British ancestry-tracing website
Genes Reunited has listed more than 18 million names in just a few months and is adding new ones at the rate of 250,000 a week. A BBC television series titled Who Do You Think You Are? – pulling huge audiences in the UK – features 10 celebrities, one per episode, tracing their family trees. Bill Oddie, ex-Goodie, is the first of the bunch. His story involves a tragedy that led his mother to abandon him as a child. It makes such compelling viewing that more than 5 million Brits watched it – at least twice the average audience.
Why is genealogy suddenly so trendy? Is it a symptom of modern narcissism or something more positive – a backlash against globalisation's tendency to reduce humanity to a common mulch? Whatever the verdict, many searchers are delighted to gain insights into the lives of relatives who thrived before the advent of TV and the motor car.
The internet is probably the best means of tracing family roots, providing endless scope for armchair detectives. Australians searching for records within this country should take a squiz at the National Library of Australia web site. It can connect you with the Dead Persons Society of Canberra (seriously) or give you a list of Australian Boer War graves in South Africa.
One of the most frequently accessed genealogical sites to have hit the internet in recent years is the complete 1901 census for England and Wales. The site includes a search engine to an index of more than 32 million people. You can even view and download a copy of the original handwritten census page. It's a spine-tingling experience to watch a page appear on screen, with your ancestor's name on it, as written at the doorstep by a census enumerator in 1901, the year of Australian Federation and Queen Victoria's death.
This site is so popular it was swamped shortly after its launch. Designed for 1.2 million users a day, it attracted as many in an hour from all parts of the globe. The site collapsed and many months passed before it returned in more robust form.
After you narrow the genealogical field, get ready for the fun part – travel. If you find your great-grandfather came from a particular part of Liverpool, why not visit the neighbourhood, drop into the parish church, look for records and toast the old bloke's memory at the local? Australia's 2001 census reveals that more than 44 per cent of us name England or Ireland as our country of ancestry. Up to two ancestries were recorded for each person – logical, really. "Australian" was the most common answer, then English and Irish, with smaller numbers opting for Italian, German, Chinese, Scottish and Greek.
Specialist travel agents are springing up online to serve an emerging market. One such enterprise, UK-based Ancestor Travel caters for visitors to Britain on family-tracing holidays, providing information, travel bookings and custom-designed itineraries. Its managing director, Graeme Archer, is an Australian who formerly worked in Sydney for United Airlines Vacations and later founded a very succesful Queensland-based online destination service for overseas visitors to Australia. Now based in the leafy south London suburb of Richmond, Archer says most of Ancestor Travel's clients are long-haul travellers from North America, New Zealand and Australia. Interest from New Zealand presently exceeds that from Australia, perhaps because emigration to New Zealand was more meticulously recorded.
"Anecdotally, family history tracing and genealogy as a hobby is now bigger than fishing and almost as big as gardening ... the internet has really empowered it."
Archer notes that "if you are trying to track down your family, you may have to go to some pretty out-of-the-way places. You need expert help to find your way around the records office or the parish register."
The average client, he says, is over 40 "with disposable income because they have put the kids through school. They are very net savvy; they know how to look up information and put things together. Plus, being older travellers, they are highly service-oriented and know what they want. Making a family connection is very rewarding. It's not about dukes, kings and royalty; it's about ordinary people ... and a fascinating snapshot [of] how your ancestors lived."
Between 1650 and 1950, more than 20 million people left Britain and Ireland for new lives overseas. Sons and daughters of the empire headed for Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada and the Caribbean (not always voluntarily). England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland are in the process of placing genealogical data on the internet. The number of records involved is phenomenal; Ireland alone is working its way through 80 million.
Tourism operators are keen to exploit the technology, yet wary of revealing too much. If people can obtain all they seek online, the urge to travel physically to family-related sites may diminish. But so far, there's little sign – nothing the net can produce equals standing in a place where your ancestors walked or seeing old family homes or graves.
The Australian
http://escape.news.com.au/story/0,9142,11707290-38475,00.html
