Helen and Geoff's Amazing Adventures

Have fun and do neat stuff

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

Shield Shrimp

When it rains across Australia’s vast inland region, temporary pools crop up all over the arid ground, giving life to a strange desert crustacean known as the shield shrimp (Triops australiensis).

Named after the formidable carapace that shields its head and upper body, T. australiensis can grow up to 7.6 cm long, and it uses its long, segmented tail and mass of 60 or so legs to propel itself through shallow water.

It also breathes through these legs – its sub-class Branchiopoda means ‘gill-legged’ – and in the females these legs bear ovisacs for carrying their tiny eggs.

Several pix in the Photo Gallery and a movie.

Acacia peuce

A rare and endangered plant. The tree grows up to 15 to 18 metres (49 to 59 ft) high, with short horizontal branches and pendulous branchlets covered in needle-like phyllodes adapted for the arid dry climate. It has a distinctive habit more similar to a sheoak or a conifer.

Although speculated to have been widespread across central Australia during wetter climates 400,000 years ago, the population is now mostly restricted to three sites, separated by the encroaching Simpson Desert. In the Northern Territory, the species is restricted to the Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve which is surrounded by a pastoral lease, Andado Station. The other two sites are near Boulia and Birdsville in Queensland. The tree is found in open arid plains that usually receive less than 150 millimetres (5.9 in) of rain per annum. They grow on shallow sand aprons overlaying gibber or clay slopes and plains and between longitudinal dunes or on alluvial flats between ephemeral watercourses.

 

Owen Springs Reserve on Hugh River

Owen Springs was a station on the Hugh River. The Hugh River flows into the Finke (when it actually flows). Both cut through the Western MacDonnell Ranges. The image above shows Owen Springs Reserve as a dot at lower right. The river it is next to is the Hugh. Hermannsburg, our next town, is near middle left edge. Hermannsburg is almost on the Finke River. You can see both Hugh and Finke Rivers cutting through sections of MacDonnell Ranges.

Palm Valley

Palm Valley is within the Finke Gorge National Park southwest of Alice Springs. Palm Valley has a smallish population of Red Cabbage Palms (Livistona mariae). The nearest related species is 850 kilometres away in Katherine NT. The average rainfall for Palm Valley is just 200 mm per year. Small pockets of semi-permanent spring-fed pools allow the unique flora and fauna (desert fish, shield shrimps tadpoles and frogs) to survive.

It had been assumed that the cabbage palms were remnants of a prehistoric time when the climate supported tropical rainforest in what is now the arid inland of Australia. Genetic analysis published in 2012 determined that Livistona mariae at Palm Valley is actually the same species as Livistona rigida from samples collected near Katherine and Mount Isa, both around 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away. It is now thought that aboriginal people brought the palms to here from Mataranka.

Mound Springs

Mound Springs occur around the Western edge of the Great Artesian Basin and represent a natural discharge of Artesian water that was captured many hundreds of kilometers away from rain falling along the Great Dividing Range and New Guinea. This article provides details. Dalhousie is an excellent example of a mound spring.

Great Artesian Basin map Great Artesian Basin diagram