Mrs Moneypenny: know your past and know yourself
Mrs Moneypenny heads off on an intriguing voyage of family discovery and says you should too. After all, if you know your past, you know yourself.
Blue skies, and trees, were in short supply. Mr M and I have just come back from a week on a small luxury cruise ship touring the Outer Hebrides, and even visiting St Kilda. No, not the Melbourne suburb, the archipelago of islands and rocks in Scotland with the same name which are 96.5 kilometres west of the nearest land, perched out in the North Atlantic Ocean. There are no permanent residents on St Kilda any more, just two or three National Trust employees in the summer and a few military personnel watching for something to scare the puffins.
Learning about your past
When the final residents of St Kilda were evacuated at their own request in 1930, they were mostly taken to Lochaline, on the Scottish mainland. Here many of them worked in forestry, despite the fact that almost none of them had seen a tree before. For us, this was quite poignant. Lochaline is a small settlement on the Morvern peninsula, in the west of Scotland, and it is where my Australian husband’s great-great-great grandfather, and several generations before that, are buried.
Does it matter where your ancestors came from? In Australia, a country with such a mix of genealogy, many people are interested in their heritage. The census even asks what ancestry people identify with; in the 2011 census Scottish (8.3 per cent) was the fourth most common after English, Australian and Irish, so my husband is far from unique. After we were married I set out to find out more about his family history, something he had never done himself.
Never has researching your family been so easy, or so much fun. Here are my top tips for getting started.
Let the search begin
Start with what you know. Ask the oldest members of your family if they can name their parents and grandparents, do they know their birth dates, places where they lived, and occupation? If you can, tape conversations on this for future generations.
Plenty to choose from
Use the many public services. They are free, and there are people to help you navigate them. The State Library of New South Wales, for instance, has records of all the ships that arrived in Australia, and much of this is now online. Mr M’s family arrived on the Persia, on May 11, 1863.
Join a family history society. The Society of Australian Genealogists was founded in 1932 and is the oldest of its kind in Australia (sag.org.au). Volunteers there will help you get started. There are also societies in most states, and the National Library of Australia (nla.gov.au) has lists of them.
Use relevant websites. There is a very useful website, ancestry.com.au, which is part of the largest collection of genealogy sites in the world. Take copies of everything. Birth, marriage and death certificates, and ship manifests. Get in touch with other people researching the same family name and see if they have uncovered anything. No need to do the same work twice!
If you don’t fancy drawing lots of boxes, you can use software to help you. The most popular, Family Tree Maker, was started by Ancestry, but has now been transferred to a separate company. A family history society will be able to show you how to use this.
Whether or not you have ancestors in Scotland, the experience of cruising around the Scottish Isles is a wonderful one. Our ship, the Hebridean Princess, was chartered by the Queen for her 80th birthday. Our cruise was a 60th birthday present for Mr M, whose birthday is on September 30. This, I now know, was the same birthday as another of his ancestors, also buried at Lochaline, with 190 years separating them.
In Australia, a country with such a mix of genealogy, many people are interested in their heritage.