January 2008

Almost everyone has an ag lab or two in their tree, so we thought that they would be the logical place to start for our new OCCUPATIONS section of the magazine. What exactly did they do? Did they stay in one place or did they move around to find work? How were they...

My father was born in Lowestoft in 1910 and tracing his ancestors has proved a lot easier than pursuing my mother's lot around Somerset and various parts of Wales. With the help of films ordered at the LDS, I have traced many of my father's direct lines back to the...

Thought I’d write a poem About my family tree – That quest to find my ancestors, To trace their link to me. They came from England mostly, To this alien, distant shore. They were seeking new beginnings For they wanted something more. They left behind the English...

My mum was born a Haylock and there were family tales that some of the Haylock family went to Australia during the gold rush of the mid 1850s. A while after I started my dad's side of my family tree I hit a brick wall and moved onto my mum's side. Whilst searching on...

As a child my granddad told us tales of his Uncle Arthur who he believed had emigrated to Australia and had helped to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. While, as a family, we believed that he had emigrated, we had never seen any evidence to suggest that he might have...

Was Guy COLE the oldest immigrant to the colonies before 1850? Would you have left Harrow, Middlesex in September 1848, at the age of 75, on a four-month 20,00km voyage to a settlement just beginning to flourish called Melbourne ? Guy was the second son of John and...

My nan had told me before she died that some of her family had emigrated to America. I did some digging and asked a few questions on the boards of Family Tree Forum and someone kindly found a Frederick Caley, my great uncle, on the 1930 US census with his family...

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only family historian who has had to devise nicknames for members of the family tree because the same names occur again and again. So I'd like to introduce you to Francis the Mormon, brother of my 2 x great grandfather, William the...

Working my way back through my husband’s family I reached his maternal great grandfather, John Chapman. He had lived in Black Torrington in North Devon, amongst a cluster of other Chapmans and had died before the 1841 census. There was no distinguishing middle name –...

My dad's cousin is also my godfather and he was 75 this year. I'll call him Henry. Henry loves to talk and is a mine of information. However, he has the sometimes disconcerting habit of chatting away and jumping about in the conversation between various members of the...

This story started for me when a contact from Genesreunited sent me details of a death: Elizabeth Warner died in 1840 at the Double Drift military post by the Great Fish River in Cape Colony, South Africa and was buried at Fort Brown in the Transkei. The service was...

Almost the first family I tried to research after getting hooked by genealogy was my grandmother’s mother’s family – the Sephtons. My father had many memories of their narrow boat building yard at Hawkesbury Junction, and my brother, who actually lives on a narrow...