Tracing Family Branches

On our recent trip to Canberra we stopped at Jugiong in order to visit the Jugiong General Cemetery and locate the grave of my Great Great Great Grandfather James Henderson.  It does seem strange that my Great Great Great Grandmother Bridget Cooney formerly Henderson née Sheridan is buried at the Jugiong Catholic Cemetery while her first husband and son are at the Jugiong General Cemetery.  However her second husband Owen Cooney is buried at the Catholic Cemetery (with his first wife) not far from her grave and another son and one of her daughters are buried with her there too.  On the immigration documents for their voyage to Australia on board the ship Emily in 1850 James Henderson was listed as a thirty year old farm labourer from Convoy, Donegal whose parents Hugh and Isabella were both dead, his religion was stated to be Presbyterian, he could read and write and is it noted that he claimed to have married Bridget Sheridan prior to embarkation.  While Bridget Sh...

As my husbands relatives are very mixed heritage we joined MyHeritage some months ago to see if we could get more DNA matches and research leads for him there and we knew some of his relatives from the Netherlands have active subscriptions through this site.  It has proved to be a very beneficial move with his side of the family tree and I am having lots of fun adding new information and working out DNA match connections.  There are so many more DNA matches for him on the MyHeritage site, especially his very scattered Dutch East Indies distant family members.  It is really filling in some vital gaps for us and I hope to be able to knock down some brick walls in his trees with the additional information I am finding! The comparison of his Ancestry ethnicity estimate with his MyHeritage one is also interesting (see below). My husbands current MyHeritage Ethnicity Estimate My husbands current Ancestry Ethnicity Estimate I have also been having fun with the photograph enhance...

 On Friday while on our way to another of my husbands medical appointments in Canberra we made a detour and stopped at Jugiong so I could visit the Jugiong General Cemetery where my great great great Grandfather James Henderson is buried (post to come about this soon).  We had not stopped there on our last visit to Jugiong (see here ) as my husband was in too much pain to do so. After deciding to grab something to eat and drink first, we parked near the Jugiong rest area to have our brunch, which was delicious again from the Long Track Pantry.  I walked over afterwards to have a quick look at the Sergeant Edmund Parry memorial and take some photographs and noticed the plaques on the back of the white pillars that make up the Jugiong War Memorial.  I had never previously stopped to look at it and was surprised to see the names of my Grandfathers brothers and other relatives listed there. Once I got home and had a good look at all of the names on these plaques, so many...

Continuing on from my visit to Wagragobilly Cemetery in 2020 I thought that I would look on Trove to see what other burials I could find occurring there, as many of the burials have no headstone or markings in this cemetery now.  The six people mentioned below were buried at the cemetery between 1902 and 1925, including my 3rd Great Aunt Ann Holt née Quirk.   Wagragobilly Cemetery More posts mentioning this cemetery can be found here ,  here , here , here , here  and here .  There will be more posts on burials at this cemetery to follow in the near future. Michael Burke Died 24th October 1902 (see headstone photograph here ) Source: Trove. OBITUARY. (1902, November 8).  Freeman's Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1850 - 1932) , p. 17. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article111072649 Transcript: MR. MICHAEL BURKE. On Friday morning, the 24th October, there passed away an old and highly respected resident of Wagragobilly, in the person of Michael Burke, aged 7...

In June last year I found that my 4th Great Grandmother Ellen Pierse had died in Australia and not in Ireland as we thought (see more here ). This discovery meant of course I had a lot more new questions about her!  When did she arrive in Australia?  When did she remarry?  Where was she buried?  Did she have more children than the two we know about (which we can link to her through DNA) ?  Today I got some answers to a few of those questions as I finally received a copy of her death certificate that my husband ordered for me as a late Christmas present. According to her death certificate Ellen Shaughrws died on the 16th April 1881 at Gundagai, New South Wales, Australia.  She was a female aged seventy years old and had died of disease of the heart, according to the verdict of the Coroners Inquiry. The name of her Father, his occupation and the Maiden surname of her Mother were unknown; so no luck finding out more information in this area here.  The inf...