Rockborne38 on Family Tree Circles
Journals and Posts
Cribb family history
We have been researching the Cribb family of my grandma for more than 55 years and now have about .5 Gb of info, including birth, marriage and death records of the Cribb family from Somerset, Gloucestershire, Devon and some parts of Wales from 1809 and as far in some branches as current generations, and are happy to share our information with others in the family, or branches of the family in which females in the Cribb family married men with other names, and in those cases we do have info on most of their children as recent as those born before the mid 1980s. If you are a family member and wish to share info please contact us via this site
Daly Family in India
My grandfather had an older sister (my great Aunt) who married a man who was a doctor and served most of his life in India as a military doctor. His father was also a military doctor, and the family appeared to live in India for a few generations. The mother in law of my great Aunt was named Annie Cecilia nee Daly, I know that her father was Francis Dermot Daly and her mother was Cecilia. I have been told that the father of Francis Dermot Daly was Richard Daly, he was a bank manager in England. I have no idea of the birth date of Francis Dermot Daly, the date he married Cecilia, her maiden name, the name of the motehr of Francis Dermot Daly, when and where his father Richard was born and died, and very little information about any of them in those generations, and dont know where to look, as nothing found in the England BMD, and not sure where to look next, can anybody help me with records from India in the 1800s please
family history research in South Africa
We just wonder if there is anybody who is on this site who is able to find birth marriage and death records in South Africa, in particular in Natal and Cape Province, if so, we would love to make contact with them
Family photos
This is probably in the wrong place, but we have just read the article by ngairedith, about the value of family photos, and it reminded us of a man who served in the army with my husband. Most of us lived a great distance from our own families, and when our children went to the local school, it was only the "Army kids" who did not have grandparents to attend their school sports, fetes and similar things, but most of us, at some time, had our parents come to visit us, and thus the kids had their grandparents with them at least on some occasion when they visited and stayed with us in the many far flung places at which we were posted over the years. A friend of ours, another solider, had been brought up in an orphanage, he had no idea of who his parents were, and stayed in the orphanage till he was 17 then enlisted in the Army, and his children used to ask him when they would have their grandparents visit, and he told them that his parent were dead. One day he noticed two big picture frames in a second hand shop, the old fashioned semi circular ones, with a photo of a distinguished gentleman in one, and a well dressed lady in the other, so he purchased them, they were about two pounds each (this happened in 1962) and took them home, cleaned them, and hung them on the wall in the hallway of the family home, and when the children asked who they were, he told them they were his parents, and his children were so excited, and when their friends came to visit, they used to say to the friends, "Look, Dad got us some photos of my grandpa and grandma" and as far as we can recall, those photos took pride of place in their home wherever they lived. It was a fib he told them, but it made those three children so happy to know that they did have grandparents, even though they could not meet them, and we have no idea if he told them the truth when they grew older, but it certainly made three young children (aged in 1962 at 6, 8 and almost 10) so happy that they had "roots" and a set of grandparents they could see, even if only in a picture frame.
Hancock family of Somersetshire
I have found details of my maternal great grandmother Jane Hancock born 1844 in Somerset, England, and details of her birth and marriage, and birth records of her 9 siblings, but I am having problems finding marriages for those siblings. When I find a marriage record of any of them which appears to be them, I cant then find them on the census with their spouse, and would appreciate assistance of anybody else who is researching this same Hancock family, all of whom were born in the same county and whose birth was registered at the Axbridge registry office.
Knowledge is Power - or is it?
We have been very lucky over our more than 50 years of research into the families of both myself and my husband, and we have so many family members who send us a message, phone us or write to us, as soon as there is a new birth, marriage or death in the family, with all the details needed to add to our family history files, and in return for their trust, we never publish the names or any details of any family member on any website, for fear of the horrid identity theft taking place
But of course, just as other family history researchers have found, there are those family members who believe in the old adage that "Knowledge is Power" and think that by keeping information to themselves, it makes them powerful. For anybody who thinks that, in relation to family history, you do need to think again, because if you have the info and wont give it to other family researchers, they will find the info in some other way in any case, but you may find that you will not benefit from all the other info they also find, as by being secretive about family history issues, you will just find that the serious researchers will not bother to keep contact with you. We have a few in our family who fit this description exactly, and they really do lose by their attitude, so to all family history researchers out there, family history should be for all family members, share what you have, and believe instead that the other adage of "What goes around comes around" is just as true, and share your knowledge of your family generously with other members of your family, write a book about them, add the history to a disk or USB stick and send a copy to other family members, arrange Family Reunions, visit family members who you have never personally met before, it is so much fun and so rewarding.
Lorna Black nee Picton nee Boyd
I am searching for this lady, she is a cousin of my father. Her mother was an older sister of my grandfather. I particularly would like to find her two sons Ralph and Peter or their descendants. I have lots of info about the family, but can find no info about Lorna or her sons after she married for the second time in 1946 to Ian D Black. I was told by another researcher that the two sons attended a school in Dorset, but have contacted that school and they have advised that neither of her sons attended that school, so it appears that some researchers just get things wrong, and I would really like to make contact with some part of this family to add info to our family history
More on the frustations of Family History research
The other thing we have found amazing about the years we have spent researching the history of the families on both of our sides, is the secretive attitude of some family members, they just will not give us info when we ask questions, even about their own branch of the family, and especially about their close family in current generations
we have no trees on any site which is open for view by others, we just keep our family history files on our own computer, back the files up regularly onto an external hard drive, and happy to share all the info we have with any other family member, provided they will give us info about their own branch to fill in holes in our trees
Last year (2012) we wrote a book, all about the family of John James Shufflebottom who came to Australian in 1829 at a convict, we wrote the book in conjunction with a cousin in the family who is also a serious researcher, and it covers the generations as far down as his great grandchildren, and not further, as that would involve details of so many living family members. Because of the cost of printing being so expensive, we only put it on a disk, and then told all the family members with whom we were in contact that it was finished, and would cost them the price of registered postage to send them a copy, so they got more than 50 years of research for a very small cost.
We sent out 156 copies of the disk and refused to send a disk to only two family members, and we would not send them a copy because they would not even tell us the names and details of their own children and grandchildren, told us it was a privacy issue, and that the Privacy Act prevented them from telling us. That is just so much rubbish, the Privacy Act does not cover family members giving family information to other family members. The Privacy Act does cover the release of information to professional researchers who are being paid to do the research, but NOT family members sharing information
Have others had this same thing happen to them, it is the cause of so much frustration to us.
Our huge family in England, Australia, USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand
Today we deleted most of our posts which we made over the last few years. We did that because our original intention was to make contact with others in the family of both myself and my husband, who were researching the same families, and in that way, make contact with cousins. We only ever asked questions to which we knew the answer, in the hope that those cousins would contact us, but what we have found is that info we gave to them from our own research over more than 50 years has so often been added to ancestry or similar site of some of those cousins, without any attribution to our research and so often with other incorrect info with no basis in fact and no proof of being correct. That did not worry us, but they usually added the info without adding the citation that we had given them, thus making it difficult for those who found their site to establish the truth of the entries they had made. So we decided, enough is enough, if anybody out there is researching the families of my husband (Vincent, Connolly, Peareth, Davison, Lowman. Boyd, Mowles, Cribb, Mandry) or my family, (Stone, Phillips, Basing, Wise, Fry, Keeling, Myall, Bullock, Shufflebottom, Stevens, Hillman, Harris), or other related families in our ancestry, then please contact us via this site. We have no trees on Ancestry or any similar site as we believe that family history is for family only, but are most happy to share with any family member, provided you give us an undertaking that you will not publish that info on the web.
Re Family History research and some rubbish we find
You will note from my profile that I am researching many families, my husband and I are researching both sides of our family, so we have researched the familes of our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents, and our great great grandparents, and in some of the families, we have been lucky enough to find information even in earlier generations than those, for example, because the mother of one of my g/g/grandparents had lived in the same village in England for more than 500 years, and all family members had been baptised in the same church, then married there, then their burial service was also held there and they were buried in the church cemetery, we were able to trace that branch back to 1496, we were just lucky that the priest was astute enough to hide the church record books when the King threw all the Catholic priests out and either burned churches or placed ministers there who were receptive to his idea of how churches should obey his rules
the one thing that has struck us in our research is the number of people who place trees on Ancestry and similar sites, and just copy info from other trees without doing any research themselves, and we found some public trees on one site that shows the parents of a family member being born about 25 or more years before their son, another where they show a man married at the age of 4, another where a man is shown married in NSW in the mid 1800s, yet they then show him as being present at the 1851 census in England even though he had been transported for life to Australia and died here in the mid 1800s. We have found so many errors like that, and we commend to all researchers, if you cant find a document that proves your information is correct, then dont add it to your tree, as chances are, it may not be correct, and dont just accept info from trees of others unless they can provide a citation to prove the information is correct. Our own family history files have now grown to just in excess of 40Gb, backed up weekly to two external hard drives.
good luck with your research, and if you are researching any of the same families that we are, then we are happy to share info with any family member.