The Ark

Checking on your ancestry used to entail long trips to country churches. Now the Society of Australian Genealogists has put church registrations of baptisms, marriages and burials on microfilm.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: It's National Family History Week, so this edition of The Ark on ABC Radio National gives you some practical advice on how to find out more about your ancestors. I'm Rachael Kohn.

The civil registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages is one place to go, but it's not cheap, and it's not complete. It was only set up in 1856. What about the almost 70 years of settlement prior to that? Well church registers have the information you'd want, and also after 1856, they sent transcripted copies to the Civil Registry.

The Society for Australian Genealogists in Sydney has been photographing the original records of churches in New South Wales, and its Executive Director, Heather Garnsey explains their value, going right back to the beginning.

Heather Garnsey: The first church registers that we have microfilmed are the first registers that are available in Australian history, and they are the records of St Philip's Church which in fact go back to 1787 to the sailing of the First Fleet and where the actual registers were brought out on the ship, on the First Fleet.

Rachael Kohn: So what's the kind of information that a person can find in these church registers that they don't find in the Births, Deaths and Marriages register?

Heather Garnsey: One of the things as a family historian you discover is that it's often important to look at as many sources of records as you can, that might relate to indeed the same event. When you ask, what's the difference, or what do you find that's not in one that's in the other, with something like, for example, a marriage register, when you buy a copy of a certificate of marriage from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and that's the civil registration event, what you're getting is a copy of the original marriage record that was sent in to the Registry. If you can find the original church register, and you see that, then you're getting the register that people actually signed on the day.

So all those photos of the bride and groom and their witnesses standing there, signing the register, that's the copy that is still with the church. So what that means is that you get original signatures which can be very important and it also means that again it gets back to this interpretation that you're not then looking at a copy that the Minister has written out and sent into the Registry, where of course he can be absent-minded, have a bad day, decide the surname must be wrong, so changed the spelling of a name before he sent it to the Registry.

So overcoming those sorts of transcription problems and human interpretation problems by seeing the original Register is one of the main reasons that you go back to the originals.

Rachael Kohn: And I guess it would be interesting to discover that perhaps somebody couldn't sign their name?

Heather Garnsey: Yes, and you see that on many registers of course, the idea that people just signed with a mark, with a cross. And that was done for various reasons.

In some cases of course it was that the person couldn't read and write. In other cases, it's often thought that it was done so as not to show up the other party, particularly perhaps if the bride could read and write, but the bridegroom couldn't, then she would not want to show up her husband on their wedding day, so she would also just sign with a cross so that she didn't appear to be better educated than him. And there are a number of known cases of that.

Rachael Kohn: That's amazing. Well Heather, in filming these records, is it the case that you actually choose the churches, or do the churches sometimes choose you? Do they actually approach you?

Heather Garnsey: It's a little bit of both actually. We try and work with the various church archives so that they know that if they have registers that they would like to have microfilmed, we can often do that work for them. And of course funding being what it is, for many of them, getting microfilmed copies and back-up copies of their records can't be high priority because they don't have the funding so this is one way to get those registers preserved in that sense.

And sometimes also it is an individual church that approaches us, that realises that they have their records perhaps sitting in the cupboard in the corner of the church hall. They've never done anything with them, and they realise that if those records are lost, then the information in them is lost. So they approach us about microfilming them as well. And I think for many of the churches today, they're beginning to appreciate the historic value of these records, and with many churches celebrating 75th anniversaries, 100, 150th anniversaries, then this is often one way to help them to look at their past and to look at their history, to actually preserve those registers in that way.

Rachael Kohn: And what are the events that are recorded? I mean I imagine marriages, baptisms, funerals?

Heather Garnsey: Sometimes funeral registers, yes. Burial registers, sometimes more just a service register that you will get, a daily register virtually of the different services taking place which would help you to establish that perhaps there was a memorial service for someone who had died, or a funeral service that had taken place in a particular church.

In some of the early records, we also have things like banns registers. In the early days of the colony where when you were getting married, you could get married by calling banns but of course the other way to get married was by licence and if you were a convict and you wanted to get married, you needed the permission of the Governor to get married, and that would be recorded on the marriage licence and the marriage bann as well. So some of the early churches that were around have those records, and we often will film them.

From our point of view it's the baptism, marriage and burial registers that we're specifically interested in, rather than perhaps vestry meeting minutes, or anything like that, that the church may also hold.

Rachael Kohn: Now is this an open-ended project or is there a terminus?

Heather Garnsey: There is no terminus, and there is no end to the amount of church registers out there probably waiting to be preserved in this way. We do a certain amount of filming every year, so it's an ongoing project and we have that ongoing support from the National Library and the Mitchell Library in terms of funding, and we sit down and work out a program of what microfilming we'd like to do over the next 12, 18 months or so, and of course sometimes a church approaches us to get their records filmed, perhaps because they've realised that they're in a bad state or they've got an anniversary coming up, and we might push one of those to the top of the list to be done. But we have quite a number of church registers waiting to be done that we'd like to get done.

Rachael Kohn: Well Heather, we've used the word 'church' generically. Is this in fact an interdenominational, ecumenical project?

Heather Garnsey: Yes, it is. We certainly don't show any favouritism. Obviously being based in Sydney ourselves, the majority of our work is being done in Sydney so at the moment for example, we'll be working with St Mary's Cathedral archives on the Catholic registers there. We're working with the Anglican diocese on any Anglican registers that they have that they want filmed.

We have also done all of the Anglican diocese of Canberra and Goulburn and those records, the original registers, are now actually with the National Library in Canberra. But that's a huge area, a huge chunk of New South Wales and of course that was a very important area because there was a lot of early settlement in those districts. And you're talking there really right down to the Snowy Mountains, big centres of population like Goulburn etc. all covered in that Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn.

Rachael Kohn: Can I ask you the delicate question about funding? I mean this is so large, who actually pays for it?

Heather Garnsey: The funding does come from the National Library and from the Mitchell Library. It's not a huge sum of funding every year, it's only a matter of a few thousand dollars that they're putting forward. Our contribution, because we don't have the funds to put in the money, our contribution is that we do the actual work for them. So we do the arranging of the filming process, we collect the registers, we set those registers up for filming, because they've all got to be done with title pages and checked, and sometimes there might be things that perhaps we can't film.

For example, with cut-off dates that we have to make sure that certain dates in registers aren't filmed and then we arrange for the filming to be done with a big company here in Sydney, and then we get the registers back and do the checking process to make sure pages haven't been missed before the registers then go out on microfilm to those other two repositories and the original registers returned to the custodians.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, that's a painstaking process.

Heather Garnsey: It is, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Heather are there any non-Christian worship communities that are included in this?

Heather Garnsey: No. At this stage there hasn't been and that's just simply that it hasn't happened, for no other reason than that. Obviously from a genealogical point of view, we're interested in covering as many different religions as possible because we get all sorts of people asking about their family's background and they have all sorts of backgrounds. So yes, there's no reason why.

Rachael Kohn: Heather, how did you get involved in this? Were you hot on the trail of your ancestral past and then decided to turn it into a profession?

Heather Garnsey: Very much so. Yes, from my point of view, that is almost exactly how it happened. I was really just interested in history as a child; I was very fortunate that I had parents who encouraged me in that interest. My mother was interested in family history so we did some tracing together. I was lucky, I started when I was about 11 years old so I talked to people who of course have long since died and their stories are gone with them. I was a volunteer with the Society of Australian Genealogists and the opportunity came up to go and work for them, 25 years ago, almost.

Rachael Kohn: Now you're the Executive Director.

Heather Garnsey: That's right.

Rachael Kohn: Well I see that SAG has published several books, including titles such as My Ancestors were in the Salvation Army by Ray Wiggins.

Heather Garnsey: That series of publications, the My Ancestors are actually an English-based version, and they've been published by the Society of Genealogists in London, so not actually by ourselves, but they're all books we have in our library, they're all books we sell through our bookshop. And they are very, very popular titles.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think SAG in Australia will have a parallel series?

Heather Garnsey: It would be nice to think that we could do so. I guess our history is that little bit shorter than perhaps the English history, so perhaps not quite as large publications. But there are certainly avenues there for doing those sorts of publications, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Well with National Family History Week upon us, you must have seen a vast increase in interest in this field?

Heather Garnsey: It's been increasing for some time really.

It's something that I think started with the Bicentenary in 1988 where history suddenly began to get a focus in the media, and people began to talk about Australia's past and then perhaps thinking about what part did their family play in that past? So we certainly saw that sort of spike starting to occur round about then. And while it has probably levelled off in the late 1990s, early 2000s, what is now happening is there's this new generation of internet family historians coming through.

While there is more and more material coming on line, you still by no means can trace your family history just using the internet. So what we find now is people go off and start on their own and then they hit brick walls. Then they find that they've got an ancestor who perhaps was in the Salvation Army or an ancestor who was Methodist minister, and then they'll come to us and say 'Well, where do I go next? How do I find the answers to that sort of research those problems?'

Rachael Kohn: And where do they go? How does someone access these church registers that you're filming?

Heather Garnsey: The church registers that we filmed are available for people either in our own library, so if they're members of our society or they come in and pay just our daily research fee, then they can use those records in our collections. They are also freely available to people at the Mitchell Library in Sydney and at the National Library in Canberra. So people can use those exactly the same films, they can use them in those repositories.

Rachael Kohn: Heather finally, can I ask you a little about your background? What have you discovered in terms of your church background?

Heather Garnsey: My own family background, the Garnsey family, go back to England and I've certainly traced them back in Devon, back to the mid-late 1500s. There were a little smattering of sort of a few Anglican clergymen back there in the family, late 1700s, early 1800s. Two branches came out to New South Wales, one of whom was the branch founded by Reverend Charles Frederick Garnsey at Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney, and out at St Matthew's, Windsor. And he founded a very long and distinguished branch of Garnseys who were all connected with the church. My branch was what I always call the dumb country cousins. We ran the general stories, and farmed, and didn't do anything nearly as exciting.

Rachael Kohn: Any taint of convict ancestry?

Heather Garnsey: Absolutely no convict ancestry in the Garnseys whatsoever. However my only real brush with the convicts is that I have a great-great-great grandmother whose daughter married into the Garnsey family and she was in fact what was known as a Matron at the Female Factory at Parramatta and that was the Female Factory for convict women so she was the Superintendent or Female of that particular place, that institution and she and her family came out in 1824 from London, and it was a very unusual situation. She was married, she had five children and they moved to Australia for her career, not for her husband. He was a fairly poorly-paid schoolteacher in London; she was the one who got the Government appointment in New South Wales, the family made the voyage out here, and sad to say he drank himself to death on the voyage, and didn't get here!

Rachael Kohn: Sounds like she was very capable without him!

Heather Garnsey is the Executive Director of SAG, the Society of Australian Genealogists, and you can look up their website at sag.org.au.

I'm Rachael Kohn and I look forward to your company again next week at the same time.

Guests

Heather Garnsey
is Executive Officer for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Further Information

Society of Australian Genealogists
Website for the Society of Australian Genealogists, Australia's first family history society.

Joint Copy Project
Over 120 volumes of early church registers have been released on microfilm by State Records in association with the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and the various church authorities.

Ancestry.com.au
You can find here the newly-released Convict Transportation Registers 1788-1868.

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn