Say G’day to Your Ancestors

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

I’ve been obsessed with genealogy all summer. Never got around to it before. Was always put off by stories of having to apply for birth certificates and plough through dusty library files. No more! The internet makes it so very easy and fascinating. I’m amazed that in minutes I can call up a scan of the actual page on which a doctor wrote, in his inky scrawl, the reason for a great-great grandfather’s death. An abscess? At 29? Dear God. And there was his girl Ellen, not yet 30 and already a widow with a six-month-old baby. So what made her sail out to New Zealand in 1875? How can I find out?

Ah, that’s the fascination of it – the unfolding of old stories, the curiosity that makes you want come closer to people who weren’t just those grim old pops and grans in the sepia portraits, but were once were the lively, laughing, eager boys and girls whose blood now runs in our veins.

I’ve found such treasures, like this picture of the ship that brought the first of my English ancestors here in 1840. It was so small – just 130 tons, no bigger than a harbour ferry. What were they thinking to set out in that little tub, knowing they’d never see home or loved ones again?  

Ah, devoted missionary types. Nothing was going to stop them, not even being stalked by a boat they dreaded was a pirate ship, when their own guns were stowed out of reach deep in the hull. Such huge, adventurous lives they had, those early pioneers.

I’ve become passionate about all of this because I’m now running one-day writing workshops encouraging women to focus on their own lives. The idea is partly to put today’s family history down on paper for future generations, but also to help us realise what rich and dramatic lives we all have. No, don’t tell me you’re ordinary. There’s no such thing as an ordinary life!

I’m planning two more soon, one in Hamilton and one in Auckland – April 26 and May 9.  If you’re interested, check out www.storyofmylife.co.nz

We’ll mostly be focusing on our own journeys but none of them could happen without the ancestors who were responsible for putting us here.

Unbelievably, even when they’re long dead you can now sometimes find them with a quick Google click.

There are heaps of helpful family research sites, but one day, struggling to find some detail about one of my ‘greats’, I simply typed his full name into the main Google search engine. In one second there he was, large as life. I found he was a writer who was ‘sequestered’ (declared bankrupt) in Edinburgh in 1851. Poor Henry, we never knew. He and his wife were both dead in their 40s, orphaning an eight-year-old girl who would become my great grandmother. How mortified they might have been if they could have known that in 160 years all their woes would be an open book for the entire world to see.

Google is keeping tabs on us all these days, dead or alive.  If any of your ancestors were bad enough, brave enough or unlucky enough to be noticed by officialdom in the past, chances are they’re Google-able too.  Go on, give it ago. Who knows what delicious secrets you might uncover?    
 

By Lindsey Dawson