by Mo Bruce

Created on: July 06, 2009

About four years ago, I was looking at the 'Dead Man's Pennies' of a man I thought of as my great uncle on my mother's side. These medallions, were sent to the families of the war dead of 'The war to end all wars'. I could also remember the medals I saw as a child, and the name of another family member who fought in the First World War. He was also one of my mother's relations.

My quest to find who these people were, was made more difficult due to the death of my mother in the early 80's, and the fact that none of my family really spoke about their parents or grandparents. I started with the married name of my Grandmother and a rough idea of her birth year.

Thankfully, my searching coincided with the genealogical explosion of information on the Internet. So while sitting with a cup of coffee, and my credit card, I have pieced together not only my family tree all the way back to the early 1600's, but my husband's family.

It's been a steep learning curve on the way, and I have found that sometimes you have to be brave enough to rip up months of work due to following the wrong name. I have also learned not to entirely trust the census records. My great, great, great grandfather, Frank Sweeney, is known in documents variously as Swiney, Sweeny, or Sweeney. He came over from Ireland with his wife and daughter, along with a lot of other Irish of the same name. This makes choosing your ancestor out of several who settled in the same area very difficult.

When you read a document, you have to imagine yourself in the role of the registrar, or census taker. Imagine yourself moving from apartment to apartment, of what could be overcrowded, slum tenements. Scottish tenements were up to 9 storeys high, and could hold up to 12 families throughout the stair. The census taker had to deal with a rich mixture of accents, and possibly a reluctance of the tenant to give too much information. Especially if the tenant was supplementing their meagre income by subletting.

Names became confused or misspell, ages could be uncertain, or misheard. Even the birth marriage and death certificates can be full of errors. I spent several months chasing the wrong line in my husband's family, only to find that the ancestor put his aunt and uncle down in the parent's name space on the document. I assume they brought him up as their own child, or maybe he fell out with his parents, but since this was in 1867, I'll never know the true story.

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