Advertising works

As a member of the Society of Australian Genealogists, you get to place one free "Enquiry" in the quarterly journal, Descent, each year. I did that for the first time, last March (2013). Here's the ad:

My copy of Descent arrived and I had just opened the plastic wrapping on my copy and checked that my enquiry was in it when the first reply came in - an email popped into the inbox on my screen!


In a matter of weeks, I had been contacted by the following people who were descendants of those listed in the ad:

• BM (Sydney, NSW) of the Blake family into which John de Burgh Carr married
• HC (Coffs Harbour, NSW). Her daughter-in-law is a descendant of Ernest Henry Carr
• RJ (Petwood, South Australia), researching John Stanley Carr.

A gentleman from Newbury, Vermont (Mr P-H) had seen the ad and wrote. He is a descendant of a Parker Carr whose family came from Ireland.

Around the same time as hearing from these people, I made contact with Gillian Johnson - a fourth cousin in Wales, UK I never knew I had. She is a descendant of Charles Andrews Carr and Margaret Carr (nee McDermott) and a keen genealogist who is researching the Carrs in Ireland and her own branch of the family that settled in Liverpool, England. She, in turn, put me in contact with LG, a granddaughter of Augustus Edward Stanley Carr, on the NSW South Coast.

So I have finally contacted the living descendants of some of the siblings of my great great grandfather. I always knew they must exist. They, like me are researching their family history. This has provided a wonderful burst of new discoveries which I am still trying to digest.

Census Sunday – vanishing ancestors

This point is so simple, I’m wondering if I should even mention it.

About a year ago, I was looking for information about the family of James and Lucy Augood who were Londoners, in English Censuses from 1861 to 1911. James and Lucy’s daughter, Harriett, is my great grandmother.

To my bewilderment, I could find not a single reference to any Augood when searching the Censuses online (on ancestry.com). Could they somehow have dodged every census for 50 years? No they hadn’t.

The key was to look for alternative spellings (Angood, Argood, Aregood, etc). Doing that, I found them in every Census in that period. I must acknowledge the help of Sylvia Murphy, a lovely lady and volunteer at the Society of Australian Genealogists library (and an authority, among things, on researching British and other ancestors in India).

I assume the problem is that words in handwriting on a document like a census page can be keyed or captured incorrectly. Here’s an image of one of the census pages with the name “Augood” on it. Or is that “Angood”?


Ancestry gives the option to Add Alternate Information, allowing you, as they say, to “not only set the record straight, you help other researchers find this person.