Thursday, March 24, 2011

Ancestry hint points me in the right direction

I was looking at 'people with hints' in my ancestry tree.  My great grandmother Margaret HUDSON had a hint to her death record in the Australian Death Index. I've had her death certificate for a while so wasn't too interested.  But I noticed
  • mother's name Jane Fitzsimm*   
and that gave me an idea - to search the Australian Death Index only giving mother (I used the * after fitzs) & father name in the hope I may find any brothers/sisters of Margaret who had also immigrated to Australia.  And it paid off for I found:
  • Annie SKELLY
  • Mary Jane TATTON
I thought I had done this type of search before on the Queensland births, deaths and marriages search site.  
In fact this is how I had already found Annie Skelly and obtained some certificates to verify she was the sister of my Margaret Hudson.  So why had I not previously found Mary Jane Tatton? 

Looking back at my records I can now see I was only able to seacrh to 1929 on the Qld BDM site at the time I searched ....Mary Jane lived to 1953.  In any case you have to enter a family name now in the Qld BDM site to search for a death which is no use if you don't know the married name.

So the lesson - whenever a new database becomes available check it, even if you've done a similar check in another database before.   And follow through on the ancestry hints, it's not that time consuming to just ignore those that are no use.

I'm busy now researching Mary Jane TATTON - I have obtained her death certificate and first marriage to Edward SHIELDS so know I'm on the right track.

No comments:

Post a Comment