I’m excited

There are so many exciting things going on in my family history life, I don’t know which way to look first.

In no particular order, I’m excited about….

• Congress 2018 coming up in March next year (tickets and accommodation all sorted!)
• Researching Abroad Roadshow coming up in August this year (I booked my tickets in February)
• More to explore in the Channel Islands indexes and images that are now online at Jersey Heritage Archive and on Ancestry (sorted out a confusing ancestor and working on new leads for the family)
• AncestryDNA results are back for my Dad (all as expected)
• Living DNA results back for me
• The methodology I’ve developed to explore and manage AncestryDNA matches (blog post coming!)
• Addition of Presbyterian Church records on ScotlandsPeople (found a missing sibling baptism that had been bothering me)
• RootsMagic now syncs with Ancestry (I want to try that out – maybe an easier way to manage my Ancestry tree?)

What’s exciting in your family history world?

A recipe to get kids interested in family history

My children have recently taken enough of an interest in our family history that they sometimes ask me questions about it.

“But children think family history is boring”, I hear you say.

“How was this incredible feat accomplished?”

Actually, it happened by accident.

A few years ago I had an ancestry chart printed out by a local office supplies store, just to try out having a chart printed. I looked at it, thought about what I would do differently next time, rolled it up and stored it at the back of a cupboard. It’s not display quality, but when I came across it again it seemed a waste to throw it away. Instead I put the 3 metre wide document up on the wall of our study.

The children noticed this new addition and asked me about it.

Now pay attention, because this is the good bit.

Instead of telling them it’s an ancestor chart – which they would hear as “Family history blah blah blah” – I told them it was a recipe. Yes, a recipe.

A recipe to make…. them!

Suddenly this mildly interesting addition to the room became all about them and (almost) fascinating. It helped that I had included their names on it. We had a good talk about where the different ingredients people came from and since then I have used it a few times to point out an ancestor I have been talking about. They like to count back the generations from themselves and are much more likely to listen to me talking about something I’ve found.

My eleven year old even thought to ask me what evidence I had for these conclusions! (proud mother here!)

Not bad for a black and white chart with only the most basic information.

Now I want to have a new chart printed with photos where I have them, perhaps country flags, occupations, “fun facts”?! I think they’ll really enjoy looking at that, and the questions will keep on coming.

Trove Tuesday: The Carlton Brewery in pictures

No title (1870, December 10). Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic. : 1869 - 1954), p. 10 (TOWN EDITION). Retrieved June 6, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article219366218

The Carlton Brewery was five years old in 1870, when the woodcut above was published. The accompanying extensive article describes a large and busy operation with a smoke stack 105 feet high (30 metres). On site were boilers, crushers, a steam engine, refrigeration, thousands of bags of malt and hops, liquor in various stages of fermentation, not to mention barrels of the finished product.

The large stables (at the back left of the woodcut image) could house 20 horses “with every convenience that a man who regardeth the life of his beast could desire”. It sounds like life was pretty good for the beasts.

I wonder what life was like for the neighbours?

This image was a particularly good find for me, because Francis McMahon and Ellen Keogh (my 2xgreat grandparents) lived next to Carlton Brewery in Ballarat street (a street which no longer exists) for at least 40 years. From my reading of maps and street directories, I think they lived in one of the houses I have shaded red, below.

A later newspaper article (1904) also found on Trove provides a glimpse into the interior of the Brewery buildings and gives some idea of the scale of the Brewery.

“The Boiler House”

“Engine Room
Hercules Refrigerator or Ice Machine, having a capacity of 40 tons per day”

“Bottling by Machinery”

More images are available in the article.

VICTORIAN INDUSTRIES. (1904, November 3). Punch (Melbourne, Vic. : 1900 - 1918; 1925), pp. 25-26. Retrieved June 6, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article175405919

The early bird gets the conference ticket

A week ago today, registrations for the 15th Australasian Congress on Genealogy and Heraldry opened. Congress is a three-yearly genealogy conference and this will be my second time attending. I’m unreasonably excited (so my non-genealogy friends, family and co-workers say) about an event that isn’t until March next year.

Last time around it was held in my home town Canberra, which was my prompt to finally attend. I got a lot out of it – both from the excellent sessions and from meeting other genealogists face-to face who I had previously only known online. There was no doubt I would sign up for the next one.

So last week when Early Bird registrations opened I bought my tickets. I’ve also booked a small terrace house near the venue in company with two other genealogists who have excitement levels about this event similar to my own!

It’s going to be fun.

Will I see you at Congress?!

Reconstituting the Allsops of Tissington–progress

I’ve been making slow but steady progress on my project to reconstitute the Allsop family/ies of Tissington, Derbyshire, England. I’ve described the general method I used previously. It makes use of the wonderful charting and querying abilities of Family Historian software. I didn’t start out with the aim of putting them all together, I was only interested in my own tree. But as it turns out, my own tree accounts for the majority of them and having gone this far there’s no turning back!

Updated method

I made one slight modification to the method described. Instead of drawing shapes to link individuals who I think may be the same person, I started colour coding the boxes instead. It worked much better as I could still see who belonged where even if the charts moved about as I merged people.

Progress

I’ve now identified two main family groups of Allsops. One group descends from a John Allsop from Kniveton who married a Tissington bride in 1833 and had some children in Tissington. This smaller tree is below. Note the use of blue and red box outlines, along with placement of trees, so that I can easily see the people who I think are the same person, but don’t yet have sufficient evidence to merge.

The other much larger group, from which I descend, had been in Tissington from at least the 1600s.

There are also quite a few coloured boxes where want to be sure they really are the same person in here.

Work to be done

I still have a number of extra individuals to sort out. I’ve shifted them so they all sit on one part of the chart sheet. I’ve also added bars with years written on them, so that I can arrange them down the page placed roughly at their estimated birth years.

I’ve been doing more targeted searches for information about these people and have slowly been linking them in to the two main trees where I can. The source that is helping me the most for those born after 1837 is the GRO birth indexes, which now include mother’s maiden names.

I’m also planning to request some documents from the Derbyshire Record Office. There is one document in particular from their catalogue which looks like it will confirm the link I have pencilled in from the earlier to the later generations.