23 October 2020

Down the rabbit hole AGAIN

 

Sometimes I find researching the family history very frustrating. One of my 3x great aunts married a man by the name of John Foy, in Lancefield in 1871, she was 16, and he 35. That in itself isn’t the frustrating part, it’s the birth places of two of their children.

Unless you pay for a full historical birth certificate from Victorian BDM (which can be downloaded as a PDF immediately) you are stuck with the barest of details of births, marriages, and deaths. Two of Margaret Allan and John Foy’s children – Letitia and John Joseph - have their birth places listed as LAKE on the summarised certificate. The other children’s certificates have various short forms of Lancefield.

So, a bright spark who is researching the family from his line (on Ancestry), assumed Letitia’s birthplace was Lake Boga – and dozens of other people have copied his guess. I checked the map, and Lake Boga is a 2 ½ drive from Lancefield in 2020. It is highly unlikely that the family picked up, went to Lake Boga for the birth and then returned to Lancefield. The last child, John Joseph who was born a year before Margaret died, is listed as being born in Lake Nowra on the same intrepid researcher’s family tree. Again dozens have copied. These details matter to me because I am writing the family history “Empty Beds” and like to be as accurate as possible.

The frustration got the better of me, so I bought Letitia Foy’s birth certificate. She was born in Lancefield. The heading on the birth certificate record indicates “District of Lake Nowra”. Black hole filled in 😊

Two other notes of interest on Letitia’s birth certificate are her father’s age – he says he was 30, when he was closer to 40. He arrived in Melbourne in 1844 from County Cavan in Northern Ireland, his age shown as 8 years on the shipping list which would indicate a birth year of about 1836. The other interesting note is the birthplace of Letitia’s mother, Margaret Allan, at Fryers Creek in 1855. Margaret’s birth wasn’t registered until 1856 in Lancefield, when her brother Robert was born. I assumed she too was born in Lancefield, now that part of the story is up for a rewrite.

You think the research is over, and another little interesting fact pops up to slow down the writing. Well that’s the excuse anyway.


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