My name is Sandy and I have been researching various branches of my family history since 1995 when I was roped in by my mother to help with a family reunion she and her cousins were organising in Albany, Western Australia.
In fact it actually started even earlier than that, way back in 1989 when I was living and working in London, and my parents came to visit. My mum knew that her father had been born in England, and I went with her to St Catherine’s House and we looked through large printed books that held the indexes for births, deaths and marriages. We were quite successful, and she managed to get printed copies of certificates for her father and grand father and others to bring back home.
So in 1995 then, my mum and some of her cousins decided to organise a family reunion for all the descendants of Alfred and Jane Bracknell, who had emigrated to Albany in 1911, with their six children. Since I worked in IT and had computer skills I helped set up spreadsheets showing the family trees for the six children, and compiled a book containing stories about each branch of the family.
The reunion was a huge success, people came from as far away as Cairns, Queensland. They also raised some money to put headstones on the previously unmarked graves of Alfred in Albany, and Jane in Denmark, and even though the tools at our disposal to create that booklet were archaic compared to present day, I have been told by some that they still refer to it to this day.
My next foray into family history was in 2007, again in Albany, on holidays, visiting my parents. My husband and I had moved back to Perth, and we now had two kids. We were watching “Who Do You Think You Are” on the television, and saw how they could look at records online using ancestry.com. Well – how cool was that compared to trawling through printed books? My mum and I decided to sign up for a free month trial using the Australian version ancestry.com.au. Almost immediately we discovered several people also researching the various English branches of our family.
It was the start of a beautiful friendship, with one in particular who I will call “James”. My family, as well as my mum and two cousins made a trip to Camberley in England in 2009, where we met James. My mum and her cousins saw the streets were their fathers grew up. We saw the gravestones of our ancestors, the churches where they were baptised, even a church window dedicated to the great great great grandfather that James and I share.
Our friendship has continued and James and I regularly email each other to compare notes on what we have found.
