AFFHO Congress 2012 Day 1

Day one of the 2012 Genealogy Congress in Adelaide and the talks have gotten off to a good start.  The first talk was a keynote speaker, Colleen Fitzpatrick, talking about finding the identity of the unnamed child from the Titanic.  A fair-haired boy aged about 2 had been amongst the bodies recovered and not identified.  A Swedish family believed it was their relative and therefore in 2001 the grave had been opened and it was found that all that remained were three baby teeth and a small piece of wrist bone.  From that they were able to recover mitochondrial DNA which proved that the child could not have been the boy in question.  After a long investigation they finally managed to identify the child and give him a name.  She was a very good speaker and it was a fascinating topic.

Next session I attended was by Dan Poffenberger about reading old writing.  He focused on Secretary hand, and first went through the letters of the alphabet and the forms they took at in that style of handwriting. He then showed an example of a will and worked through most of it practicing reading the writing.  Although I have done a lot of palaeography work before, I still got a lot from his talk.  Again he was a very good speaker.

The afternoon started with another keynote speaker, Daniel Horowitz, whose talk was entitled How we preserve and share memories in the Digital Age.  This started as a discussion of the history of recorded information and methods of digitisation and storage of data.  But it quickly changed to what was essentially an advertisement for MyHeritage.

Next talk was Chris Watts discussing records for British Merchant Seamen.  Lots of information, but some of the slides were flicked over too quickly to allow me to make comprehensive notes.  But he has written the book My Ancestor was a Merchant Seaman which is part of my library, so I can check that for further information.  The main thing I got out of the talk were the large number of different records that have information about Merchant seamen.

Final speaker for the day was Shauna Hicks, talking about Ancestors in church records.  She was focusing not on parish registers, but on other records like church newsletter/newspapers & church histories.  Shauna is always a very knowledgeable speaker and I always learn something from her talks.  This reminded me that I really must look for the Alway family in the records of the Baptist Church and Salvation Army in Victoria.

Certificate in Genealogical Research

It has been a while since I last put a post in here as I have been busy working on gaining my Certificate in Genealogical Research with the Society of Australian Genealogists.  But that is all done now and I received a New Years 'present' in the form of notification that I have been awarded the Certificate and am eligible to go on to do their Diploma in Family Historical Studies if I should so wish.

British Parliamentary Papers

I have just discovered a very useful new resource – the British Parliamentary Papers.  They are available through the eResources on the National Library of Australia web site (www.nla.gov.au) and are available to anyone living in Australia.  You need a library card to access the resource, and can apply for that card for free online.

You might think that British Parliamentary papers would be boring and of no relevance to Genealogy, but you would be wrong.  I found “Accounts of superannuations and retired allowances in public departments” for the years 1857 and 1863, and these gave me information I have been seeking for ages about my g-g-grandfather, Thomas Spiller.  Thomas was an Inland Revenue Office, or Excise Officer, in Ireland.  I knew he must have died before 1864 as there was no death for him in the Civil Registers, but could not pin it down in anyway.  Nor did I have any idea when he was born.

The 1857 return I mentioned contained a list of Superannuation Allowances granted, and among the list for the Inland Revenue dept for 1856 was Thomas Spiller, salary on retirement £100, age 53, period of service 26 years 11 months, cause of retirement “disease of lungs”, yearly allowance granted £53.

The 1863 document contained information about Superannuation Allowances ceased, and in it I found an entry for Thomas Spiller, died 10 Jul 1862.

So now I know he was born about 1803, and died 10 Jul 1862.  What a find.

UK Railway records on Ancestry

I love Ancestry.com, and it really is worth every cent I spend on my subscription.  The ever-growing list of new resources being added is so useful.

The two most recent additions I have been using are the records of the Post Office employees in the UK, and the records of the UK railway employees 1833-1963 which went up this week.  My husband’s grandfather and great-grandfather both worked for the railways.  Strangely, I couldn’t find any records for his grandfather, but when I entered the great-grandfather’s name (Frederick George Welch), several entries came up.  I clicked on the first on the list, expecting to find something like a list of employees with his name included, but instead a page from a book of retired senior staff came up, which included his photograph!  We had never seen a photo of this man before.  I called my husband (who has no interest in family history) to come quickly (he probably thought I’d seen another spider or something like that), and showed him the photo.

“So this is Grandpa’s father”

“Yes, that’s right”

“Yep.  I can see it.  I can see the resemblance.”

This entry had his dates of birth & death (although I already knew them) & a complete summary of his professional career

Entered the Service of the London & North Western Rly Company as an apprentice clerk at Aylesbury in November 1881.  He was transferred to Camden in 1882 and in March 1903 was appointed Goods Agent at that station.  In March 1912 he received a similar appointment at Broad Street, London, and in November 1914 he was made Assistant District Goods Manager in London.  He was promoted to District Goods Manager at Leeds in June 1920 & held this position until his retirement in June 1925

The moral of this story is to keep checking the list of recent additions to the ancestry site.  You can check this from home, even without a subscription, and then you know whether you need to go to a library that has access to Ancestry.com to further your research.

My Manning family from Wicklow

Wicklow Church of Ireland marriages have just gone online on the pay-per-view site www.rootsireland.ie but any hopes that I may have got any further back with my Manning ancestors seems to have been in vain.  There is nothing obvious amongst the Manning marriages that helps me.

I was told that my great-grandmother, Susanna Manning, came from the Meeting of the Waters in Ireland.  Her parents were William Manning and Susanna Manning, who I was told were cousins.

When www.rootsireland.ie put on line the Church of Ireland baptisms for Wicklow, I was able to find the baptism of Susanna (junior) and many of her siblings.  They were all baptised in Ballinaclash, and their abode was specified as Ballynatone Lower/Ballynatone/Ballinatone.  This isn’t exactly at The Meeting of the Waters, but it’s not far from it.  By pure fluke I found the marriage of William Manning and Susanna Manning at St Peter’s in Dublin (why did they marry in Dublin?) on the free site http://www.irishgenealogy.ie/.  They had married on the 3^rd August 1842.  This was before civil registration, and their marriage entry did not name parents.  All I had was that William Manning of Rathdrum had married Susanna Manning of Corballis and that the witnesses were Richard Manning and Sally Manning.

Unfortunately, the only C of I baptism of a Susanna in Wicklow seems to be the wrong one.  There is a Susanna born 1826 or 1827 (rather young to marry in 1842, but possible), but lots of online sources say this Susanna died in 1847.  It also wasn’t in Corballis.  There are still too many William Mannings to possibly know which is which.  So for now, at least, this stays a brickwall.

In case anyone is interested, the children of William and Susanna Manning are

·         Sarah Manning – born 1844

·         Richard Manning – born 1846

·         Maria Manning – born 1848.  Known as Minnie?  Married the Rev. Edward Cassian Crotty in Madagascar (what was she doing in Madagascar?) and immigrated to Victoria, Australia 1887, where she died in 1920.  My grandfather remembered their children.  Not surprising as they were his 1^st cousins

·         George Manning – Born 1850, died 1900 in Victoria.  I don’t think he ever married, but am not sure

·         Emily Josephine Manning – born 1851.  She married Edmund Manning (son of Abraham Manning and Elizabeth) on 20 Sep 1876 at St Thomas’s in Dublin.  The witnesses were Robert Manning and William Manning.  I would guess that he was some kind of cousin of hers, but don’t know.  They arrived in Victoria in about 1877 and their children were born there.  She died at the young age of 41 in 1892.

·         Ambrose Manning – born 1852

·         William Manning – born 1854

·         Robert Manning – born 1856.  Went to Victoria (probably in 1878) and set up business as a Draper in Echuca in Victoria.  In 1884 he married Annie Craig Jamieson in a double ceremony, when his sister Susanna married William James Spiller.  He eventually moved to Western Australia.

·         William Manning – born 1857.  Died in Melbourne in 1938.  I don’t think he ever married

·         Susanna Manning – born 1859.  My great-grandmother.  She arrived in Victoria about 1883 and married William James Spiller in 1884.  She died in 1941

·         Alfred Manning – born 1862

·         Herbert Manning – born 1869.  Moved to Victoria and married Florence Tamson Jamieson. 

·         Edward Manning – born 1869

As you can see, at least 7 of the children moved to Victoria.  I spent years looking for their arrival as a group until I realised that it was a case of what Dr Perry McIntyre described as “serial migration”, which I think is a fantastic phrase.

The nature of memory

I have just attended two days of sessions about Oral History.  At one point there was an open discussion/Q&A session and the discussion revolved around what do you do when you know what you have been told is incorrect.  What this really comes down to is the nature of memory.  Many of us will have heard a story from our very early childhood so often that we become unsure about whether we really remember the occasion, or whether we have “invented” the memory based on the story we heard over and over again.

An example was given of a rural community who all would have sworn blind that a certain family owned a property, because they had lived there for a couple of generations, whereas the Land Records categorically showed that it was owned by someone else.  The residents had been renting it all along.  But when we find two bits of conflicting evidence when studying history, we usually decide that the balance of probability is with the more commonly written/expressed point of view if we cannot find definitive official evidence.  The land ownership versus occupancy is a particularly relevant example, as land transactions are often used to identify people or branches of certain families in the times before parish registers. 

Even believing the official documents might not give us the true or full story.  My great-grandmother, Merab Brockbank (nee Annesley), lost a son aged 4.  His death certificate says that he died of pneumonia, but according to one of her daughters she always said that was wrong.  She claimed he “got a strain” helping a next door neighbour get out of some barbed wire he was caught in.  He came inside crying and from that time on was in pain and she believed he had strained something.  Within less than a week he died in bed in his mother’s arms. 

To us the concept of dying of a strain seems ridiculous, and the reality is that we’ll never really know what happened in this case, but I have a theory.  Both his parents died of heart conditions, and his father had to retire from work early because of a bad heart (the family used to say he had strained it from too much hard physical work – bit of a theme here from this family).  What if the young boy had a congenital heart problem, and what if he really did injure himself and the pain was as a result of that injury.  In 1911 would a country doctor think that a four year old could have heart problems?  Then once he was already injured, he might have been more susceptible to infection, leading to the pneumonia that was the ultimate cause of his death.

Or maybe the story that came down to me was the result of ‘chinese whispers’ and had changed since the original event.

We’ll never really know the truth, but it does illustrate that stories from family members can indicate that an official document may not contain the whole truth, and that commonly held beliefs may not be true

The nature of memory

I have just attended two days of sessions about Oral History.  At one point there was an open discussion/Q&A session and the discussion revolved around what do you do when you know what you have been told is incorrect.  What this really comes down to is the nature of memory.  Many of us will have heard a story from our very early childhood so often that we become unsure about whether we really remember the occasion, or whether we have “invented” the memory based on the story we heard over and over again.

An example was given of a rural community who all would have sworn blind that a certain family owned a property, because they had lived there for a couple of generations, whereas the Land Records categorically showed that it was owned by someone else.  The residents had been renting it all along.  But when we find two bits of conflicting evidence when studying history, we usually decide that the balance of probability is with the more commonly written/expressed point of view if we cannot find definitive official evidence.  The land ownership versus occupancy is a particularly relevant example, as land transactions are often used to identify people or branches of certain families in the times before parish registers. 

Even believing the official documents might not give us the true or full story.  My great-grandmother, Merab Brockbank (nee Annesley), lost a son aged 4.  His death certificate says that he died of pneumonia, but according to one of her daughters she always said that was wrong.  She claimed he “got a strain” helping a next door neighbour get out of some barbed wire he was caught in.  He came inside crying and from that time on was in pain and she believed he had strained something.  Within less than a week he died in bed in his mother’s arms. 

To us the concept of dying of a strain seems ridiculous, and the reality is that we’ll never really know what happened in this case, but I have a theory.  Both his parents died of heart conditions, and his father had to retire from work early because of a bad heart (the family used to say he had strained it from too much hard physical work – bit of a theme here from this family).  What if the young boy had a congenital heart problem, and what if he really did injure himself and the pain was as a result of that injury.  In 1911 would a country doctor think that a four year old could have heart problems?  Then once he was already injured, he might have been more susceptible to infection, leading to the pneumonia that was the ultimate cause of his death.

Or maybe the story that came down to me was the result of ‘chinese whispers’ and had changed since the original event.

We’ll never really know the truth, but it does illustrate that stories from family members can indicate that an official document may not contain the whole truth, and that commonly held beliefs may not be true