I have been researching the Guy family of Madron, Cornwall for over 40 years. During that time, I have discovered all kinds of information about the family of three brothers who came to Queensland in the 19th century at different times. As everyone knows, we don’t discover everything about a family in a single session. Usually, bits and pieces of information are found as new records are indexed or digitized. Every so often we need to step back and review what we know and what is perhaps still unknown. The question Why? should be running through our mind as we do this. For example, I knew from ..read more

Many researchers have discovered that one of the joys of being a blogger is the revision you may need to do while in the writing process, due to having researched the person prior to the age of online genealogy sites. There is a vast difference between scrolling a microfilm through a particular parish in a county and doing a wide search on the various sites. Gosh, these days we can even add wild-cards, extended periods to search and various counties or countries to search. Having decided that I need to tackle writing about my Neville ancestors, thus begun three weeks of intense research recent ..read more

Horace Archibald Davies was born to Moses and Catherine on 3 April 1895 in Normanton, north Queensland, Australia.[1] This little town boomed briefly as a port following the discovery of gold nearby at Croydon in the 1880s, but by 1911 the population was down to about 541 people and falling.[2] Normanton is a long way from anywhere. The Davies family, 1912. Horace is the tallest standing at the back. Author’s collection. Horace was the eldest child of his family, with a sister and three brothers. He was nine years younger than his cousin, my grandmother.  When war was declared in 1914 ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become more prominent in our everyday lives, with almost daily news about the latest innovations. The field of Family History is no exception, with new tools being hailed as providing the holy grail of research and storytelling nirvana. Is AI New in Family History? The short answer is no. Many platforms have been using AI for years, including providing hints to our family trees, quickly indexing record sets such as the 1939 register, and suggesting links between our trees and DNA matches to name a few. The recent surge in reporting about AI is primarily due to ..read more

I came across Joe in the early 2010s while looking for photographs of Australian World War One soldiers for a presentation, I had found his photo on the State Library of New South Wales website.  He enlisted in the Australian Army in 1918, but as he was of Canadian nationality, I didn’t use his image for my talk. However, I didn’t forget him because the question intrigued me, what was a Canadian doing enlisting in the Australian Army? I eventually went looking. Attestation paper of Joseph Guidice. National Archives of Australia ref: NAA_ItemNumber4391823. The first place I looked was th ..read more

Adelaide (Ada) Baker, the second eldest of six siblings was born on 22 February 1856 in London to parents Daniel Thompson Baker and Ann Dorling, who lived in a comfortable residence at 390 Oxford Street in Soho, London: about where Oxford Circus is located. The Bakers employed housemaids, one of whom accompanied Ada to school before bringing her home in the afternoon for music lessons with a private tutor. The children lived in sophisticated gentility, they were not asked to do household chores. Ada recounted to her granddaughter one day that she hadn’t so much as washed a handkerchief before ..read more

By Karyn Walker. Bunhill Fields Cemetery in London. Authors collection. Last year we were finally able to embark on a much delayed ‘gap year’ and spent 6 months in the UK where we’d lived in the 80s and 90s. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of ancestors and do lots of research during that time. In Bunhill Fields lay several of my ancestors, mostly members of the Deacon family who lived in London during the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a peaceful place criss-crossed by paths and several benches and significant tombs. It is owned and managed by the City of Lo ..read more

In true 21st century style, we are all tempted to do a “grab & go” run on our favourite paid genealogy site. Each site regularly brings new records online and more and more people join the sites. Then there’s all those trees to trawl for common relatives or ancestors. Certainly, this strategy can quickly add branches and information to our trees. However, do we stop and reflect on what we’re seeing and whether it’s substantiated by solid records? This tree-snob has had to modify her disregard for trees, as I’ve recently been finding great primary source information in the gallery section o ..read more

Have you thought about writing up the results of your research and producing a family history. How to do this can be quite a daunting prospect and therefore something which many family historians defer. Not everyone has the time or inclination to write a full family history and many explore other ways of recording the family’s story. Some produce books, others create stories around their photo collections, yet others write blog posts, create websites – the options are endless. One of the aims of GSQs Writing Group is to give members the opportunity to try different forms of writing and also ex ..read more

Life in Ireland was difficult in 1840-41, it was a time leading up to the great famine that peaked in 1845. No doubt wanting to believe the favourable tales and promises made by recruiting agents that a better life was to be found in Australia, Hugh and Ann McGovern made the decision to leave behind the hardships of life in Ireland. Being married, Protestant and able to read and write, they would have been eagerly recruited by ‘bounty’ agents tasked with replenishing the labour supply that was soon to dry up when convict transportation was ended.[1] In May 1841 with baby Mary Jane, they joined ..read more