I have just generated a long-overdue update to my family tree. There is a lot of new information in it now that wasn’t there before. New cousins, new ancestors, new information about ancestors I already knew about. Of course, I didn’t have to spend all day adding all the new information I’ve found since then into my family tree program. I do this as I find it.

I also didn’t spend as much time as I should have fixing up my sources. I first starting using a program to collect my family tree information about ten years ago, and I didn’t know what I was doing in those days, I just did it. I am slowly fixing them up but it takes time – time I don’t have – so I just live with it as it is. I would rather publish the sources I have, warts and all, than leave them out.

What took the most time was adding to the list of family and new friends who have helped me along the way. The list gets longer and longer every year. I’ve lost touch with some of them, and some we’ve lost altogether. Some are now friends on Facebook.

All have been generous sharing what they know with me and with others, and I’d like to acknowledge all of them here:

Larraine Abbey, Joe Andrews, Stein Andrews, Marion Batchelor, Irene Bell, PJS Boaden, Jennifer Brooks, Judith Anne Brunskill, Margaret Burns, Talai Burness, Graham Campbell, Anne Chambers, Jean Chambers, Russell Cooper, Narelle Corbett, Orlin Craig, Mareta Davila, Gillian Eason, William Eason (“Uncle Bill”), Leigh Evans, Steven Evans, Karla Eyre, Larraine (Ewin) Abbey, Russ Ewin, Emma Field, Michael Flynn, Norm Flynn, Geoffrey Goode, Helen Harman, Dianne Marie Hoger, Deborah Horrocks, Terry Riley Hulme, Betty Hunt, Lena Irvine, Raewyn Irwin, Jackie Jensen, Olwen Jonklaas, Terri Keck, Alicia-may Laaman, Sharyn Lamont, Christine Liava’a, Yola Macken, John Francis MacKenny, Martha Martin, Brad McKenzie, Greig Melrose, Graeme Moad, Fran Morton, Courtney Oates, Ken Oates, Paul Padley, Rae Paine, Richard Parata, Wayne Parker, Jo Parsons, Melanie Pascoe, June Paterson, Florence Petersen, Gretel Pickering, Winston Kitchener Powell, Graham Ralph, Mireya Ranger, Lady Jessie Richmond, Adi Milian Riley, Diane Riley, Everett Riley, Lavenia [Riley], Tulia Riley, Julie Ruzsicska, Nigel and Vinita Sharma, Jenny Shea, Milford Southon, Lisa Steedman, Dulcie (O’Connor) Stewart, Gail Stewart, Ken Sutherland, Margaret Taylor, Mary Taylor, Elizabeth Nicholls Walling, Peter Webster, Michael Whippy, Paul B Whippy, Tui Benau Whippy and Judy Woodley.

If any of you are reading this now, please accept my heartfelt gratitude for your kindness and generosity.

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Week 3: Cars. What was your first car? Describe the make, model and color, but also any memories you have of the vehicle. You can also expand on this topic and describe the car(s) your parents drove and any childhood memories attached to it.

I’m going to jump straight to family cars. Here is my Mum’s car. She learned to drive after her marriage to my Dad ended and we moved back to Dubbo where her parents were. She bought the car second hand from her father. It was a Valiant, a beige Valiant station wagon. It had a bench seat in the front so we could seat three in the front when necessary. As the eldest of four I sat in the front and the other kids in the back.

The house I grew up in, with the car next to it.

My first driving lessons were in this car. It was a terrible thing, big and heavy. It had a column shift, coming out of the steering column. I ran it into a tree ( I nearly missed it!) at a very low speed and not a scratch did the car suffer.

This is the only photo I can find that has the car in it that doesn’t show people that may not want to be displayed for all to see in my blog. Some of them are in this picture too, but I’m confident that they’re privacy is secure.

I will save the commentary on the house for a future post which I’m sure will be coming over the next few months.

My grandfather had a small farm in his semi-retirement. He used to take my sister and me out there on Sundays, and we used to ride in the back of the ute. We watched farming stuff going on – sheep being dipped and so on. We got our cat from a litter of kittens on the farm. Here we are disembarking after one of these trips:

Pop's ute

I don’t know when riding in the back of a ute became illegal. Perhaps it was already illegal by then. We loved it!

Here is my grandfather and his young family in perhaps the mid-1930s. I like to think this was his first car, but I don’t really know.

Grandfather's car

Actually I’m only guessing that it’s his car. He’s in the middle and looking proprietorial so I think I’m safe. I can imagine the family piling into the car and chugging off home, with all these other people waving them off.

Any information about what sort of car this is would be very welcome!

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It’s Christmas Eve, and we’ve had a nice quiet dinner at home with the Christmas ham and a bottle of champagne. The corny Christmas TV programs are over. The tree is all lit up; the presents are wrapped and piled up underneath.

The house is all clean and the floors and ceilings vacuumed (spider webs). The fridge is full of food and the bar fridge full of sparkling wine (and a ham).

Christmas Day will be spent with family, and really, that’s what it’s for.

Merry Christmas!

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I had decided to take advantage of a special deal with 23andMe and get my DNA tested. I am hoping to learn a bit about my deep ancestry from my mitochondrial DNA in this test, as well as some genetic health risks and susceptibilities.

I tried to order the kit a few days before. I eventually realised that my first order with 23andMe didn’t go through, so I ordered again. I received confirmation that it has been sent, which I hadn’t had before, so obviously I had done something wrong, or not done something, before. So far so good!

Timeline so far:

9 Dec 2010 – I ordered a kit from 23andMe

10 Dec 2010 – Kit was shipped from 23andMe

13 Dec 2010 – Kit arrived at my front door

15 Dec 2010 – I spat my sample into the test tube

16 Dec 2010 – Sample collected by courier

21 Dec 2010 – Sample arrived at the 23andMe lab, and I was reminded to register my kit on the website

The process takes 6-8 weeks, so there will be no new updates for a while.

In the meantime, I had ordered some books from Amazon. That order did go through, and all 5 of them have arrived – 3 all at once and the other 2  individually. I’ve read the first 3, the last one being Megan Smolenyak and Ann Turner’s Trace Your Roots with DNA, (2001). Even though the book is nearly 10 years old it gives an excellent introduction to the basics of DNA testing. They discuss the coming developments pretty accurately – more markers, more usefulness for mtDNA, more popularity and so better chances of matching with someone else’s test results.

All this reading has inspired me to more testing! I’ve ordered a test for my maternal uncle, and one for my unsuspecting father or brother.

I’ve also changed companies. I will be using Family Tree DNA for these and probably all subsequent tests. It’s not that I think that they are a better company, or do better tests; it’s more that they do different tests.

Family Tree DNA are more concerned with pure genealogy, whereas 23andMe are more concerned with the health aspects of DNA. It will be interesting to compare the two. Family Tree DNA has, as far as I can tell, the largest number of  projects.

A project is what you join if you want to find matches with other people who may be relatives. The pricing is less expensive if you join a project. Most of the projects are for surnames. My husband, for example, is part of the Bassett project, so he can see how closely he is related to other Bassetts around the world, and where their most recent common ancestor came from. There is little point in getting your DNA tested unless you want to compare it with others’.

Other projects are for geographic areas. My uncle is one of the last of a line of Easons, the first of whom came to Australia from County Tyrone in what is now Northern Ireland, so he will be part of the Ulster Project. The story we were told was that Eason was originally a French Huguenot name with a d’ on the front of it. I have not found any evidence of this as yet, but then my trail runs cold in 1813 with the marriage of Sarah Irwin of Clogher, Tyrone, to Richard Eason of Armagh.

Family Tree DNA do not use couriers unless requested, so this story will unfold a little more slowly.

Image courtesy of Chris Harvey at Dreamstime.

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Blog posts are a snapshot in time. Just as a photograph can tell you a lot about someone, so can a blog post, even when they talk about seemingly trivial things. Even memes, those things that seem to go around like a craze in primary school, can be meaningful.

I have been sorting through old drafts that were never published, and I found this one from October 2008:

Ten years ago I was:

1. Working on the implementation of a new computer system to prepare for Y2K
2. Sharing our new house with my sister’s family until theirs was ready to move into
3. Wondering how long my mother’s new marriage would last (not long)
4. Planting Australian natives in the garden
5. Spending too much money

Five things on today’s to-do list:

1. Give the cat his antibiotics (done)
2. Call my Dad to see how my step-mother is doing (trying)
3. Go and see my step-mother in hospital
4. Meet an old friend for lunch (will do)
5. Do some neglected housework (not done)

Five snacks I enjoy:

1. My sister’s brownies
2. Yoghurt
3. A banana, or some grapes
4. dry-roasted cashews
5. Did I mention my sister’s brownies?

Five places I have lived (in no particular order):

1. Beautiful leafy Hornsby in Sydney’s northern suburbs (for the last 20-odd years)
2. Dubbo in Central Western New South Wales (where I grew up)
3. A flat in Rockdale in Sydney’s south (while I was at uni)
4. A semi-detached house in inner-city Stanmore (when I was finishing uni and starting work)
5. Suva, Fiji (for about 6 months when I was 12)

Five jobs I have had:

1. Salesgirl at Woolworths Variety when I was 14 or 15
2. Sales assistant at Angus and Robertson book store in Dubbo between school and uni
3. Bar attendant at a couple of southern Sydney pubs while I was at uni
4. Clerk for the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs for a couple of years when I finished uni
5. Computer programmer at the gas company

Five places I would like to visit:

1. Ireland – Northern Ireland and the Republic
2. The National Archives of Fiji
3. Namibia (again)

None of this will have any significance for anyone outside of my family, I suspect. For my close family, however, it may mean a great deal. Not only does it say to anyone who is interested some details of my past and present life, but it has some bearing on other events that had great significance.

I suspect that I didn’t finish the post because of what was going on at the time. I did talk to my Dad about how my step-mother was doing, and I went to see her in hospital every day and sat with her while my sister, her daughter, raced home to get things done. We moved her home when the hospital could no longer do anything for her, and after a few days she passed away, in her own bed with her family around her. Only 11 days after I wrote this.

It still hurts that she was taken so soon. 60 is young, these days. Her father lived much, much longer.

I also remember meeting the old friend for lunch. He told me a trick to do with parking near the hospital before the afternoon peak hour.

It was a shock to read through this post after all this time. I thought I would share it with my family, and anyone else who is interested.

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I have posted previously about letting Picasa 3 scan for faces so I can identify them. I had hoped to publish the results at the time but I was caught up with other things and didn’t get a chance.

Unfortunately I don’t have an accurate record of how long it took. I started it on about the 1st October with 14,000 photos to process. On the 4th it was 50% completed after I had added an additional 5000 photos because I added some of the folders under Documents. On the 5th it was saying all day that it had 51% to go. Then that evening it changed to 52%. I thought it was going to take another week, but the next day it was finished.

That’s 5-6 days. For 19,000 photos.

It ran for 24 hours a day, and I only closed it down occasionally when it was slowing down what I was doing. It used an average of 45% of my CPU, so sometimes this was a problem. I don’t remember the processor that my laptop has, but it’s a bit over 2 years old.

Of course, not all of these photos have people in them – there are landscapes, wildlife, and images of documents.

Some things I have noticed:

• if I sign in to Google it can get the names from my contacts list
• it runs very slowly at other times and quite quickly at others
• it picks up faces from the covers of books and photos on the wall behind the real people
• it can find faces in very fuzzy pictures
• it is not bothered by hats and sunglasses
• it quite often suggests the wrong person but that person is closely related, such as a sister, aunt or grandmother
• it identifies people more accurately the more photos you have identified
• it can identify people at all ages in their lives
• it is better at identifying babies than I am
• it doesn’t recognise cats, dogs or gorillas, although it did identify one front-on picture of a dog
• I have a lot of duplicate photos, and when I identify one it suggests the same name for the others very quickly
• I am terrible at remembering names
• I nearly have more photos of my nieces than I have of my husband or myself

By the time it finished it said it still had about 6500 faces to identify. I am slowly whittling those down. I now have just over 5000. There are also the faces it can’t identify as faces, which I have to do manually if I want it done at all.

It seems to have trouble with faces if they are:

• at an angle
• have hair over one side
• side-on unless they are completely from the side
• really, really fuzzy

And yet sometimes it sees a face where there isn’t one. I thought this one must be in the background somewhere.

He looks like he has a little beard and a receding hairline.

This is the photo it came from:

Can you see the face, in the top right corner? Not a face at all!

It also picks up the hundreds of faces in the backgrounds of photos and wants to know who they are. You can mark each one as ignored, and you can see these later if you want to. When the Sydney Harbour Bridge was 75 years old they opened it to the public to walk across, and the photos from that day have many people in the background. Fortunately they are mostly wearing lime green hats so I could quickly exclude them when I saw them.

All the people in a wedding photo can be identified if you have already identified them elsewhere. Even if you don’t know their names you can give them a number, like Wedding 12, and group photos of the same person together. You can then more easily identify the person, or a relative can, when you can see a number of photos of the same person together.

I have had a wonderful time with Picasa, and I still am. I am finally learning, through having to identify photos, which of my grandmother’s three sisters is which, and what my mother’s older brothers looked like when they were young.

I have also very much enjoyed seeing pictures of the same person throughout their lives all in the one place. Here are some of my grandmother Amy Eason nee Stewart:

You can see her from the earliest photo of her that I have, when she was a baby; as a teenager, a young mother, and so on all through her life. The photos are of varying quality but the only one I had to manually identify was the blurry side-on one in the 3rd row.

A valuable lesson I learned was in trying to identify what it is that makes this person look like that person. What is it in my face that Picasa mistakes for my grandmother’s? Or two of three nieces but not the third?

To be fair, sometimes Picasa is totally wrong. It tried to tell me that this same grandmother was in a shot of my husband posing with the Wests Tigers rugby league team. It wasn’t. When it ‘groups’ unnamed faces it tends to put faces together that are shot at the same angle. Sometimes I think it is suggesting names based on the frequency with which that name appears, or on the previously identified name, but that might just be my cynicism.

All in all I am so glad I went through this exercise. Identifying faces has become my procrastination-of-choice, and it has made me much more likely to name the faces of photos I have just taken rather than leave it for years when I can no longer remember the names. I am also determined to research the names I should know but can’t remember – school classmates, fellow safari tourists, even Wests Tigers. All those unnamed faces bother me!

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It’s Australia Day, and I was inspired by Shelley’s blog to find out what happening on this day in my own family’s past.

Here are the highlights:

1616 – Eleanor Nicholas, my 9th great grandmother, was baptised in St Keverne, Cornwall.

1823 – Martha Miles, my 3rd great-grandmother, was baptised in the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Towcester, Northamptonshire. She married George Goode from Yardley Hastings, Northamptonshire and they migrated to New South Wales with their two young daughters.

1840 – James Pascoe, baby brother of my 3rd great-grandfather Henry Pascoe of St Keverne, Cornwall, was baptised. He died unmarried  when he was only 31.

1865 – Grace Pascoe nee Oates, my 3rd great-grandmother, her daughter Bessie, and her mother Elizabeth Oates nee Williams arrived in Sydney on the Hornet from Plymouth as assisted immigrants, eventually joining their brothers and sons in the Millthorpe area of New South Wales. Eleanor Nicholas was her 4th great-grandmother.

2008 – dear Uncle Ray passed away after a long illness.

For all but the last one there was no ‘Australia’, let alone Australia Day.

To find out how I got the list out of my family tree software, see this blog.

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I’ve recently updated my Facebook photo from the Christmas version to my normal one. The normal one is taken from an unusual angle, and it’s a bit fuzzy. I love it, though, because of the photographer and the circumstances in which it was taken.

My niece turned 13 early last year, and for her birthday her parents had approved a mobile phone. This is no ordinary 13-year-old – she looks after her things amid the chaos of living in a small house full of teenage girls. So the day this photo was taken I took her shopping to buy her the Aunty Carole present,  and we looked for her mobile at the same time.

In the end the mobile she wanted was more expensive than her parents had approved, but with my contribution would work out. We called her Dad, he said yes, and we bought the phone and went home with it.

The battery had a bit of charge, and she started playing with the camera. She took this photo of me as I was leaving – the car keys are in my hand.

So every time I see this photo it reminds me of her, and what a good day we had that day. It’s not a great photo as a portrait of me, but I love it. She’s taller than me, as you can see.

Memories

So it’s the memories associated with the photo that make it special. I used to find this when I would edit the enormous numbers of prints from an overseas holiday. We used to go to exotic places with wildlife (and we will again one day), and we’d come home with dozens of rolls of film. When the photos were developed I’d sort through them and choose the best to put in an album. [This is like a history lesson, we don't do this any more!]

Sometimes it was hard to choose the right photo, because the memories attached to the photo outweighed the objective interest of the photo itself. The first lion we spotted in Africa resulted in a photo of a small blob in a large expanse of yellow grass, which could just as easily have been a bush. Anyone looking at the photo would not give it a second glance, but for me it brings back the excitement of the day, with everyone leaning out that side of the truck trying to decide what it was, and realising it was a lion! The first iceberg on the way to the Antarctic peninsula is equally unspectacular. So the photos are in the albums even though they mean nothing, and may be uninterpretable, to anyone else.

Family history

Perhaps this is a by-product of the Camera Age, where we all take way too many photos and keep them all. Or the Tourist Age. I was recently subjected to the digital photos of a nephew’s trip to Egypt, all 1050 of them. Overseas trips are particularly susceptible to this. After I had chosen the photos and put them in the album I would check with my husband to see if I’d left any out that he has particular memories of – a shot re remembers trying to take of a leopard, or whatever, that had no significance for me.

Looking through old family albums, then, may not be the time-consuming process it is for more recent ones, but the same principle applies. Before you flick past to the next page, looking for a face you recognise, think about the photo you are looking at.

Why that building? Or that tree? What could it’s significance have been? Who took it? Is the format different from all the others, an indication that someone else’s camera was involved?  Do the same people, or buildings, or even trees, keep turning up? Is it just a blob in the grass?

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Carole’s Family Tree

I have been researching my family tree for a few years now, and there is always more information to find, more names to research, more relatives to talk to. My Australian family surnames are Eason, Irwin, Ewin, and Bell from Northern Ireland; Goode, Miles, Oates and Pascoe from England; and Stewart, Thomson and Simpson from Scotland. My Fijian surnames are Riley, Andrews, Whippy, O’Connor, Brown and Simpson.

My family tree is not complete – it may never be complete. It’s here so that you can contact me if you see anything that looks relevant to you or you if would like to add something to it.

Click here to enter my family tree.

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In my previous post I mentioned the concept of the “good ancestor” and I think it deserves a bit more explanation.

When I first saw the term I was thinking, as a genealogist, about all the things we wish our ancestors had done, for example:

• saved all the documents – birth, marriage and death certificates, baptismal certificates, electricity bills…
• taken lots of photographs of family members and saved them all and labelled each person in them with the date and place in a non-damaging way
• written a diary or journal and kept them all
• writtten down the stories their grandparents told them

But that’s not what it means. It’s a more general, community type of saving. It’s being wise with the resources we all have and making sure we use them in a sustainable way so that they are still around for our children’s children. It’s being mindful of how our descendants will talk about the previous generations in the future. Watch the videos on Good Ancestor Workshops for more information.

Looking around us now I would say that our descendants will have cause to curse us. Global warming, financial crises caused by greed, reliance on fossil fuels… There is a long list of things that are wrong with the world today that we blame our ancestors for, and our descendants will blame us for.

There are many ways to be a good ancestor. We can start at home by using less power. Turn off the lights. Switch off the elctrical appliances. Use less hot water. Drive less. Pump up the tyres. Recycle. Buy products with less packaging. Take fewer plane trips. Adjust the thermostat. Plant trees.

The recent Earth Hour shows that people are interested in changing the way we use our resources, although I think it will take something more to make us change our day-to-day habits. People who were careful to turn the lights off at the appropriate time on the Saturday night were leaving them on when they left the room the next evening, at least in my household. 

I don’t have the answers, I’m just posing the questions.

Sources

An Inconvenient Truth. Website. http://www.climatecrisis.net. 

Earth Hour. Website. http://www.earthhour.org/home

Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica. Website. http://munnecke.com/blog/?cat=76

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