Week 44 (Oct. 28-Nov. 3): Challenging

The prompt for Week 44 is "Challenging", which pretty much describes most aspects of family history research at times.  How to pick just one area upon which to focus?

One aspect of research I find truly challenging is the amount of misinformation and inaccurate research I find out there.  Incorrectly transcribed records, inaccurate original records, outright lies, and poor research skills can cause all sorts of problems for the unwary.

Online trees on any website I find can be full of errors, many of which are perpetuated by other researchers simply copying the incorrect information without  trying to verify it - even without noticing that the information is impossible!

Some of the impossibilities to keep in mind :

• Children cannot be born before their parents. 
• Children cannot be born to a mother who is 6 years old.  Or 94 years old. 
• Children are highly unlikely to be born to a father who is 89 years old.  While this MAY be biologically possible, it is unlikely and deserves a bit of fact checking.
• A child cannot be christened 4 months before they are born. 
• A woman cannot marry 3 years after she has died.
• A man cannot enlist in the army 5 years after he has died.
• Full siblings cannot be born 4 months apart.
• Travel takes time, especially before the age of the airplane.  In 1883 a child could not be born in England and christened in Australia 5 days later.
  

I have seen all of these, and more, in online family trees.  And trying to contact the tree owner to get their errors corrected?  Challenging indeed! 

Trove Tuesday

Researching Immigration can be difficult for researchers for many reasons.  

Many arrivals into Australian ports were divided into categories.

• “assisted” (subsidised)
• “unassisted” (paying their own way), or
• “coastal” (travelling from another Australian port)

How a person arrived had great influence over the detail available about them.  Assisted immigrants generally owed the government money (or labour) in return for their passage and thus the records for them are usually fairly detailed.

For Unassisted and Coastal passengers, ship's registers frequently lacked detail.  Women, children, servants and steerage passengers were frequently left off passenger lists.  Names might be abbreviated - "J. Smith" or simply "Mr Smith", and children were often simply added as a note - "Mrs Smith and 5 children". 

Newspapers, however, often published shipping news, including lists of passengers as shown in the article below, which reports the arrival of my Beseler family in South Australia on the ship Pauline.

South Australian Register, Sat 1 April 1848

Included in the list of passengers are Frederick Beseler, shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and five children.  The article also notes that the ship had sailed from the port of Bremen, Germany.

Another Trove Treasure.

Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland was created through a five-year State-funded program of research entitled ‘Beyond 2022'.  It is funded by the Government of Ireland under Project Ireland 2040 through the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. 

 Led by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, the program "combines historical investigation, archival discovery, conservation and technical innovation to re-imagine and recreate, through digital technologies, the archive lost on June 30th, 1922, in the opening engagement of the Civil War".

Many genealogists with Irish family history have mourned the loss of records that were the result of the Dublin Records Office fire.  Combined with the destruction of the historic Irish censuses, the loss has made the task of researching Irish ancestors more difficult.

The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is an open-access resource, freely and permanently available online to all those interested in Ireland’s history at home and abroad. The website states that "our extensive and growing treasury of digitized records—scattered over space and time, but now reunited on-screen—brings ordinary lives buried in official documents back into the light". 

By 2022, over 70 archives, libraries and societies in Ireland, Britain and the United States have formally joined the enterprise to bring the destroyed Record Treasury back to life. 

Week 43 (Oct. 21-27): Lost Contact

During my family history research I have often reflected on the enormous step taken by my ancestors when they migrated to Australia.  Various branches came from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany, all seeking a new life and leaving behind family, friends and their old homes.

None of my migrating ancestors would ever see those they left behind again.

For whatever their reasons, my original Australian immigrant ancestors made a huge leap of faith to leave their homelands and travel to a distant country, most with little chance of returning to their homeland if their new lives proved less than they hoped.  Settling into a new country is not easy. Immigrants have to adapt to an unfamiliar environment and lifestyle, while maintaining aspects of their previous culture and way of life.

Even maintaining contact could be difficult, or close to impossible.  Not all my ancestors were literate.  How do you maintain contact with family on the other side of the world before telephones and international calls, when the only real way to communicate was by letter?  Not only could it take months for a letter to make its way across the seas, such letters also cost money to post.  Then there would be a wait, possibly for several more months, for a reply to arrive.

There was more difficulty to overcome if either party (or both) lacked reading and writing skills.  In the 1800s when most of my family lines arrived in Australia, literacy levels were low, especially among the poorer classes.  Not all my ancestors who emigrated could read and write, and frequently those left behind in the 'old country' lacked literacy skills themselves.  Perhaps they could have sought assistance in writing to loves ones and reading their replies, but this would have been another cost to pay.  Little wonder so many lost contact.

Trove Tuesday

One of the saddest stories I have found in my family history is that of Eliza Pummeroy (nee Beseler).  Eliza was born in 1871 in Learmonth, Victoria to Edward Beseler and Emma (nee Flower).  Eliza married Alfred Pummeroy in1895 in St Kilda, where Alfred worked as a plasterer.  They had four children before Alfred suddenly became ill with pneumonia and died on 6 Feb 1901, leaving Eliza with 4 young children and in a desperate situation.

The family lived in rented housing and had little by way of savings.  With four children to look after, the eldest 4 years old and deaf and mute, the youngest (my grandfather William) only 2 months old, Eliza was unable to do much by way of paid work.  She took in washing to make a little money, and was given 3 shillings a week by the local Ladies Benevolent Society.  It wasn't enough.

After struggling for a month after her husband's sudden death, Eliza took the step of applying to the local court for help, risking having her children removed from her custody and placed in an orphanage, something she was adamant she did not want.  The judges hearing the case awarded her 10 shillings from the poor box and committed the children to the department, with the recommendation they be handed back to their mother.

This appeal was reported in several newspapers.  Two reported the case with a fair amount of detail, including the fact that the children all appeared clean and well cared for, while a third much briefer article gave a somewhat different impression, especially with the heading 'Neglected Children'.

Prahran Telegraph, Sat 9 March 1901, p3.

The Argus, Sat 9 March 1901, p15.

The Herald, Fri 8 March 1901, p5.

A great series of articles found on Trove. Having these to add to my records adds so much to my knowledge of my family history - without these reports I would never have know how much of a struggle my great grandmother Eliza faced after the death of her husband.

Family Tree UK Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• What were you doing 40 years ago? Was it family-history related?
• Celebrating 40 years of Family Tree
• Heredis 2025: new software out
• 93 million new Theories of Family Relativity from MyHeritage DNA
• A.I. grants for library, museum & archive innovation
• 23andMe board steps down en masse
• Artificial Intelligence and genealogy
• Finding your way around  Findmypast
• Free, frugal & fun : time- & money-saving tips, tools & tactics
• The life of a 19th Century soldier
• Digging deeper & decoding the National Register records
• Your DNA questions answered!
• Witch-hunts during the Little Ice Age
• Wartime trauma The life of George Smith, ARP warden...

Foundling Hospital Archive Free Online

The archives of London’s famous Foundling Hospital are now free to search online.

Almost 100,000 pages of records, containing details of over 20,000 children, have been made available.

The Hospital was founded in 1739 by sea captain Thomas Coram to provide a home for the capital’s many unwanted children, particularly children born to unmarried mothers.

At the time, the name ‘hospital’ meant any place that provided ‘hospitality’, or shelter. Rather than being a hospital in the modern sense, it was a children’s home, where children received care and education before leaving to enter into an apprenticeship at about the age of fourteen. The education was progressive by the standards of the day – both boys and girls were taught to read, girls were later taught to write.  The children were also taught music.

The digitised records fall into the following categories:

• Petitions from mothers and others: 115 volumes, 1762-1881
• Billet Books containing tokens: 203 volumes, 1741-1814
• Admission and baptism registers: 8 volumes, 1741-1885
• Apprenticeship registers: 4 volumes, 1751-1898
• Registers of country nurses and inspectors: 6 volumes, 1749-1812
• Branch Hospital registers: 5 volumes, 1757-1772
• Records claiming children: 21 volumes, 1758-1796
• Committee Minutes: 43 volumes, 1739-1895