These trees trace the descendants of our ancestors.

Geoff’s tree traces people who came to Australia in a number of waves. One group arrived in NSW and some of those moved to Queensland. Others went straight to North Queensland. Most came from England, some from Scotland and some from Ireland. Why did they come? Why did they move when and to where they did?

Geoff’s tree index page Helen’s tree index page

 

The trees show only people the program thinks are no longer living.

Getting started. Use the index page to find and click on a person of interest. The format of each page is the same. At the top is a ‘context’ diagram with the person being focused on (the focal person) in pink on the leftish side. That person’s ancestors (parents, grand-parents) are to the right and descendants (children) to the right. Any spouses are below. Crosses in a person’s box show the number of marriages. Lines link people. Lines going off the sides indicate more people – descendants to the left; ancestors to the right. You can click on any person with blue text to go to their page.

Under the ‘context diagram’ there are photos (if we have any). Under that is a table showing all relatives of the focal person. (This can be quite lengthy.) Recall, only non-living people are shown. Under that is a table showing events in the focal person’s life.

We have used iFamily on our Macs to gather and build the trees. They are also published on ancestry.com and cut down versions on Genes Reunited and Gen circles.

Note on bracketed family names. Often family names in brackets, eg (WILLIS). These are people for whom we know only first names and not family names. They are usually women who we have found in the census records. In the diagram above Mary (WILLIS) is an example. We don’t yet know her maiden name, but only the name of her spouse. Ignore these bracketed family names in any index.

Geoff’s public tree has about 60,100 people. Every person in the tree is related by birth or marriage to at least one other person in the tree – no strays. The people in the tree come mainly from four projects.

    1. Geoff’s family tree. The original project begun about 1998. ID numbers less than about 6,000
    2. Canberra and Queanbeyan Pioneers. The next 30,000 begun about 2004. Sourced almost entirely from HAGSOC’s excellent ‘Biographical Register of Canberra and Queanbeyan’. The project began when Geoff decided to add siblings, spouses and parents for a relation with an entry in the Register. 12 years work.
    3. Wagga Pioneers. We moved to Wagga and Geoff thought he would extend the Queanbeyan project by adding people from Wagga Wagga & District Family History Society’s ‘Pioneers of Wagga Wagga and District’. About 10,300 people added over about a year.
    4. Tumut Valley Pioneers. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Geoff decided to extend the above projects by adding pioneers of the Tumut Valley. Initial sources were Snowden’s ‘Pioneers of the Tumut Valley’ and ‘Relict of … Lives of Pioneering Women of Tumut and District’. Excellent references published by Tumut Family History Group. He also added material from newspapers of the time – especially, death records, obituaries and weddings from ‘Tumut and Adelong Times’. This project is in its early stage and might take a few years. He plans to extend to the upper Monaro (Adaminaby, Kiandra, Cooma, Jindabyne).

We upload new information to this website about every 3 months. Our motivation for these projects is to provide public information for people seeking to trace ancestors and what became of them. Much of the information provided can be difficult to find.

If you find errors – anything incorrect (dates, places, wrong parents, wrong children), and you have evidence, weI would love to fix them. Or, if you have information that would extend our projects, do not hesitate to contact us on the email link below. We do not publish information on living people – which means We’re not much interested in people born after about 1920, and usually distrust material from before about 1770 without extremely good sources.

If you have comments, corrections or additions, contact Geoff on g.bell at bigpond dot net dot au
or Helen on h.bell at bigpond dot net dot au