Alternative Records used in Genealogy

I found myself trapped into looking for Genealogical records simply based on archived information such as birth’s, deaths, baptisms, marriages etc. These are all the good things needed to build a family tree.

Four recent events made me rethink this approach. To illustrate the point of this article, we can look at the Bible. Genealogy as in family trees are extensively used in the Bible and are a very important part of the Biblical story. If that was the total Bible, it would be a rather thin fairly pointless book. Instead the Bible is a “story” of history of movement, various peoples’ lives, life styles, births, deaths and events all interlinked with a very specific objective and an example of how to live. If we take the total duration of the Bible as chronicled using the Islamic Jewish calendar it covers over 4’000 years. Ditto the Quran. Both have very specific genealogies for a number of branches of one family essentially based from the time of Abraham. They are both genealogy and history.

The point being that the two subjects are so closely interlinked that one cannot be studied and presented effectively without the other. Some families which link into European and Asian Royalty can actually go back thousands of years with documentary support. I used the word support rather than proof because documents also contain errors and omissions whether by accident or design. Genealogy based on oral tradition is even more difficult and relies heavily on memory which can be fickle. I am on the wrong side of the halfway mark and know how fickle it can be. That said, much of the Bible and Quran started as an oral history and they were documented much later and there are differences between the genealogies and history presented. Most of the people in the world rely heavily on oral history and converting it into modern documented verifiable history falls to genealogist and historians, be they professional or amateur.

Recently, we celebrated my wife’s family’s 150th anniversary since the progenitor arrived in the country. For 150 years, descendants of the progenitor have operated under two surnames depending on whether they were from the son or the daughter’s line. Not much abnormal about that since daughters marry and take on the husband’s surname and so the line continues under a different name. In this case however, both names were linked to adoptions and not bloodlines. For 150 years documented history operated under different names to the actual. By a series of circumstances involving photographs and historical books, a different story emerged from the “oral” and recent documented history. This was subsequently borne out by DNA testing but 150 years is pretty much the outer limit of DNA’s ability. A whole new story has emerged which differs from the original and is actually much richer in the telling. To my mind it is fascinating and takes nothing away from any of the families involved. On the contrary I think it enriches their combined histories. We sometimes get too caught up in what is socially acceptable and the view we want to portray to the world. Many of the greatest Biblical characters would be vilified in current society, gaoled and hung in many cases.

The second event was a You Tube video by a gentleman named Brian Donovan from a company Find my Past. This is a genealogical site with records similar to a number of others. What struck me though was he focused on the lack of Irish records. Much of my family has Irish roots that date back anywhere from 100 years ago to almost 200 years ago in South Africa. I found it difficult to find records of my ancestors and to verify the often-embellished “truth” of the oral family history. I now understand why the Irish documents are so difficult to access and are often limited to church records. Their archives were burnt down in 1922. Irish genealogists now use newspapers, church registers (as we do), court documents, title deeds, town planning, census (many census documents for a period were also lost) , passenger lists and legal litigation records to infer much of the information and thus history of families. Many USA documents can trace people in Ireland because of the numbers that went over during the famine and the Troubles. We have all heard the stories about the one brother disembarking in South Africa and the other one going onto Australia. A very handy source of Irish information is the Australian penal records which are quite detailed. Many of my family have the Irish surname Carew and there are not that many left in South Africa. Australia by contrast is crawling with them. I know that my great, great grandfather Carew was interned on Van Diemen’s Island (Tasmania) with one of his brothers by the British for insurrection. (No. The Irish are not British and definitely not English!) I found about 800 Carews in the Australian penal records, many for insurrection. I am not certain if they are criminal or just difficult. Many are very good sportsman but that is a separate discussion. The long and the short is that there are many sources of information outside of the traditional archival information. More difficult to find but they add history to the information.

The third event is a contact from the Hellenic side of my family in USA. The Hellenes have a strong family name tradition which is both useful but can be confusing if you do not have dates of birth or ages. More and more Hellenic documents are being digitised and transposed into the Roman alphabet. The word alpha bet is derived from the first two letters in the Hellenic alphabet so it seems odd to have changed but that too is history. The Romans conquered a vast portion of the Mediterranean, near and middle east and Europe. I guess they left a few marks and some genes along the way too. It has been my experience that working out the people’s movements from secondary records helps to reduce the confusion created by family names. This is common in Afrikaans as well. That creates a story and history as well. The US documents are quite useful even though the clerical side leaves much to be desired, because family need to sponsor family to get into the country. Immigration documents say where the person is going to and to whom they are going and the relationship. This helps to identify family members, siblings or often the previous generation who went to USA first.

The fourth event is a body of work conducted by a relative in Australia. He and his wife are avid genealogists and originally from South Africa of mainly both English and Afrikaans stock. He took it upon himself to research the family movements and internment during the Anglo Boer war of 1899 to 1902. He also looked at why some ended up in the concentration camps and some not as well as when. Much of the area around Clarens and almost all of QwaQwa was part of our families’ farms. They were obtained by various routes and many were bought from King Mosheoshoe of Lesotho or the Basotho people. This has turned out to be a tome and reference of note. It is fascinating reading but it meant that he needed to use sources outside of the family tree document sources. This work has resulted in a number of changes and corrections to the family tree which was often based on oral history. When the original tree was drawn up in the 1970’s electronic documents did not exist. At best you got access to microfilm so much was based on oral history. Another family member, Peter Howard, is planning on reprinting his book “Beneath the Mushroom Rock” about the families in the Clarens area. It is a very worthwhile read and description of life around the latter 1800’s and early 1900’s in the Eastern Free State. It is likely to be quite expensive. The more copies, the more the price comes down. It is almost a collector’s item. The first publication certainly is.