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I don’t know if Clint Eastwood ever actually said this. When I saw it I thought “that’s right!”. There are no guarantees in genealogy. Or in life!

I am often asked “if I do ______ will it give me the information I need?” and the answer is always “I don’t know”. It might, or it might not. There are no guarantees in genealogy.

The toaster will come with a guarantee for a specified period. A subscription to Ancestry or FindMyPast or any other paid website will not. Nor will membership in a family history society. Nor a book you are tempted to buy. Nor a CD.

The record with the information you are looking for may be in there, or it may not. It may exist, or not. It may exist but not in the form/place/date you expect.

Even if it’s not there, that is information you can use as well. Think about the possible reasons that it would not be there.

The only guarantee I can give you is that if you don’t try anything new you won’t find anything new.

My Dad’s Story

My Dad has been staying with me lately, and he has decided to write a book about his life. I am very encouraging of this plan, as you can imagine, and I told him I would help him to organise the material for him. He has had an interesting life, in Fiji and Australia, and has mixed with a lot of interesting people in both countries. 

At first I think he thought that he had to sit down and write the whole thing from beginning to end, ready to be published. He got up one morning and said he had been thinking about how to start it. He wanted to start with the funeral of his late wife, my step-mother, which took place last November, and then go back to the beginning, a time-honoured structure which is none the worse for having been used before.

Write first, rearrange later

I suggested to him that he didn’t have to write it from beginning to end in one go, but should just write episodes as he thought of them. If he remembered something that happened when he was a boy he should write that bit down, and so on. I would then help him to put it all together afterwards; we could rearrange the bits into suitable chapters, and so on.

He seemed greatly relieved. Once the decision to write a book has been made many peopple think that the process is to sit down and write it all at once, from beginning to end. Perhaps fiction is written that way, but factual accounts need not be. A lot of editing and rearranging is usually done on the material before it is ready for publication. He went back to Fiji and no more was said.

Talking instead of writing

The other day he rang me and reminded me of our conversation in which he had said he would write a bit each day, every morning. I don’t remember him saying anything so detailed but I was pleased that he still wanted to go ahead and was committed to that extent.

His idea was that he would prefer to talk into a tape recorder. Every morning he could lie in bed and tape his memories, and then label and send me the tapes. I suggested that tape recorders might be rather thin on the ground these days, and he reminded me of his almost-total inability to deal with technology. I said I would look into something for him to record his stories, and send it to him.

Although this will mean more work for me I don’t mind. To have his voice recorded for posterity would be just as valuable as having his stories written down. I’m sure I can get help with the transcribing from other family members. Well, I hope I can.

Recording devices

So I need to find something that he can manage and that I can play back. He was imagining a little tape recorder like you see in old movies, with little cassette tapes.Even if I could find such a thing, I’d need two so I could play them back.

These days most options are digital, and there is no way that I can see him downloading files to his computer and emailing them to me. He only uses a computer to read the news on a couple of websites, and email is beyond him, despite some lessons from me and others. He just doesn’t want to learn, an attitude common to many, and the danger of files being deleted or overwritten is too great for me to seriously consider this option for him. 

So I am deliberating buying two or three MP3 players with recording capability. Whatever I choose will need to be foolproof and let him know when it is full. When he’s finished one he can send it to me, or bring it over next time he’s in the country, and I can give him another one to go on with. Perhaps I can use voice-recognition software to do the transcribing!

If anyone has any recommendations for MP3 players or other such devices I’d be grateful for your comments.

Christmas is a time for getting together with family and eating and drinking and sharing presents. Sometimes I dread the big family Christmas because family members don’t always get on, and perhaps you do too.

It can also be a good time to find out more about your family and getting them interested in the research you are doing. Don’t waste such an opportunity!

Look around

This year we will be gathering in Orange at my mother’s house for a few days. My mother grew up in Blayney, which is not far from Orange, and so we are planning a bit of a family history tour. The teenagers of the family will be able to see where their Gran lived and went to school, and may get their first experience at cemetery searching if they are lucky. The Millthorpe Museum is known to contain portraits of my g-g-grandparents William and Elizabeth Grace Goode, so I hope it’s open!

My cousin Peter has knowledge passed down from our uncles about where our g-g-grandfather Richard Eason’s first mud house was built. Richard arrived in the Colony of New South Wales as a 20-year-old in 1850 and settled in this area after first spending some time with an uncle in Maitalnd. I have found this first 40 acres of land on the NSW Lands Department parish maps and Google Maps and I’m hoping that it agrees with Peter’s information. We can then go on to find the land that he subsequently purchased and passed on to his sons.

Even if we can’t find the exact pieces of land it is important to get a feel for the place where your ancestors live. I live in Sydney and I grew up in Dubbo, so I am not familiar with Blayney, the place where my mother, and two generations before her, were born and grew up. Towns get bigger over time but the countryside doesn’t change much and some of the old buildings are still there.

Share stories

I am hoping to get my mother and her brother talking about their childhoods and what they remember of their grandparents and aunts and uncles. Do they have any stories that their parents or grandparents told them? My mother usually “can’t remember” when I ask her on her own, so I am hoping that with her older brother and sister-in-law there they may spur each other on. My sister and cousin also were told stories by our grandmother which I am hoping they will share with all of us. I may have to take a recorder, since I don’t take shorthand!

Sarah, Margaret and baby Amy, circa 1898, probably in Wagga or Albury, NSW

I will also tell them what I know from what I’ve discovered through the records. My direct g-g-grandmother through the female line, Margaret, arrived in Auckland, New Zealand as a four-year-old with her family, including a new step-mother, from Scotland. Auckland was just a village next to the water in 1842 and she grew up with the town. I have a photo taken of her with her daughter Sarah and Sarah’s first daughter Amy, my grandmother. For such a photo to have been possible either Margaret had to travel to Australia or Sarah had to have taken the baby back to New Zealand. What a life she must have had!

Show pictures

I have collected a lot of photos of some of my ancestors over the years. I will take my laptop with me, which contains all my research and the photos and documents that I have scanned over the years. The laptop can be plugged in to a reasonably recent TV to show photos that everyone can see at once. I will also take my scanner with me in case anyone has photos or documents that I don’t have.

I have also started searching for old photos of places where my ancestors lived. Do a search on Picture Australia, the website of the National Library of Australia devoted to images of Australia’s past, which includes photographs, objects, maps, and works of art. Typing “Blayney” into the search screen gives 140 results showing photos past and present from many different sources including the State Library of NSW, National Archives of Australia, Flickr, and others. I’ve found the cafe in Melbourne where my parents lived when I was a baby using this site, and I found it that it burned down. Try it out!

When you get together with your family this year try to make it a more meaningful experience for everyone by including your ancestors!

I’ve recently been contacted by the people responsible for a new family tree website called It’s Our Tree. It’s free and just requires you to enter your name and email address. I’ve just registered and now it wants me to enter my parents and grandparent and so on, and to invite my relatives to join as well.

There are more and more of these sites around; some are free and some are not. Ancestry lets you create your family tree for free and let’s you know whether it has any “hints” for these people: either trees with the same people in them or databases which may have them. You can’t see the hints, though, unless you have a subscription.

GenesReunited is a similar kind of thing. I don’t know if you can start from scratch without paying the yearly subscription, but if you have created a tree in it and then stop paying the subscription your tree remains for others to find. I have found a few relatives with my subscription and so I keep it up but I haven’t put much detail on my tree and so it keeps sending me hints that are completely irrelevant.

Another one is FamilyTreeLink from the World Vital Records people. This one is free, and allows a gedcom to be uploaded. I can see who else is researching people from the same places as my people, and I can add photos, stories, documents and headstones (presumably photos). It has some different features such as the ability to request lookups from people. I haven’t been into this one for a while and when I just tried to see a tree diagram with more than the default number of 4 generations it seemed to kill my web browser (which is Firefox V3). No, it just gave it a scare, it’s working again now.

What I like about Ancestry is the ability to link records that you find with the relevant person in your tree. If you find your great-grandfather in the 1930 Census you can link the page to him. You can also upload pictures and multimedia, share it with others and even give them the ability to add to it. In theory members of different branches of your family could all be working on the same tree, but in practice I think I would want to check things for myself before allowing it on my tree.

You can also create a book that can be printed, which is a great idea. A family can collaborate and print a number of books to distribute amongst family members, or you can do it by yourself.

What worries me about these things is that there are so many of them. You need to be on as many of them as possible to have a chance of catching other relatives. I don’t know about you, but after I’ve gone to the trouble of entering the details of all of my ancestors individually and adding photos and stories and the like I’m not likely to do the same in another site. If any of my living relatives have started using another site then we won’t find each other.

The social networking sites such as FaceBook have family tree applications as well. You can upload gedcoms to these instead of entering them from scratch, which makes them more appealing to me, at least.

Is there any sense in using a new one that has just started? I certainly won’t be unless I can upload a gedcom; there aren’t enough hours in the day to enter the data into the ones I use now without starting again with another one. If I can’t upload a gedcom directly it isn’t worth the time for me. I’m afraid that It’s Our Tree may be too late.

My experience this afternoon with FamilyTreeLink leads me to another issue. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to build a web application that will work perfectly with all web browsers and all computer configurations, and each new application has to do it themselves. A bad experience with one of these new ones can turn you off it for good. And then the browser will come out with a new version, as Mozilla has with Firefox 3, and suddenly things that used to work don’t any more.

The answer to this one, I guess, is to stick with a site that has been around for a while and has a large development team behind it. I’m not advocating Ancestry specifically but I have to confess that it’s the one I am spending more time entering data and linking records.

Which one do you use? Do you use any of them? Have you found any relatives?

This afternoon James Valentine on ABC Sydney Local Radio (702 AM) continued his phone-in collection of world record holders. Claimants this afternoon included a man who forgets that he’s wearing the wrong glasses up to three times per night and has to go back upstairs to retrieve them, and a high score on a game that I’ve already forgotten the name of.

Last week a lady rang in to say that her grandfather was born in 1833, thus claiming the record for the longest span between a living person and the birth of a grandparent. She won without any contest.

That record stood until this afternoon, when another lady, who turns 77 in December, claimed a grandfather born in 1803.

1803!!! It doesn’t seem possible, and yet there it is.

Her grandfather, born in 1803 somewhere in what is now Northern Ireland, fathered her father when he was 58 years old. This gives an approximate year of 1861.

Her father then fathered her when he was 73 years old, presumably in 1934. Work it out. Does it add up? No, it doesn’t exactly, because if she’s 77 she should have been born in 1931, not 1934, but it’s close enough.

So the record stands at 1803. Such a long span of history these three people have seen between them.

My four grandparents were born between 1897 and 1901 and had their children at a more usual age. My mother, who is still alive, has four grandparents who were born between 1867 and 1875, with the men older by just a few years than the women. So she wouldn’t have a hope of winning a medal in this event!

I guess it has to do with the age discrepancy between the parents because, let’s face it, 73-year-old women don’t have children, and very few 58-year-old women manage it. If men marry much younger women who then have children then this sort of range is possible. Pablo Picasso, born in 1881, famously fathered his youngest child, Paloma, when he was 67 or 68. (Source: Wikipedia).

What’s your record?