General info

Theory in progress

Miss W. General info, Smith, Somers ,
PIRO4D / Pixabay

 

This theory is a big DNA puzzle.

If you have followed my blog for a while, you will realise I had my dad do a DNA test to check if we had Samoan heritage. Unfortunately we don’t but among his DNA matches there were quite a few names I didn’t recognize. I have since sorted them out into his paternal side – all came from England and his maternal side – all names unknown but having links in Tasmania.

So looking at his mother’s links, I again grouped into paternal – sorted them out, but the maternal side is half cousins (generally come from the Smith side of the family who do have Samoan heritage) or unknown.

A common name among the trees in this unknown group which originate with his maternal grandmother is Thorp. When searching his matches there are 40 that come up with that surname in their trees. They are third cousins or further back. Now to confuse matters even more, we are unsure of the parentage of dad’s grandmother. Her father is supposed to be Thomas Somers and her mother Alice O’Keefe but this has not been proven yet.

So does the Thorp name connect somehow to the Somers/Summers/O’Keefe names?

There was a Thorp family arrive in the north west coast of Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was first known back in the early 1800’s). I have built their tree out and added as an mirror tree on my tree – not linked yet.

It begins with a Thomas Thorpe born in Yorkshire in 1783, marrying and having 13 children born in Yorkshire, before he dies in Wisconsin after moving there to be with his eldest son and his family in the early 1830’s.

Thomas’ s fifth son Henry is the one who moved to Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) after marrying in 1840 in Yorkshire. Their first child was born in 1842 in VDL. The couple had nine children – seven sons and two daughters. My dad has DNA matches through 4 of those children.

I still need to develop this tree further into those families in Tasmania and hopefully find a link to Somers/Summers/O’Keefe – my great grandmother’s parents.

Australia Project challenges

Miss W. General info, WikiTree , , ,
AI_Solution / Pixabay

I haven’t been doing too much of my own family research lately. Instead I have been taking part in the Australia Project challenge in WikiTree.

Each month there is a different challenge:

  • January – 20th century connecting
  • February – clean up Australian profiles
  • March – Miners connections
  • April – World War I profiles connections
  • May – Mother’s Day connections
  • June – clean up Australian profiles
  • July – cemetery connections

The idea of these monthly challenges is to connect a profile to the big WikiTree rather than having them alone in the WikiTree website. Statistics at the moment say:

  • Over 1 million members of WikiTree
  • Over 42 million people connected as ancestors and cousins
  • Over 15 million have DNA connections

The person organizing most of the challenges sorts the profiles into individual states of Australia, so I have been working on the Tasmanian profiles for each challenge. Sometimes the person in the challenge may have been born in Tasmania or Van Diemen’s Land, married there also but then died in another state. That means I am learning how to use the birth, death and marriage record searches in those other states. Using Trove for newspaper articles under family notices or obituaries can also be helpful.

There is a group of people who are members of various Australia Project Teams who take part in these challenges each month. If I get stuck and can’t work out how to connect a profile to the big tree of WikiTree then there is always help from others. Many of them are members of Discord where I can ask for help and get a reply very quickly.

I really enjoy using WikiTree as you have to include sources when adding a new person to the tree.

Readers: Are you a member of WikiTree? What do you enjoy most about using WT?

X for Xtra unusual place name

Miss W. General info, Wyatt , ,

Here in Tasmania we have lots of unusual place names. Some are:

  • Bust-me-gall Hill
  • Break-me-neck Hill
  • Swearing Bobs Plains
  • Black Charlies Opening
  • Mother Browns Bottom
  • Gelignite Creek
  • Doo Town

My dad, Bob, was on the Nomenclature Board so knew lots of unusual named places like those above.

He would always run Hobart Walking Club trips to these places especially those with Bob in the title. My brother and I would always check out the names of mountains, hills, creeks and rivers whenever we were in the car with our parents.

Up in the northern part of Tasmania, there are some towns and other landmarks relating to the bible.

  • Promised Land
  • Devil’s Gate Dam
  • Walls of Jerusalem National Park
  • Lower Beulah

But my favourite unusual place name in Tasmania is Nowhere Else. This is a locality about 8km west of Sheffield, the town of the murals. On one of our holidays as kids, I invited one of my school friends Robin to come with us. Dad photographed my brother, Robin and myself at the signpost to Nowhere Else.