They didn’t hold property but they could vote

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I continue to hear fellow family historians say that they won’t bother searching early Queensland Electoral Rolls because they believe their ancestor was poor so didn’t own property, and therefore wouldn’t have been able to vote. So a very valuable resource is being ignored because researchers do not realise that residence (generally for six months) was a qualification our male ancestors could use to vote. The residence qualification has been very useful in tracing one of my early Queensland families. … Continue reading

A lesson learned

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Recently I have been conducting some research to help a friend out. She had been researching for a while and had come across some brick walls. One of these walls was the search for the parents of her great grandfather, Edmund Meagher. Edmund Meagher married Harriet Beecher Stowe Alexander in Melbourne in 1875 and died in Adelaide in 1935. No parents were listed on his death certificate, so, I decided to attack the problem from another angle – by researching … Continue reading

The Old Mill…But which one?

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Much of what we learn about our ancestors comes from information gathered by us, the “family historians”, from birth, marriage and death certificates, census and immigration records and other documents gathered after hours of painstaking searching of every site and archive available to us. If we are lucky, we have family photos, hopefully labelled, and other handed down treasures and documents and we may find articles mentioning our family members in old newspapers. Often there are stories and “facts” passed … Continue reading

The story behind a photograph

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I love old photos. I really don’t care if they’re not my family, I just love the look of them – the clothes, buildings, styles and most of all, the stories behind them.  Some years ago, I managed to locate the descendants of my great grandfather’s half sister, Ephrath (Effie) Paulovich, and visited them at the family property at Widgee near Gympie. I had thought that this would be a day for chatting about family and finding out more about … Continue reading

So What’s in a name? Name variants and do they really matter?

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As a genealogist by trade, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients tell me something similar to this:  “He/she isn’t from our line because the surname is spelled Byrnes instead of Burns” or “Oh no, ours is Elliot with one ‘t’ – not two”, or “Our line is MacIntosh with an ‘a’ not “McIntosh”. And to be fair, they all truly believed it – they were quite unaware of the ever-annoying variants of surnames when tracing back … Continue reading