YPRL is
celebrating International Women’s Day all week. This year’s theme is Choose
to Challenge
Today’s spotlight is to encourage the family historians among us to uncover the stories of our female ancestors.
As always follow or review the beginners’ steps:
summarize known names, dates and relationships and family traditions.
Gather records and memorabilia from around
the house. Are their family heirlooms such as jewellery, crockery, a vase that has
been kept through the generations? Is
there an old quilt or sampler? Needlework was customarily taught to girls at
schools.
Pull out your photos, identify them, analyse them, what story can they tell you, examine the setting and background information. Is there a Family Bible? Are there letters and diaries?
Gather oral
history, ask open ended questions. Verify family stories through civil
registration records and find married names.
Consider that your ancestor may have married more than once.
The
opposite challenge may be to determine a married name. Look for death notices, obituaries and wills
for the father. The married daughter may
be mentioned.
Consider the use of naming patterns.
Names can
be anglicised, shortened, and spelt in numerous ways. Early day clerks made
many errors with foreign names and they had problems with different accents.
Not all our ancestors could read and write. Not all of them could write their
own name. Christian names were often
interchangeable, like Anna and Hannah.
Research
the immediate family – brothers and sisters and issues of your female ancestor. Find your relative in school records
Check the
witnesses for baptisms and weddings – your female relative may have been one.
Search for your
first record in the country (a death certificate will indicate how long in the
colony). Perhaps your ancestor came out
on a woman only emigration scheme.
Orphan girls who were part of the Earl Grey emigration scheme to Australia between 1848 and 1850.
There are a couple of projects devoted to female convicts including the Parramatta FemaleFactory
Hunt forheadstones. Epitaphs may reveal a wide range of details about an ancestor’s life.
Search Tips
Search everywhere! Both online and offline. Search broadly, then narrow down, search in non-traditional resources such as
the local history catalogue for the public library where your ancestor lived,
hospital records or even prison records.
If you can,
do not include the surname in your search, instead use other identifying
information such as birth or death date or relationships. This trick works well if you have an uncommon
first name.
Be mindful
of your spelling. Some names may have been abbreviated e g. Marg’t for
Margaret.
Historical
newspapers via Trove, Gale Primary Sources and British Newspapers Archive are
worth looking at. Employ your different
search strategies including e.g. “Mrs T.
Ryan” combined with a place name to narrow down your search. Your ancestor may
appear in featured news articles, social news, obituaries, birth, marriage,
death, funeral and probate notices.
Find your
Australian ancestor in the electoral rolls via Ancestry and Census Records in
other countries.
Consider
creating a time line for your ancestor. This can include birth and marriage and
births of children for a start
Explore these Resources
Petition,
from 'Ladies Resident on Plenty River' requesting protection from bushrangers
Midwives ofEssendon and Flemington Index compiled from birth certificates
TheAustralian Women’s Register
Bal Maidens
Cornwall & Devon (searchable database of women miners)
Photo: Ivanhoe Croquet Club, 1913. Yarra Plenty Regional Library in partnership with Heidelberg Historical Society
This blog post was first published at Yarra Plenty Regional Library 9 March 2021
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