I Am Ethically Chinese Living IN Australia and I D Like

By PW168 January 9, 2011 1239 views 2 comments

to find out more about my heritage but don't know where to start? Can anybody give me some ideas where to start?

Comments (2)

allycat

Start with yourself and work backwards, carefully documenting all notations of records of instances of birth, death, baptismal, marriage and any other records found. Choose how you are going to document all the data you start collecting. It's rather tedious at first doing it by hand, but there are many blank charts and forms that you can fill out, see here at Rootsweb for example. Or you can choose to download software like 'Personal Ancestral File' from the LDS Church Database website FamilySearch.

See if anyone else in the family has already done work on your genealogies. Ask if they can supply you with photocopies of bdm certs.

Do you at least know the names of your grandparents? Your great grandparents?

Think about having your family tree online say http://www.geni.com is a good starting point, free website. When you click on the link, it will ask you to begin your tree (just start by entering your own name). Then when you become more proficient you can upgrade to GeniPro for a small fee.

The National Archives of Australia is a great repository of documents, photographs, posters, maps, films and sound recordings. Just click on 'search now' as a guest, type in your surname in the keyword search area and click on search.

With common and popular surnames it pays to be VERY careful that you don't research the wrong family.

China Genealogy Forum - there's one for Australia also. And if you goto the 'jump to forum' field right-hand of the screen you can enter the surname you are seeking to goto that particular genealogy forum.

At FamilyTreeCircles, please update your profile to include all the surnames you are researching, written in uppercase and separated by commas.

Best wishes.

NZBC

http://siyigenealogy.proboards.com/index.cgi

http://chinesecommunity.org.nz/