Genealogy new year resolutions

A lot of ideas are coming through for reinvigorating our genealogy research in 2015.

Thomas MacEntee has proposed a genealogy do-over starting 2 January. There is a schedule of topics taking us up to the end of March. There is a FaceBook community with 836 members already excitedly exchanging ideas. Many experienced genealogists have come on board and it will be interesting to learn from them.

It is hard to start again but I think it is definitely an opportunity to put into practice all we have learned and apply it to our own family. All of us know more about genealogy research than when we started and do not often revisit the very core of our family tree. There is no question we will make new discoveries. We will probably also be more organised. It is a great opportunity to follow up on Pauleen Cass's post on her three Rs of Genealogy Research : Revisit, Record and Revise.

Some of the ideas that are being shared on organisation:

• Jenny Lanctot on consistency in file naming: http://aremyrootsshowing.jenny-ology.com/2014/12/28/genealogy-do-over-prep-time/
• Miriam Robbins has an elegant way of naming files at http://ancestories1.blogspot.com.au/2008/12/tuesdays-tip-organizing-your-digital.html
• Russ Worthington will not be doing a complete do-over but will be participating. He has already been doing a lot of work with citation templates http://ftmuser.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/genealogy-do-over-and-my-ftm2014.html

I have found blogging to be a great way to revisit and record my family history. A couple of prompts I use to help me find inspiration are:

• Trove Tuesday, started by Amy Lehmann in 2012
• The Sepia Saturday prompts are a lot of fun and it is a very nice community of fellow bloggers (several of whom contribute to this blog)
• Last year I participated in the A to Z blogging challenge. It was a lot of work to produce 26 blog posts in the month of April but I am really pleased with the results. It was very important to prepare so as to be able to complete the schedule.
• Randy Seaver has enjoyable and thought provoking prompts at Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF)
• Thomas MacEntee has lots of prompts and ideas at http://www.geneabloggers.com/

This year I plan to join in the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge by Amy Johnson Crow.

My own family history blog reached 150 posts late last month. I can't quite remember what the prompt was but I decided to print my blog. I used blog2print. It works on various platforms. There are several other providers who also print from blogs. I found blog2print very easy. There are limited options to tweak though you can choose to print only part of your blog using tags or a date range. You can vary the size of the photographs, whether you have a page break between each post ... I am really pleased to have a print copy of my blog. Some of the formatting has not translated perfectly from the screen to the printed page but overall it is a marvellous souvenir and back-up. I look forward to printing volume 2 towards the end of 2015.

Happy researching in 2015

Regards
Anne

On the Eureka rebellion and elections

160 years ago today the Eureka flag was hoisted above Ballarat. Gold miners were unhappy with the laws that required them to pay an onerous license fee. Miners received few services for the fee. They had no vote. The miners burnt their licenses and built a stockade.The Eureka rebels adopted the language of the American revolution - there should be no taxation without representation. There were other issues: a young miner, James Scobie, had been killed by a hotel owner, Bentley. The miners felt that Bentley was acquitted inappropriately by the judge - a similar grievance to the contemporary protests at Ferguson, Missouri.

A replica of the Eureka flag flying near the site of the stockade photographed by me in 2007

On 3 December the Government forces attacked the stockade built by the miners at the Eureka lead. The miners lost the skirmish. 22 miners were killed and 5 of the Government troops. However, after the rebellion changes were introduced. The license fee was reduced. Miners could own land. Miners also got the vote.

A gold license issued in 1853 by my great great great grandfather, Philip Champion de Crespigny (1817-1889),  who was a gold warden in Victoria (image from the State Library of Victoria). He was not at Ballarat at the time of the rebellion.

160 years later the citizens of Victoria went to the polls to elect the State Government. There are debates as to how significant the riots were in progressing Australian democracy. It seems to me that the miners included lack of representation amongst their grievances and that grievance was addressed not long after the riot. The path to our present political system is not dependent on one event but in my mind certainly the protests by the miners progressed our system of democracy and thus our vote today has roots in the raising of the Eureka flag 160 years ago.

In the 1850s more than half a million immigrants arrived in Australia and 60% of these came to Victoria for Gold. At the time of the Eureka rebellion there were about 25,000 living on the Ballarat goldfields including some of my husband's forebears.  I don't know if they played any part in the rebellion, they are certainly not among those named, any part they played must have been small. I would love to know what they thought about it.


Further reading:

• "Eureka Stockade." Explore History. State Library of Victoria, n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/golden-victoria/impact-society/eureka-stockade>.
• "Eureka Stockade." Australian Stories. Australian Government, 16 Feb. 2010. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/eureka-stockade>.
• Wilkie, Ben. "What's Wrong With Eureka? Part II." Stories. The Ballarat Independent, 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://theballaratindependent.com.au/news/article/what-s-wrong-with-eureka-part-ii>. 
• Wright, Clare. "Eureka Flag Heralds Winds of Change." The Age. Fairfax, 28 Nov. 2014. Web. 29 Nov. 2014. <http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/eureka-flag-heralds-winds-of-change-20141125-11t7sz.html>.

I am a cousin

At the beginning of this year I read an opinion piece in the New York Times where the author, A J Jacobs, asked whether I, the reader, was the author's cousin. Jacobs, a journalist from New York, is well known for writing about lifestyle experiments. One that I had heard of before was The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

Jacobs has discovered genealogy and has decided to hold the world's largest family reunion in June 2015. As well as various newspaper articles he has given a TED talk on the subject.

You can discover whether you are a cousin of A J Jacobs, and many others, by contributing to Wikitree or the World Family Tree on Geni.com (which is a part of MyHeritage).

Jacobs believes that a large worldwide tree has several benefits.

• Scientific value - for example data on how diseases are inherited, people's migration patterns
• It brings history alive to realise you are connected to famous historical people
• Understanding our interconnectedness. Perhaps our farthest cousin is our 50th cousin.
• A kinder world if we realise we are all related.
• A democratising effect. Sometimes genealogy can be elitist but in fact we are all related to famous people.

I decided to follow up on the challenge of determining if I was related by using Wikitree, a free collaborative family tree.

I chose not to upload a GEDCOM file of my existing research but to work slowly and use the opportunity to review my research and ensure I had sources for my links and birth, death and marriage dates. For me this is an great opportunity to follow through on Pauleen Cass's excellent advice in an earlier blog post to revisit, record and revise my family tree.

I wanted to establish a connection to A J Jacobs so I started on the branches of my tree that lead back to the USA as I felt that way I had a better chance of connection. I have connected in 29 steps, including two marriages, through my Dana forebears. My relationship to A J Jacobs defies normal cousin terminology but we are indeed distantly connected. I still have many forebears to add and perhaps there will be a closer connection.

For me it is a different way of thinking about genealogy. I am not interested in my connection to famous people. I am interested in the history experienced by my forebears as I find that brings history alive for me. However, I am happy to collaborate on our shared family history and genealogy. I think it is an interesting idea to acknowledge that we are all related and that we do not own our forebears and their history.

Anne Young

Creating your own Google Map using the Mapalist utility

Earlier this year Jill Ball wrote about where our forebears come from.  She included a map of where her forebears came from.

An excellent utility for preparing Google maps highlighting specific places is Mapalist.

I have written about Mapalist previously on my own blog (Mapping the birthplaces of the children of John Way and Sarah née Daw).

First you create a spreadsheet in Google Drive. You enter the place names you want and the utility uses those names to mark the places on a Google map.

It was very quick to enter the data and generate a map. I used a separate column to enter the Australian state to ensure correct disambiguation of the place names.

Birthplaces of children of John Way and Sarah Daw	State
Adelaide	South Australia
Binalong	New south wales
Collingwood	Victoria
Murrumburrah	New South Wales
Grenfell	New South Wales
Parkes	New South Wales

You then go to https://mapalist.com. You do need to register for an account if you haven't already got one. You will need to allow Mapalist access to your Google account details.

Go to the tab Maps then choose create. Choose the source type of Google spreadsheet. Choose the worksheet you entered the data into.

Creating a map in Mapalist

You get a preview of the data being used.
After clicking next you assign fields to the columns. It did this automatically - I didn't need to change anything.

stage 2 of creating your map using Mapalist

I used a separate column to enter the Australian state to ensure correct disambiguation of the place names.

I clicked apply and then next. 

stage 3 of creating your map using Mapalist

In my case it had no problem in working out the places I meant.  If you have trouble then you might need to tweak your spreadsheet with extra fields to help locate the place you are meaning.

At the next stage you configure your map by choosing the pin you want.

stage 4 of creating a map using Mapalist

You can play around with the settings and preview your map

options in stage 4

Finally you save your map, having configured it as to whether you want it private or public ...

stage 5 save your map

You can preview

Immediately below the map are some buttons to click. The second one, a rectangle with an arrow emerging from it, is for sharing by email but clicking that also gives you the code to embed your map on any web page including your blog.

Et voila!

Good luck with mapping your family history.

Digitisation projects for World War I commemoration

I recently attended a consultative forum at the National Archives of Australia's Victorian office on behalf of AAGRA (Australasian Association of Genealogists and Record Agents).

I was interested to hear project updates on two major digitisation projects.

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) are working on their World War I Repatriation personal case files. They are digitising the files of all those who were on the Albany convoy. They are also adding metadata to their catalogue so that the files of all other men and women who served and claimed repatriation will be available for retrieval. The files have data in addition to that found in series B2455, the First Australian Imperial Forces personnel dossiers, that are already available through the NAA. For example if somebody was wounded, the details of the event where the wound was incurred might be described in more detail on the repatriation file. Also you may be able to learn more about life after the war.

Not all those who returned claimed repatriation. A few did not need to. Others were too proud.

The digitised files and the meta data will be released in November to coincide with the commemoration of the departure of Australian and New Zealand troop in convoy from King George Sound, Albany, initially bound for Europe. The convoy ended up in Egypt and in April 1915 the majority of soldiers landed at Gallipoli.

The Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV) are digitising the land files associated with soldier settlement after the war. There were around 10,000 Soldier Settlers after World War I and the Settlement files will be digitised and available on line in 2015. The scheme had mixed success. Some soldiers were successful farmers, others failed. A case study on the PROV's website at http://prov.vic.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/soldier-settlement gives the story of the challenges faced by one returned soldier.

A group of returned soldiers who had settled on farms in the Mallee. They rode horses to Melbourne to place wreaths on the Shrine of Remembrance. They have stopped for a meal. There is a truck loaded with sacks of chaff in the background (probably to provide feed for the horses). Photograph from Museum Victoria: Negative - Returned Soldier Settlers from the Mallee Having Roadside Meal, Wemen, Victoria, circa 1930 Reg. No: MM 002568 Copied from Mrs Jim Ryan, 1985 The Biggest Family Album of Australia, Museum Victoria.

I know my family tree contains soldiers who were totally and permanently incapacitated after World War I, including my husband's grandfather. We also have family members who were soldier settlers in the Mallee.  Both sets of files will contain family history information for me.

One hundred years ago

I was alerted by a blog post at Dr. Bill Tells Ancestor Stories that one hundred years ago was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie. The assassination is widely acknowledged to be a trigger for World War I. Bill Smith states

What seemed as a minor event in Central Europe, 100 years ago today, was not even reported in many American newspapers in the US until two days later. An assassination in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina was the event.

The assassination as illustrated by Achille Beltrame of the Italian newspaper Domenica del Corriere, 12 July 1914.

The news made page 3 of the Ballarat Courier on 30 June and was widely reported throughout Australia.

CABLEGRAMS. (1914, June 30). The Ballarat Courier (Vic. : 1914 - 1918), p. 3 Edition: DAILY.. Retrieved June 29, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article73308399

 Some Australian newspapers, such as Perth's Daily News, reported the assassination on Monday 29 June.

From now for the next five years there will be a significant focus on World War I.

Many families, including both mine and my husband's, had young men who served in the war who were killed, and others who were injured.

As a family historian, if I come across a young man born in the 1890s, the first thing I do is check for a military record.

While the military records are useful for family historians it seems worthwhile to pause and remember the suffering represented by those records.

I am sure that as our forebears read the newspapers on 29 and 30 June 1914 they would have no idea of what that assassination might mean for them and their families.

Bankruptcy in England in the early nineteenth century

Shrewsbury Prison main entrance

It seems that my fourth great grandfather, William Pulteney Dana (1776-1861), went bankrupt and was gaoled for it. Notices in the London Gazette include insolvency and I found some concerning William Dana that give some of the story of his financial experience. The Gazette commenced in 1665 and is now digitised and searchable. 

 

(On their own Petitions.)

Recorded in The Gazette (London Gazette), Publication date: 18 August 1840 Issue: 19885 Pages: 1921-2 retrieved from https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/19885/page/1922

A few months later he was out of gaol and living in lodgings. We learn that as well as being on half-pay from the army, Dana was running a printing business.

Recorded in The Gazette (London Gazette), Publication date: 13 November 1840 Issue: 19913 Pages: 2558-9 retrieved from https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/19913/page/2558

Some months later his case was adjourned.

Recorded in The Gazette (London Gazette), Publication date: 5 March 1841 Issue: 19958 Pages: 627-8retrieved from https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/19958/page/628

I have found no further mentions of the case. I assume Dana settled his debts. At the time of the 1851 and 1861 censuses he was living with his married daughter and her husband in a terrace house in Shrewsbury. It would seem his finances did not recover.  It was quite different to living in Roughton Hall.

Bankruptcy featured a lot in Victorian literature. Charles Dickens's character of Mr Micawber springs to mind. In 1824 Charles Dickens's father, John Dickens, was imprisoned for debt under the Insolvent Debtors Act of 1813. It wasn't until 1869 that debtors no longer went to prison. For a brief history of insolvency law in England the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_insolvency_law#History is useful. However I found the chapter on the subject of Bankruptcy, Debt and Money lending in What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens knew : fascinating facts of daily life in the nineteenth century by Daniel Poole very readable and informative.

Pool, Daniel What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens knew : fascinating facts of daily life in the nineteenth century. Robinson, London, 1998.

Earlier this month, Susan Donaldson wrote about a book on Victorian life and this is another but containing many references to novels of the era. Bankruptcy and debt featured in many novels and this presumably was based on the experiences of living in the era. My forebear was one of those who experienced this misery.

Anne Young blogging at http://ayfamilyhistory.blogspot.com.au

To do lists in Evernote

I have enjoyed reading how others use Evernote to help with their family history research.

Screenshot from my desktop version

My main collecting point for my family history is my tree on ancestry.com synched with a tree on my desk top computer using Family Tree Maker and also on my iPad using the ancestry.com app.

For research projects though I use Evernote. In particular if there is a book, a manuscript, a database I want to look up and explore I add it to Evernote with the questions I want answered and tag it with the relevant surname  and the repository plus to do.

The same to do list on my phone - I can click on a note to bring up the content

For example if there is a manuscript in the State Library of Victoria, I will tag it with SLV to do. When I get down to the SLV then all my to dos can be grabbed together by retrieving notes that are tagged. Once I have completed the to do I might collect my findings against that note and updating the tags by removing the to do tag but replacing it with the repository, ie the tag SLV to do is replaced with SLV.

I use this for interstate repositories too, for example the State Library of South Australia which I get to visit less than once a year. It is really useful to have collected in advance all the things I want to achieve there as I think of them.

Evernote is synchronised across my desktop computer, my iPad and my android phone. Thus I have my to do list with me all the time.

See also  Diane Hewson's post in February on collaborating with Evernote: http://worldwidegenealogy.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/evernote-collaboration-sharing-of-tips.html

Scots in Australia - Ballarat art exhibition opening in April

From 11 April to 27 July the Art Gallery of Ballarat will have an exhibition on images of Scottish Australia from the beginnings of European settlement to Federation. I am a volunteer guide at the Gallery and we have been studying up on all things Scottish for this exhibition.

Anne Eliza Duff with her daughter, Jessie c.1847  by Martha Berkeley from the Art Gallery of South Australia

This image was used on the front cover of a recent issue of Antiques and Art in Victoria.

The exhibition will highlight the contribution to Australia of emigrants from Scotland. For example, the Australian Dictionary of Biography has 1591 entries of people with Scottish heritage, 12.6% of all 12,590 entries.

Measuring ancestry is tricky - I have lots of ancestors ;) and some of them are Scottish - although my husband's family tree seems to contain no Scottish forebears. About three quarters of my fellow volunteer gallery guides can also claim a Scottish forebear. It is a small sample and not at all representative. Claiming a Scottish forebear does not mean identifying as someone having Scottish ancestry.

Estimated percentages of the ethnic origins of the Australian population 1861-1987

Graph of figures in Table 1.1: Estimated percentages of the ethnic origins of the Australian population 1861-1987 in  Prentis, Malcolm D. (Malcolm David) The Scots in Australia. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2008. Prentis sourced his figures from C. A. Price et al. Birthplaces of the Australian Population 1861-1981, Working Papers in Demography, No. 13 (1984); S. E. Khoo & C. A. Price, Understanding Australia's Ethnic Composition (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1996), 11.

Despite having some Scottish forebears, I would not be counted in the 11.9% of those who had Scottish ancestry in 1987.

Malcom Prentis remarks in his book The Scots in Australia that, unlike some groups which came predominantly at particular moments in the history of their home societies and of Australia, the immigration of Scots has been sustained at a consistent and substantial level for the last 200 years.

The Scots have been a very successful ethnic group but largely ignored in the history of Australia which has paid more attention to our Irish forebears.

The forthcoming exhibition looks at a number of themes, including politics, indigenous relations, business endeavours as well as artistic contributions. It will be a great opportunity to learn more about Australian history and the contributions of our Scottish forebears.

Martha Berkeley who did the painting above of Ann Duff was my great great great aunt. She wasn't Scottish but the painting is included because it depicts a Scottish woman. You can learn more about the Duff family at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~barqueasia1839/FINLAYDUFF.htm.

I have been inspired to review my Scottish family history and intend to publish some more stories on my blog about emigration, where my forebears came from and what they did when they arrived in Australia. Before I do that though, I plan to participate in the A to Z blogging challenge - my first time - and it will keep me busy for the next month. It is not only genea-bloggers who participate but there are a couple of other family historians who have put their names down for the challenge.

Greetings from Victoria

Hi - I am Anne and I am the 7th collaborator from Australia and the only one from Victoria so far.  Jill, Diane and Sharon are from New South Wales, Helen and Caitlin from Queensland and Pauleen from the Northern Territory (bit of an eastern states bias).

I blog at http://ayfamilyhistory.blogspot.com.au/ and although I started in 2012 only regularly blogged last year.

Although I have been researching the family history for over twenty years I have found the recent move to blogging a terrific way to revisit my research and to communicate it to others. My daughter reads my blog posts :) and I guess in the main she is my intended audience, as well as any other family members that are interested.  A database is a terrific way to collect information but it is only a useful tool to store the information and to talk with another enthusiast.  Writing a blog post means I revisit my sources and make sense of the facts. It is never a quick process!

I have found geneamemes really useful inspiration as sometimes I become overwhelmed by all there is to write up and freeze in front of the blank computer screen.  I participate occasionally in SepiaSaturday posts (http://sepiasaturday.blogspot.com.au/)

Historical photographs of any age or kind (they don't have to be sepia) become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images.

I was inspired by the notion of Trove Tuesday - writing on a Tuesday about a discovery through Trove - the National Library of Australia's research service which includes digitised Australian newspapers (http://trove.nla.gov.au ). The idea for this blogging prompt was started by Amy Lehmann in 2012 (http://branchesleavespollen.blogspot.com.au/p/trove-tuesday.html ).

I recently participated in a blogging challenge for Australia Day initiated by Pauleen Cass. It was an excellent example of where I had done the research and had the facts but it wasn't organised. A great opportunity to get more organised.  It also highlighted some further areas of research to follow up on.

I read other people's blogs - two of my favourites are The Legal Genealogist (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/) and Western District families (http://mywdfamilies.wordpress.com/). 

This is my first collaborative blog and I look forward to further working with everyone in 2014.