Finding ancestors online

Subscribing to Ancestry or Findmypast may well provide you with hours of genealogy fun as you attempt to track down ancestors using a huge range of facilities. 

However, often the ancestor remains completely invisible, which can be frustrating. The fact is that he may well be there but lurking under an incorrectly-spelled surname, or his birth and other major events were simply never recorded.

Try every imaginable spelling of his/her surname: that's a basic rule. With a name like GADSDEN, for example,  there are many variant spellings, all equally feasible. Sometimes the name may appear with one spelling on one record and another spelling on a different record.

In the South African context, you may be searching for a reference to the ancestor on NAAIRS, 
www.national.archives.gov.za hoping for a deceased estate file. Remember that if the individual died comparatively recently, about the mid 1970s, any estate file would be held by the Master's Office in the province of death and would not be referenced on the NAAIRS index. It is more complicated to trace an estate file under these circumstances: they are filed by year of death and may be in one of several off-site storage locations. 

If you are not certain precisely where the ancestor died, search NAAIRS under the database RSA, for all South Africa.

Not everyone who died in South Africa had an estate file lodged with the Master's Office. Reasons for this vary, e.g. the individual may have had no assets at date of death, literally no 'estate'. Despite your belief that the ancestor died in South Africa, he may turn out to have died elsewhere e.g. in the UK, in a different colony or on board ship. Search further afield.

Miss Bell

These Forgotten Things

Why do we research our ancestry? I suspect the reasons vary from individual to individual. Terrick FitzHugh, in his excellent book How to Write a Family History, quotes the opinion of an author of yesteryear, John Aubrey:

'The retrieving of these forgotten Things from Oblivion in some sort resembles the Art of a Conjuror who makes those walke and appeare that have layen in their graves many hundreds of years and to represent as it were to the eie [eye] the places, Customes and Fashions that were of old Times'.

Any family historian who has attempted to make their forebears 'walke and appeare' by finding out more about them and the times in which they lived, will agree that there is a magical element in such a task. But what is it that produces our initial stirrings of interest in the topic?

Readers of Thomas Hardy's novels will remember that, in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine's father caused anguish and tragedy through his search for noble ancestry. This sort of 'snobbish' approach to genealogy is now considered old-fashioned. Most of us are content to accept our 19th c ag labs and are thrilled when an ancestor happens for some reason to stand out among the crowded branches of our family tree. We also realise that there's no such thing as an 'ordinary' ancestor: every ag lab has his story too.

I was fortunate enough to be encouraged from an early age by my mother to take an interest in family history. Another helpful aspect was my unusual surname, Gadsden - though I would discover later that it wasn't nearly as unusual as I then thought it was. Perhaps the most significant bit of luck was the fascinating local hero, a mariner named William Bell who occurred in my paternal line: lucky, because he had achieved recognition as a result of a brief moment of glory in our home town, so a certain amount of information about him had appeared in print. Even more intriguing, that glorious moment had been captured in a painting by a famous artist, featuring a depiction, centre-stage, of our mariner's ship. It was an irresistible combination of events and circumstances.