Accentuate the Positive Geneameme 2022

For the first time, I am participating in GeniAus end-of-year blogging challenge, so here goes! 

1: I was happy to go back to my local genealogy branch meetings after a Covid absence. (I was really looking forward to going to the Lower North Island Irish Research Day as well, but managed to end up in isolation with Covid when it was on!) 

2: In 2022 I was particularly proud of writing about Fr Patrick O’Riordan who served as a priest in NSW- my first cousin twice removed. I had seen him mentioned in a newspaper when he visited another priest-cousin in New Zealand, but hadn’t managed to find out much about him. Suddenly, one bit of information from Andrew Redfern, a fellow Twitter-er, broke open the floodgates of information! 

5: A new genealogy book that sparked my interest was Chris Paton’s “Tracing your Scottish family history on the internet”, and I hope to delve into this more in 2023. 

6: A geneasurprise I received was this beautiful photo of my maternal grandmother, Rose Payn, that my cousin sent to me. I think she is probably a bridesmaid for one of her sisters in this photo, around 1912 or so.

7: In 2022 I finally met a third cousin from a Scettrini line that I hadn't had any contact with. 

8: Locating the birthplace of my great-grandmother Mary Burke in a rural area near Abernethy, Perthshire, Scotland, gave me great joy. Doing a Pharos course by Chris Paton gave me the confidence to use maps from the National Library of Scotland effectively, and led to this discovery. 

11: An informative newspaper article I found was one that told me Fr O’Riordan’s brother was killed in an ambush in 1921 in Ireland. This led to more research and discovering a military archive that contained a huge amount of information about his family, when they applied (unsuccessfully) for compensation after his death.

12: I was pleased I could contribute to my local genealogy branch by taking over as editor of the monthly newsletter. I am thankful to the long-time editor who thought to ask me to do this, and had faith that I could do it. 

14: I got a thrill from opening someone’s eyes to the joy of genealogy when I was able to go from an Irish marriage entry a friend had obtained from an old family Bible, to a whole heap more information about her family in Ireland. 

20: Another positive I would like to share is that I finally worked out how to search on Trove effectively, by using Advanced Search. This has helped me find the information I wanted, instead of being overwhelmed by 1000s of results! 

Thanks GeniAus for setting this opportunity up.

Reorganising Files- BurkeNZ

I am in the process of reorganising all my genealogy files. They were already organised to a certain extent, with an elaborate numbering/lettering system that only I could follow, and it meant I couldn't always find information I knew I had that was buried in folders somewhere. Also it was tricky to work out where to file new information. A few months ago I worked out a system for one family line where I used dates and categories within family folders/files. It seemed to work quite well so now I have extended it. I have just spent some of the weekend hours reorganising my Burke-Burton information.

My great-grandmother, Mary Burke, was born in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1862, to an Irish father who had left Co Mayo at the time of the Famine, and a Scottish mother from Fifeshire. She emigrated as a toddler to New Zealand with her parents Martin Burke and Ann Philp, arriving in February1864 in Lyttelton. Her sister Ann was born in NZ in December that year, and a brother Thomas was born two years later in 1866. Mary married Patrick Riordan from Charing Cross, Canterbury, NZ in 1882 as a young woman.
Both her brother and sister married members of the Burton family from Redwoodtown, Blenheim. The Burtons had emigrated from Galbally in Ireland with quite a few Irish-born children in 1876. Ann Burke married Francis Burton in 1888, and Thomas Burke married Nora Burton, one of the youngest Burtons and a New Zealand born member of the family, in 1899. 

Annie Burke and Francis Burton, Marriage notice

Thomas Burke and Nora Burton

 

 

This double lot of Burke-Burton lines has been a bit confusing for me at times, and I have met third cousins who seem a bit dubious that I can be related to them! I am of course cousins with everyone descended from the Burke marriages with Francis and Nora Burton, but then there are a whole lot of other members of the Burton family I am not genetically related to. Hopefully, having reorganised all my files,  my mind is now clear about how everyone fits in.