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 accepts wildcards and 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.

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 indexes 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.

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

A post from Ancestry.com about how little Americans in general know about their family history has surprised me. In summary, the results are:

• Most 18- to 34–years-old Americans (83%) are interested in learning their family history. For older age groups the percentages were increasingly smaller.
• Half of Americans know the name of only one or none of their great-grandparents.
• One in five Americans don’t know what either of their grandfathers do or did for a living.
• One in five Americans don’t know where their family lived before they came to America.
• Four out of five Americans say they are interested in learning more about their family history, and yet half have never tried.

Source: Survey Reveals Americans’ Surprising Lack of Family Knowledge, 24-7 Family History Circle, Ancestry.com, 7 Dec 2007.

I wonder what the results of such a survey would be in Australia? I suspect they would be much the same. I think the biggest surprise for me is the number of young people interested in their family history. That four out of five under-35s are interested in knowing more about their ancestors came as a bit of a shock. After all, these are not the people you see in family history societies and libraries.

How can we share what we know about our family history with the younger members of our own families? How can we make it interesting for them?

I don’t think kids will be interested if we show them the things that we get excited about - certificates and mentions of our ancestors in newspapers and the like. They like stories. I tell my nieces stories about individuals - about their great-great-grandmother Margaret who went from Scotland to New Zealand with her family when she was four years old to settle in the new town of Auckland, and went on to marry a man who had kids already by a first marriage and died when he was only 46, leaving her with her own kids and his too. And I ask them to imagine what it must have been like for her, as a four-year-old, to travel on a sailing ship for months to the other side of the world and live in what must have looked like a wild west town - dirt streets and horses and all.

Kids need to be involved, and all of this age group are much more accepting of new technology. Not just accepting, but expecting! They expect the internet to work like we expect the phone to work. Put it to use!

• You could get them to create a family tree on Ancestry or FindMyPast or GenesReunited or one of the many other websites available for this purpose.
• You can show them what is available on the web and how it can help build up a picture of the ancestor in question.
• You can give them copies of photos of their ancestors and get them to upload them and link them to their family tree.
• They could then print out a chart of their ancestors, complete with photos. They might be inspired to hunt for missing ones!
• You could put them in touch with distant cousins and show them how they are related.

The possibilities are endless. Young adults could also be more involved by handling the web side, copying photos and hunting out more information.

And what about you? Do you know what your grandfathers did, or still do, for a living?

Do you know where your family (or families) lived before they came to Australia?

Do you know the names of your great-grandparents? Especially on the female side?

Do you know which of your younger relatives might be interested in the work you are doing in your own family history?

There is so much to learn, and so little time. The younger we start, the more time we will have, and the more we can build and what has been done before. It’s not just a hobby for the retired!

Who Do You Think You Are?

The big news for family history fans is the SBS premier of Who Do You Think You Are this Sunday, 2nd December. Starting with some selected episodes from the first three UK series they will then show the six episodes of the Australian series on Sunday 13th January 2008. The first three UK series have been shown on cable TV, (or perhaps just the 2nd and 3rd), and have been very enjoyable and inspiring.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have teams of researchers going ahead of you and digging up everything you need to find out about your ancestors! Genealogists and social historians local historians and all the rest. I would love it! Alas, most of us have to do it ourselves, and this show won’t help you to do that. I would say that Who Do You Think You Are is more inspirational than informative, and of course it is very entertaining watching people we feel we know find out the thrilling or disturbing secrets of their ancestry. It’s interesting to watch their attitudes change as their ancestors become real people.
The BBC has a comprehensive website that covers UK family history research in some detail at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/.  They are currently showing series four in the UK. Also check out the SBS website for the series at http://programs.sbs.com.au/whodoyouthinkyouare/.  The Australian series should be of great interest to us here in Australia, with Cathy Freeman, Kate Ceberano, Jack Thompson, Geoffrey Robertson and others.
National Burial Index of England and Wales now on FindMyPast

FindMyPast has released the National Burial Index of England and Wales (NBI). The National Burial Index is an ongoing project run by the Federation of Family History Societies and currently contains approximately 10 million records collected from individual family history societies of England and Wales. There have been two releases on CD and these are available at many libraries and family history societies, but the convenience of searching from home, as well as taking advantage of continuous updates, makes the FindMyPast option exciting news.

FindMyPast is a pay-per-view site run in association with The National Archives. Searching is free on findmypast.com, as is building an online family tree with our innovative Family Tree Explorer software. “To view the records you will need to purchase credits, either by buying pay-per-view units or one of three subscription options.”