberate destruction of parish registers, such as pages being torn out, possibly to obliterate evidence of convict ancestry.
  13. The child was born out of wedlock, in which case the baptism will be recorded, and indexed, under the mother’s name.
  14. The child may have subsequently been adopted, and so the birth name will be different.
  15. The person may have changed their name after birth or baptism.
  16. The family was not religious and didn’t attend church.
  17. The family held a different religion to the one you thought they did.
  18. The names are recorded differently than you expect. The father might answer to Harry but his real name, as given to the registrar, was Thomas Harold. If you search using “Harry” you will get no result.

If you have followed up, as best you can, all of these possibilities and still can’t find the event in any of the likely indexes then it is time to consider other sources, such as newspapers and family bibles.

Source: Nick Vine Hall, Tracing Your Family History in Australia – A National Guide to Sources, 3rd Edition. Mount Eliza, Victoria: Nick Vine Hall, 2002.

Photo: © Phil Date | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Not just Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become the go-to source for an initial overview of any topic, from American history to episodes of Doctor Who. Historical figures are usually well-represented, and I can look up King Henry VIII or Captain James Cook and get a fairly good idea of his life.

But what if the person you are searching for isn’t there? Wikipedia has aternatives.

Here I am searching for David Whippy, one of my ancestors who settled in Fiji in 1825.

David Whippy Search results

The first result is probably relevant. When I go to the article, however, the link in the article to David Whippy gives me this:

David Whippy on Wikipedia

I am tempted now to write an article for David Whippy myself, and one day I will. In the meantime, Wikipedia offers alternatives in its ‘sister projects’:

David Whippy sister projects

Wikibooks is a collaborative, open-source project to build textbooks, including children’s books and cookbooks. There are currently 2,686 books on computing, languages, history, and much more. Nothing on Fiji, but there is one called A Concise New Zealand History. The book on Australian history is not yet finished.

Wikiquotes is a free compendium of quotes, with sources and links back to Wikipedia for more information. There are quotes from famous people, literary works, films and TV shows, proverbs and much more.

Wikisource is ‘a free library that anyone can improve’, with a current total of 287,335 texts in English. It has everything from out-of-copyright fiction to United States Senate Committee testimony. The portal page for the history of Australia lists many sources for the colonisation and exploration of the country.

Wikiversity aims to ‘set learning free’, creating educational resources for teachers, students and researchers. The current total is 20,467 resources. The page for Australia is part of the Comparative law and justice project and is a good introduction to the court system in the country.

Wikimedia Commons is an exceptional source of images and videos, to which anyone can contribute. There are currently over 17 million files from archives, libraries, and people like us. The copyright restrictions are specified for each file.

There are many other projects:

Wiki projects

The only one of these projects to have a result for David Whippy was Wikisource, which has a book called Forty Years in the Pacific by Frank Coffee, published in 1920. The chapter on Fiji mentions David Whippy as one of the claimants made by the American settlers on Cakobau, the self-proclaimed King of Fiji. It is a book I hadn’t come across before, but as David Whippy died in 1871 Coffee can not be expected to have known Whippy personally.

I did search for pictures of Levuka in Wikimedia Commons and found a couple of beauties from Dumont D’Urville’s 1842 expedition:

Levuka

The copyright explanation for different countries is helpful for knowing whether you can republish it in your country.

Wikipedia projects won’t replace Google as a source of information, but it’s worth checking to see what they have for those elusive Fijian ancestors.

Tuncurry Afforestation Camp

I’ve been researching the great-uncle of a client. We started off with a notice in the NSW Police Gazette that he had been arrested for stealing money from the Government Savings Bank. A Sydney Morning Herald report of the trial at the Sydney Quarter Sessions showed that he had worked for the bank for 17 years and was sentenced to two years hard labour in Goulburn Gaol ‘to be made an example of’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Aug 1925, p.12).

For more information I needed a trip out to State Records NSW at Kingswood.

The Goulburn Gaol Entrance Book [7/13506] is an enormous volume requiring three pillows to support it. The Entrance Book gives:

  • Entrance date
  • Entrance number
  • Name
  • Gaol Number
  • When, where and by whom committed
  • Offence
  • Sentence
  • Where born (with date of birth in this case)
  • Ship and Year if born out of the colonies (it’s an old book)
  • Religion
  • Trade
  • Age
  • Height in feet and inches
  • Colour of hair and eyes
  • Education
  • Remarks, which appeared to indicate whether this was a first imprisonment
  • How and when disposed.

Our former bank employee was admitted to the prison on 10 September, along with some other prisoners. He’d been a bank manager, aged 36, with brown hair and blue eyes. He was disposed ‘To Tuncurry’ on 4 November 1925.

Tuncurry? I hadn’t realised there was a gaol at Tuncurry.

It turns out that Tuncurry hosted the first ‘Afforestation Camp’ in New South Wales. Tuncurry Afforestation Camp was a 6,000 acre property where prisoners were provided with ‘a modified form of prison life and the opportunity to acquire skills which could be used on release’. It makes sense – he was never going to be a bank manager again.

There are a number of volumes generated by the camp in its history from 1913 to 1938. The Entrance book shows some of the same information as the Goulburn book, without the physical description or birth date, and the final column shows that he was disposed ‘On license’ on Christmas Eve 1926. I imagine this was an early release for good behaviour, since his two years wasn’t up yet.

Entrance book [Tuncurry Afforestation Camp] 1913-1937, [5/1617]
Entrance book [Tuncurry Afforestation Camp] 1913-1937, [5/1617]

I had high hopes for the Visitors Book [5/1620] but I guess Tuncurry is a long way for family members to travel. Visitors weren’t as common as they are now. Few of the pages were actually used and the visitors were usually chaplains and surgeons, although there was a visit from the Governor of New South Wales and his entourage during my bank manager’s inprisonment. What a day that must have been!

[5/1620]
Visitors book [Tuncurry Afforestation Camp] 1913-1938 [5/1620]

I would love to know how this ex-bank manager got on after his year of planting trees. I do, however, know what happened to the prison camp:

Sydney Morning Herald Tue 29 March 1938, p.8
Sydney Morning Herald Tue 29 March 1938, p.8

 

University libraries for family historians

University of Sydney clocktowerUniversity libraries can be enormously helpful for your family history research, especially if you have one nearby. They have a lot of books and microfilms on the open shelves that are not available in most other libraries, or must be ordered and retrieved at the state libraries.

You don’t need to be a student or staff-member  to enter the library. The hours are usually extended into the evenings except during university holiday periods, although it might be better to avoid exams. You can stay all day and make cheap photocopies of what you find.

I attended the University of Sydney, which is in the inner city and a short walk or busride from Central Station. Fisher Library is the main library of the university, and there are smaller specialist libraries around the campus. As a graduate of the university I can pay $80 for a yearly membership that allows me to borrow books. Members of the public can also join in this way as well, although at a higher cost. See http://sydney.edu.au/library/borrowing/cards.html for more information. Other universities may have these provisions.

When you search for books, magazines, journals, or whatever on Trove, the National Library of Australia’s master catalogue (it’s not just for digitised newspapers!), you can also find out which library has what you are looking for. Here is part of the listing for the Historical Records of Australia:

HRA on Trove

The full series of the Historical Records of Australia is in 33 libraries in NSW alone, and most of them are university libraries, which are far more numerous than the state libraries. There may be one closer to where you live than you think.

Consider university libraries too when you visit other cities to research there. A couple of years ago I visited Auckland for a conference and stayed an extra week to do some research on my great-grandmother’s family. I found that Margaret Lowe nee Craig signed a petition in 1893 to give women the vote. Two or three of her sisters-in-law signed it as well, and appear on the same page. New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and seeing my ancestor’s name on the petition gave me a real sense of pride – a real ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ moment!

I then spent a morning at the library of the University of Auckland, down the road from my apartment in the centre of Auckland, and found historical information and contemporary sources on the women’s suffrage movement. Reading about the history of the suffrage movement in the university library gave me the context in which this event occurred.

Outlines of the Women's Franchise Movement in New Zealand, by W. Sidney Smith, 1905.
Outlines of the Women’s Franchise Movement in New Zealand, by W. Sidney Smith, 1905.

Consider, too, whether your nearest university library may have microfilms published by the archives authority of your state. The University of Sydney library catalogue lists 80 titles published by the Archives Authority of New South Wales, all microfilms and books that your local library may not have.

The Australian Joint Copying Project was a project to make available to Australians and New Zealanders the the historical sources of Great Britain. Any microlim you see with a PRO prefix has come from this project, and includes Surgeon-Superintendents’ journals, Home Office records about convicts and Colonial Office records about immigrants. The whole set of over 10,000 films is available at the State Library of NSW and the National Library of Australia, but some universities outside Sydney and Canberra have some of the films most relevant to the courses they teach. The University of New England in Armidale, for example, has 18 series of films, of which this list is about half:

UNE Library Catalogue entry for 'Australian Joint Copying Project' microfilms
UNE Library Catalogue entry for ‘Australian Joint Copying Project’ microfilms

So don’t discount university libraries just because you’re not a student there. They may have just what you’re looking for!

Government Gazettes and Police Gazettes

Government Gazettes and Police Gazettes are an enormously rich source of information for family historians. They can be useful for filling in some of the detail about the lives of our ancestors, and in many cases can solve mysteries.

NSW Government Gazettes

Government gazettes contained all the administrative detail that affected the lives of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives – such as laws and regulations, licenses, land auctions and sales, unclaimed mail, and much, much more. Records of convict assignments and absconding may appear nowhere else but here. Sailors who deserted their ships are listed, as are government employees. Court notices of probate and bankruptcies, livestock brands, and petitions.

Your ancestor should be in a government gazette if he or she:

  • leased, purchased, forfeited land
  • worked for the government
  • tendered for public works
  • died
  • went bankrupt or insolvent
  • had unclaimed mail
  • was a convict
  • was assigned a convict
  • had a livestock brand
  • had a license to run a pub, sell liquor, cut timber
  • signed a petition

Notices of this type were published in the local colonial newspaper until a regular government publication was established:

  • New South Wales – 1832
  • Tasmania – 1825
  • Victoria – 1843 (Port Phillip)
  • Queensland – 1859
  • South Australia – 1839
  • Western Australia – 1836
  • Northern Territory – 1927
  • Commonwealth – 1901

All are still published today, although mostly online rather than printed, and with much less of interest to family historians.

Police gazettes are where the juicy stuff was going on. They were published weekly and distributed to police stations for the information of the local constabulary in order to help them with their work – describing offenders, listing licensees, and so on. Later gazettes in the early-to-mid twentieth century contain lists of known offenders with photographs, for the information of police who may come across them.

In many States publication ceased in the 1980s, as methods of electronic distribution of information became available. Some States publish them to this day, but access is still restricted.

The contents of police gazettes vary slightly by state, but they contain most of the following:

  • Warrants for arrest and details of crimes
  • Arrests, convictions, discharged prisoners
  • Property stolen and recovered
  • Stolen cattle and horses, including brands
  • Escaped prisoners, ship’s deserters
  • Missing friends
  • Deaths reported to police
  • Police appointments, instructions, lists
  • Magistrates, Justices of the Peace
  • Licensed sellers of liquor, wine and tobacco
Police Gazettes were published in the following years:
  • New South Wales – 1862-1982
  • Tasmania – 1861-1933
  • Victoria – 1853-1994
  • Queensland – 1864-1982
  • South Australia – 1862-present
  • Western Australia – 1876-present (restricted)
  • Northern Territory – 1900-present (restricted)
  • Commonwealth – 1 January 1901-present?

It is important to look for your ancestor in other colonies/states, as people travelled over the borders as easily as we do today, particularly if they didn’t want to be found.

Photo of NSW Government Gazettes from the 1850s taken by the author at the Society of Australian Genealogists headquarters in Kent Street, Sydney.

Why a blog is more attractive than a website

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you are better off publishing parts of your tree as separate articles in a blog than as a full family tree website as produced by most family tree programs. My reasoning will be demonstrated by searching for a name and a place that I am interested in for my own family history:

Google search

The very first result in this list is a blog post: 

Riley blog post

Compare that page with this one: 

Riley family tree website

Which one looks more interesting? Which one would look more interesting to someone who wasn’t all that interested in genealogy?

If I’d put a picture or two in the blog post it would be even more interesting.

So that’s two good reasons:

  1. A blog post about a specific person or family line will be higher in a Google search
  2. A blog post will be more likely to hold the attention of a casual reader

A third reason is this: I have my full family tree as a separate website as produced by Second Site, a program to turn my The Master Genealogist project into a website. Most of the enquiries I get from it are for people on the edges of my tree, people who have married cousins of my ancestors. I have no more information about these people than what is on the tree, but the researchers who find them get excited when they find the name and email me for more. Really it’s a waste of  my time and theirs.

Anyone who finds the names in my blog posts is really looking for my family, and we are usually related. Over the years I would say that as many real relatives have found me through my blog posts as through my tree, although of course I can’t count the people who find my tree, grab the information, and leave without contacting me.

Blogs make it easier for them to contact me, as there’s a form for comments at the bottom of the page.

So there it is. Write stories about your ancestors in a blog. Don’t just put your tree up and wait for people to find you.

Note: in case you’re wondering about the Google logo in the first image – it was the 46th anniversary of the first Star Trek episode, and Google was celebrating. And why wouldn’t it?

Restoring old photographs

Old family photos are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for family historians, but often when you find them they have been damaged over the years. I have been practising my photo-editing skills to overcome this problem.

I have used Paintshop Pro for years. I know it’s not the industry standard; when I was deciding between it and the similarly priced Photoshop Elements (the cut-price version of Adobe Photoshop, which is very expensive) I decided that Photoshop Elements was going to take too long to learn and I just didn’t have time.

That was years ago, and Photoshop Elements has come a long way. I have continued to upgrade Paintshop Pro until this last one, and I still like it for some things like lightening up the photos I’ve taken of archival documents. Last year I was persuaded to buy Photoshop Elements for fixing scratches in photos because it does it so well and so easily. They have really tried to make Elements easier for novices to use since my first trial all those years ago.

This is one I worked on the other night for a client using Photoshop Elements. The brickwork was particularly tricky!

Unedited photo

 

Here is the photo after I had a go at it:

Edited photo

I spent about an hour on this on my laptop while watching TV. When I got to the bottom left corner I just decided that there was too much woodwork anyway and cropped the bottom off. There’s still more I could do. I was a bit nervous about his eye but I think it works.

Photoshop Elements and Paintshop Pro are about $100, depending on where you live; less for an upgrade. Paintshop Pro has most of the same tools as Photoshop Elements but Elements has a very cool brush  that lets you paint along a scratch and it takes the image on either side and fills it in for you. It’s like magic!

Online software

Today I attended a Dear Myrtle webinar on free online photo editing software, and was introduced to PicMonkey. It is fully-featured photo editing software that runs online. You can start editing without even signing up, upload (or drag) the photo you want to edit, and the resulting photo is stored on your computer, not on the website. And it’s free! I was very impressed.

Have a look at PicMonkey. Save a copy of your photo, upload the copy, and see what you can do. You can always undo what you’ve done, or rub it out with the eraser, so don’t be afraid to experiment. And you have your original stored safely because you made a copy to edit. Always make a copy before editing.

I highly recommend Myrtle’s webinar for a demonstration of how easy it is if you’ve never played with photo editing before. She recorded it so it should become available soon.

Social Media for Family Historians, 2nd edition

Social Media for Family Historians 2nd editionThe second edition of my book, Social Media for Family Historians, is now out. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media sites that can help family historians to communicate, share and collaborate with other family historians and with their own families.

It has been expanded and updated, with some sites removed that I no longer consider useful, and new ones added, such as Google+. The section on getting started with Facebook in particular has been greatly expanded, demonstrating the new privacy settings and layout.

You may discover new ways to communicate using Sykpe and SecondLife; social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+; blogs and microblogs such as Twitter; sites for sharing family trees such as Ancestry and MyHeritage; sites for sharing photos and videos such as Flickr and YouTube; and community information sites such as wikis and social bookmarking.

Contents:

Preface
1. Introduction
– About this book
– My experience
– A warning
2. What is social media?
– The internet
– Self-publishing
– Social media
– Mobile computing
3. Why use social media?
– Advantages
– Disadvantages
4. Communication
– Chat
– Social networking
– Blogs
– Microblogs
– Virtual worlds
5. Sharing
– Family trees
– Photographs
– Videos
– Social cataloguing
6. Collaboration
– Wikis
– Documents
– Questions and answers
7. Dangers
– Risks
– Some simple rules
8. What are you waiting for?
Appendix 1. How to get started with Facebook
– Sign up for Facebook
– Using Facebook
Appendix 2. How to get started with Blogging
– Find a host
– Create an account
– Name your blog
– Set security
– Create your profile
– Select a design
– Start writing!
– More advanced blogging
Glossary
Index

You can buy it from Gould Genealogy, and I hope you do!

Land Research for Family Historians in Australia and New Zealand

Land Research for Family Historians in Australia and New Zealand

My new book Land Research for Family Historians in Australia and New Zealand is out now at Gould Genealogy and History.

In the book I have tried to display the main types of land records available and give a summary of where they can be found in each Australian state and territory, and in New Zealand.

Here’s the blur from the back cover:

Land research can tell us so much about how our ancestors lived and worked. It can help us find out the truth about stories we’ve heard, and can give us a much richer picture of our ancestors’ social and economic position. It they owned a house, business premises or rural property there are records to be found, many of which contain a wealth of information.

We can also break down brick walls using land records that we have been otherwise unable to solve. Buying or selling property may have been the only time our ancestors dealt with government in colonial times, and land records can contain evidence such as birthdates and names of family members; information that is recorded nowhere else.

This book will introduce you to the main types of records you can find, such as deeds and grants, Torrens titles, Crown leases, selections and conditional purchases, closer and solder settlements, title applications, maps, and plans. We will look at what they mean and where to find them in New Zealand and each Australian state and territory.

Whether you are researching the history of your house or tracing the history of an ancestor through the property they owned, this book is for you.

Contents:
Abbreviations
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Why land research?
3. Challenges
4. Where to start
5. Where to find land records
6. How to find land records
7. Old System grants and deeds
8. Crown leases and licenses
9. Torrens Title
10. Title Applications
11. Government purchase schemes
12. Maps ad plans
13. Local land records
14. Putting it all together
Addresses
Further reading
Glossary
Index

 

Ordering films in the new FamilySearch

FamilySearch, or what we used to know as the Family History Library, has an enormous number of resources for family historians in their library in Salt Lake City. They have travelled the world collecting original material by microfilming it, and these microfilms can be ‘borrowed’. If you have a FamilSearch Center nearby, or a society library designated for lending films, you can borrow the films and research them without having to travel to Salt Lake City. In most cases the microfilms were also donated back to the archive or repository, protecting the original records from wear and tear.

Go to FamilySearch and click on the word Catalog under the main heading.

The new catalog search looks like this:

FamilySearch catalog

When I’ve typed in ‘Fiji’ I get a long list of possible places. I think it’s best to just use ‘Fiji’ to start with, without getting too specific.

FamilySearch results for Fiji

Birth, marriage and death records are held under Civil registration. If you click on any of these entries you will see what records they hold. For example, if I click on Land and property – indexes I can see:

Fiji land and property indexes

If I click on the last of these I can see the individual film entries. The film numbers are what I need to order the film:

Fiji land records card index

To order a film, you can click on the film number, which takes you to another page: https://familysearch.org/films/. You need to be signed in to do this; signing up is easy and free. You can order a film on short-term loan for 90 days or long-term loan for extended periods.

Just enter the film number:Film ordering

My most convenient library is the Society of Australian Genealogists and the website remembers that setting for me. You can change it at any time.

You can then go on to find more films, or checkout and pay by credit card or PayPal.

Once you’ve placed your order and paid for it you can track the status of your order at any time. You’ll get an email when the film has been received by your library, and you can go there and look at the film. Some libraries charge an extra fee for handling the film on top of what FamilySearch charges.

Bear in mind that the 90 days starts on the day the film is sent, not the day it arrives in your library. So get in and look at it as soon as you can.