My maternal great-grandfather's surname was Clark (always a challenge to research) and for several years the family's immigration and early years in Australia eluded me. My Great-grandfather James Nicholas Clark (pictured left at his wedding to Pricilla Mulholland) was born in Bristol and emigrated to Australia with his parents and older brother as a young child. My mistake was assuming (never assume - how many times are we told that?? NEVER assume) that as the family settled in Victoria, that was where they started their lives in Australia. Wrong. Assume makes an ASS of U and ME.
It was mostly by chance that I discovered one of James Nicholas's siblings was born in Port Sorrell, Tasmania. A little further research and I found the family lived in Port Sorrell for several years and six children were born there before the entire family crossed to Victoria. By not looking in the right place I had missed all that information.
My fathers parents married in England before coming to Australia in 1909, starting their Australian lives in Collingwood before moving all over Victoria, including stops in Narre Warren, Bambill, Mildura and Clyde. While they did stay in Victoria their travels covered a large protion of the state and tracking them through the electoral rolls and other records has been quite an exercise.
Like Shauna, I have found making a map and timeline to follow my ancestors has helped enormously, as they were a much more mobile lot than I had previously realised.
Shauna tells us "this blog challenge is to stimulate my own genealogy blogging efforts in 2014 by focusing on a different kind of genealogical record each week. I wanted a challenge that reflected my own archival background as well as my own genealogy interests and there are probably lots of other records that I could have included. The challenge has an Australian focus but most of these records will be found just about anywhere in the genealogy world." Visit her blog here.
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