Zombies in the Family Tree
Yesterday Kristy and I spent many hours deep in research to try and sort out the children of a convict family we are researching. This family don’t have any previous stories written about them. They are one of the many un-famous convict families who seem to be at the top of a great many family trees with that ubiquitous blank profile under their names.
Their story is amazing and the more we dig into them, the more we find, but, the children’s lives are rather tangled in the records, to say the least. Thomas and Mary only had daughters so tracing them is dependent on ascertaining, with complete certainty, just who married who and it is a bit tricky. It’s trickiness is only worsened when they become referred to in reports as Mrs. Whoever, instead of Elizabeth or Mary Whoever. Women really were just goods and chattel to men for such a long time but that’s for another whinge on another day.
We had planned to really hit the NSW Births, Deaths and Marriage site yesterday with a vengeance, and lo and behold, as has become the norm since someone had the bright idea to ‘fix’ the site, it was down again…. all day. Really, REALLY frustrating once more. Seriously, when something ‘ain’t broke’, don’t fix it! It was fine the way it always had been. So, in light of this hopelessness, and the fact that we don’t have many days together without interruption to do this research, we had to resort to Ancestry as a means of research. To cut a long story short, we started with 4 daughters, increased to 5, then slowly gained 8, whittled it back down to 4, and now we think we have it confirmed at 6.
Some of those daughters died in infancy, some died in young adulthood, some lived on and bred like all good Catholics of that era were meant to do. It wasn’t easy doing this through Ancestry but it really brought home the fact that a serious researcher must NEVER! (did I shout that loudly enough?) rely on other people’s trees for information.
It’s quite obvious from the start when hints come up that lead to Public Family Trees that some of the people have just copied information from other trees. That’s easy enough to weed out by looking at who has sources attached and who doesn’t. It’s also easy to weed out the ones who don’t have the right locations attached to the family yet have the same names. The weed wand also gets waved over the ones who have the wrong shipping information attached to the convict… (seriously, isn’t that the easiest thing to find?) but yesterday we found another method of sorting the useful from the useless…
… The Genealogical Kleptomaniacs who believe in zombie baby marriages.
Yes, you read that right. There are researchers out there who have copied others information which stated, categorically in vivid colour on our screen, that, a young female child who died a week after being baptised, went on to marry and give birth to two children who were actually the children of her father’s namesake from another convict ship. The Zombie Baby Apocalypse of Ancestry has begun.
Can’t wait till we find Dracula in the family too… if Anne Rice was still with us I'd be sending it to her and sitting back waiting for the royalties to pour in.