Genealogy

 

I love the school holidays. Apart from having a break from a busy time at work, it gives me the opportunity to get stuck into some genealogy - I mean hours and hours of it! I can quite easily spend 8-10 hours a day just researching and sorting and puzzling through things. My poor garden does get a bit neglected and I find myself hoping for rain so I don't feel too guilty!

These holidays gave me the chance to tidy up some lines with the main purpose being able to try and track some DNA matches. You get matches with all sorts of people and often I find that we can't work out who that common ancestor is. So my goal was to set up something that meant that others could see where they might fit on my tree and hopefully be able to connect a few dots.

This fan chart started last year when I decided to do something for my children for Christmas. I did both my tree and the McLachlan tree, giving them a fairly full idea of their ancestry on both sides of the family. Both had gaps with dates not complete, or names missing, so I decided to work on filling in some of these on my line. Although there are still a few gaps and a couple of "I'm fairly sure" guesses, it is looking a lot more complete than the one I did last year. 

This is a printout from MyHeritage. I don't put my tree online generally, but found this was a really good way to present this information so I've put the basics up there, enough just to print this out. The limitations are that you can only have 250 people in your tree for free, I'm sitting on 241 with the Eason and McLachlan trees, so I won't be putting much more up there - maybe a few gap fillers if I find them. I do like the way it looks - it's very clean.

After doing the fan chart, I thought I'd see what the next generation looks like. As I couldn't do this in MyHeritage due to numbers, I used Charting Companion. I've used this a lot in the past for full circles of lines and did a number of descendant circles for the McLachlan Reunion in 2013.

I did a circle for each of the lines that came out to New Zealand and did them in different colours, but hadn't done an ancestor one until today.

The difficulty is that I have my Sagar and Eason lines in different files. I decided not to join them together early on in my research and they have stayed apart. It's something I'll have a think about - it would be useful when putting pretty things together but when I'm researching, the files get very large. The Eason one in particular, because I'm doing a One Name Study, it has Eason's from all over the world. Having my Sagar line in there could get a little confusing I think.

Anyway, I did the Eason and Sagar lines to see what they looked like - taking them out the 8 generations back. They are not pretty yet, but I just wanted to see what was missing and this certainly gives me a really good view.

I'm missing a fair bit, not the Eason name itself, as I know I have more even further back, but many of the others need filling in.

The question is always - how far do you go? These are my great great great (x lots) grandparents, but often in lines that we don't always think of. Most of us research our name (generally paternal line) or our maternal line, but then once again following the paternal grandfather. It's interesting to follow different lines back and often see where some of those obscure middle names have come from!

So, both the Sagar and Eason lines have now spread into Metcalfe, Gildon, Holmes, Anderson, Hill and Phillipson lines and it only gets bigger from there!

In working my way back I am finding all sorts of interesting things, some unusual middle names (I finally found where the Avern came from in my GG Grandmother's name) and some interesting forenames - Mr Brown White is definitely one for the books!

So, next step is to fill in the next generation all round I think. It would be good to get a few more filled out - I won't be going back down every line, but it would be nice to have as many of my 5 x great grandparents names.

Part of me hopes it will rain all next week.....