Start is the first prompt in the 52 Ancestors challenge - writing something about an ancestor each week for a year. I'm writing about how I started researching my family history.
My interest in following the family history began about 10 years ago after a conversation about my maternal great grandmother's cause of death. She had been institutionalised at some point after the birth of my grandmother and had died there 20 or so years later. It was determined at the time that we should look into her death (rumoured to be caused by a pituitary tumour) to confirm if this was the case.
A quick Google search that day produced a few records that piqued my interest. Mum knew of a story of a baby being burnt and dying of these injuries. One search turned up a record of a baby's grave in a Grafton cemetery so, at the time, we assumed this was the baby. Another record indicated a bankruptcy.
Other casual research turned up other information about the family and I had the outline of a family tree from the time the family had arrived from Germany. I connected with a couple of distant relatives and slowly pieced the puzzle of the Mäthenius family together. My aunt expressed a desire to find out where in Germany that they had come from, something that I have yet to completely confirm. From then I have done extensive research on the family and have been able to trace most of their movements from the time they arrived in NSW in about 1861 (they had arrived in 1856 and spent 4 years somewhere in Qld). Most of the information I've found has been been pieced together using Trove and other internet sources.
I've mostly been concentrating on one family line, but have others to follow so have plenty of material to keep me researching for a while yet!
My interest in following the family history began about 10 years ago after a conversation about my maternal great grandmother's cause of death. She had been institutionalised at some point after the birth of my grandmother and had died there 20 or so years later. It was determined at the time that we should look into her death (rumoured to be caused by a pituitary tumour) to confirm if this was the case.
A quick Google search that day produced a few records that piqued my interest. Mum knew of a story of a baby being burnt and dying of these injuries. One search turned up a record of a baby's grave in a Grafton cemetery so, at the time, we assumed this was the baby. Another record indicated a bankruptcy.
Other casual research turned up other information about the family and I had the outline of a family tree from the time the family had arrived from Germany. I connected with a couple of distant relatives and slowly pieced the puzzle of the Mäthenius family together. My aunt expressed a desire to find out where in Germany that they had come from, something that I have yet to completely confirm. From then I have done extensive research on the family and have been able to trace most of their movements from the time they arrived in NSW in about 1861 (they had arrived in 1856 and spent 4 years somewhere in Qld). Most of the information I've found has been been pieced together using Trove and other internet sources.
I've mostly been concentrating on one family line, but have others to follow so have plenty of material to keep me researching for a while yet!