Filling in blanks on family tree

PETER GRIFFIN looks into the evolving art of tracing ancestors on the web.

A few weeks ago, Sally Mills posted a message on a bulletin board at genuki.com, one of the better-known sites for people researching ancestors in Britain and Ireland.

She was interested in finding relatives called Gardner.

"Have you seen that movie called Six Degrees of Separation? I think in New Zealand it's more like two degrees of separation," she says.

The Parnell-based genealogist has good reason for believing in such a theory.

Out of the chaos of names, dates and official records listed on the web, she has been able to fill in many of the blanks in her family tree and discover she attended school in Christchurch with relatives she never knew she had.

By chance, the message posted by Sally Mills was seen by another web surfer - the curator of the Deale Museum in Kent, England. He was looking to track down Gardner families who had emigrated. The two began swapping information via the web.

Using the huge search engine run by the Mormon Church - familysearch.org - Sally Mills was able to use information supplied by the curator to extend her own searches and find a man from her past.

"The curator found him on the 1851 census. From that I found his christening on the net. I found his parents from that and then put his parents' names into the search engine and found eight members of his family."

Not only did she find ancestors she didn't know she had, the curator was able to give her details of Gardner relations living in the South Island.

"I've found an entire family on the web. This Gardner family, it's almost as though they've rattled their bones up there and said, find us," says Sally Mills.

She will go to Christchurch on Sunday to meet assorted relatives at a Gardner family reunion expected to be attended by about 140 people.

Sally Mills communicated with the curator throughout the process via e-mail. They sent each other documents as attachments, but she says she will order film copies of various documents to double-check the family ties herself.

"I've had wonderful luck with the net, but be careful. Make jolly sure they actually are your family. And it can be frustrating searching."

Of the billions of web pages that make up the internet, a huge number are devoted to genealogy. One website, cyndislist.com, boasts 90,000 links.

And the genealogical giants such as rootsweb.com and ancestry.com seem to crop up wherever you surf.

But how many of them will help you find your long-lost ancestors?

"Everything on the internet is either trash or treasure," says Glendowie-based Beehive Books owner and NetGuide columnist Jan Gow.

Regarded as one of the most active genealogists in the country, Jan Gow was hunting high and low for relatives long before the internet as we know it was born. For her, endless hours of squinting at a microfiche screen and leafing through faded card files for family records have been replaced with endless hours of surfing the web.

She suggests fresh-faced genealogists start with the most basic of internet tools, the search engine.

The likes of yahoo.com, google.com and altavista.com are likely to uncover family crest sites or the odd online article or bulletin board message. Gendoor.com is a search engine that will specifically trawl genealogy resources.

But search engines are only as good as the websites they "crawl." Jan Gow says a surname, specific location and time frame need to be fed into a search engine together.

It was frustration with the vast tangle of genealogy resources on the net that urged genealogist John ten Velde to set up his own search engine.

"The idea was that all those pages, published by scores of people, would be searchable in one place," he says.

Nice idea, and one that has been seized on wherever you go on the net. There seem to be as many genealogy link pages on the web as pages actually holding information. If you are not careful you can easily spend your time bouncing from one site to the next in a never-ending cycle of links.

Mr ten Velde's "New Zealand Genealogy Search Engine" is as good a place as any to start New Zealand or international searches. Once again, what you feed in will determine what a search reveals. He also recommends joining the New Zealand Genealogy e-mail group.

"This is one of many genealogy-related groups hosted by Rootsweb. They cover geographical areas, name-specific areas and many others.

"It is also useful for following the trails of others. They can often lead to common ancestors or locations."

Almost as important is storing on your computer the screeds of information you have painstakingly assembled.

From shipping passenger lists and census information to war graves records and births, deaths and marriages lists, the internet can be mined for a large amount of detail that demands methodical storage.

"There are many genealogy software packages available. The one I use is personal ancestral file (PAF), which happens to be free for downloading from www.familysearch.org," says Mr ten Velde.

You may want to share that information with the rest of the world.

After all, others following the same surnames may stumble across your site via a search engine and offer you their own useful information.

"Probably the easiest way to share what you have is to generate what is known as a GEDCOM file from your genealogy software and upload it to a site specifically designed for this."

A site such as http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com is one avenue for doing this. Templates at homestead.com and familysearch.org will guide you through the process of building your own site.

Don't feel you have to open your wallet to gain access to information of value. A number of genealogy sites will happily take your money for a glimpse at a record crucial to your search, but generally the information will be posted free somewhere.

For ancestor searches within New Zealand, the maze of broken links is no less annoying. But a few decent resources stand out. The New Zealand archives, the Hocken research library and the National Library of New Zealand are good places to visit.

Many Maori tribes now have their own websites, which has made the tracing of whakapapa (genealogy) all the easier. A good start point is maaori.com/whakapapa, although the local knowledge of tribal elders could save hours of searching.

"We haven't too many official sites that are really good," says Jan Gow.

"The New Zealand Genealogy Society has a lot of resources, but I don't think they have plans to put them on the web as they've got a lot of members who pay for that information. There's a fine line they've got to tread there."

There is also a lot to be said for doing things the old-fashioned way.

"Nothing takes the place of visiting the village of your ancestors and photographing the local church," says Jan Gow, who has made trips to Britain to trace her own ancestry back to the 1300s and to the sister of William the Conqueror.


Links:


Gendoor

Genuki

Ancestry.com

Rootsweb

Homestead

Beehivebooks

Cyndilist

Family search

NZ Genalogy Search Engine

NZ Archives

Hocken research library

National Library of NZ

Maaori.com