FAN Club

Do you have an elusive ancestor?  Approach their FAN club for help.

Family / Friends, Associates, Neighbours

Researching your ancestor's familiar, social, and business networks might provide you with the clues you have been looking for.

Family

Go beyond your ancestor's direct line of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents.  What stories could researching their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and others in the family reveal about your ancestor? 

Friends

Do you know who your ancestor's friends were?  Could they have photos, letters, stories, diary or journal entries that mention your ancestor?

Associates

Where did they work?  Where did they go to church?  Which school did they attend?  Were they members of sports team?  Did they join a fraternal organisation, a social club, or were they a member of a choir or theatrical group?

Neighbours

Where did your ancestor live?  How many times did they move?  Were neighbours family?   

Wait a minute, the number of direct ancestors doubles with each generation, without adding a multitude of cousins, aunts, and uncles.  Why would you want to add more names to your list of people to research?

Why?  Because sometimes the records your are looking for are hard to find.  Sometimes they do not exist at all.

Benefits of the FAN Club approach

• Break through brick walls, when you are either finding no information or too much information
• Help to distinguish between individuals who might have a similar name, age, or residence
• Locate records that you would never find otherwise
• Confirming relationships
• Uncover vital clues that place your ancestors' lives into a context and flesh out their story

Example: Proving Relationships

No documents seem to exist that connect your ancestor to their parents (records may have been lost, destroyed, or never have existed).  Is it possible to prove that someone is their sibling?  If so, they would have at least one parent in common.

 

Example: Brick Walls

You have been unable to find a shipping record for when your great-great-grandfather arrived in Australia.  Could he have come with another family member?  Maybe his parents, a sibling, or a cousin?  

How to track down the FAN club

Official Sources:

• Marriage certificates
  • Includes the name of witnesses (were they family members, friends, or strangers?)
  • May list parents (if one or both parties was underage, a parent or legal guardian may have had to provide permission)
• Baptism certificates
  • Includes the name of the godparents / sponsors
• Death certificates
  • May list parents, siblings, children (and their ages at the time of their parent's death)
  • The informant is often listed, if this is not a relative, it could be a neighbour or the family doctor (or the undertaker)
  • Also list the place of burial, which could lead to other family burial records
• Census
  • Includes the names of family members staying at the house
  • Also includes the names of any boarders and servants
  • Names of neighbours (are other family members living close by?)
• Probate records and wills
  • Source for children, siblings, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, other relatives, close friends, etc.
  • Potential source for the names of groups your ancestor was associated with
• Land records
  • Includes if the land was purchased in partnership (family or business)
  • Includes if the land was inherited 
  • Land divisions (was a bigger block subdivided for family members)
• Cemeteries
  • Family members could be buried near each other or within the same burial plot
  • Ipswich General Cemetery is a denominational cemetery, meaning people will be buried with people they would have attended church with and likely have associated with at other times.
• Citizenship / naturalisation papers
  • Reveal the name of sponsors
• Ship manifests
  • Family members
  • Possible neighbours traveling on the same ship

Unofficial Sources:

• Family Bibles
• Newspaper death notices and obituaries
  • Family members (living and deceased) for up to several generations could be listed, along with their relationships
  • Often includes maiden and married names
  • May include the place of residence, location of death, where the service is taking place  
• Business directories
  • The local business owners they might have interreacted with, either because their businesses were complementary, in the same precinct, or were business rivals
• Telephone and postal directories
  • Neighbours 
  • Look at the names of those living either side, across the road and behind
  • Cross reference with school registers to determine if children attended the same school at the same time
• School photos, yearbooks, magazines, newsletters, attendance 
• Social or fraternal club membership registers or event programs
• Newspaper society columns
  • Notices of where someone is holidaying and who they will be staying with 
• Newspaper family notices
  • Engagement and wedding notices could include names of the bride and grooms parents and where they are living
  • Engagement and wedding notices can be very detailed
  • Birth notices 
• Newspapers
  • Legal and criminal court cases
  • Inquests and witness statements
• Genealogy websites & DNA testing

Examples: Official Documents

 

1. You know your great-great-great-grandparents arrived in Australia before your great-great-grandmother was born, and you know roughly when she was born from her marriage and death certificates, but you have not been unable to find a record of her birth.  Try tracking her siblings, particularly siblings born either immediately before or after.  If there is only a few years separating the siblings,  and the siblings were born in the same location, chances are your great-great-grandmother was born there too.  You may be able to confirm this further with census and school registration records.  If the siblings were born at different locations, perhaps your great-great-grandmother was born somewhere in-between.  

 

2. Your ancestor, John Smith, has land transferred to him by someone named Thomas Jones.  Was Jones just a very generous benefactor or a relative.  Is it possible that Thomas was John's father-in-law?  Could Jones be John's wife's maiden name?  (If Jones was not her father, could he have been her step-father or close maternal relative?)

Keeping track of the FANs

You have started to build up your ancestor's FAN club, how do you keep track of all of these new names?

Family members are relatively easily - attach them to your family tree.

Associates and neighbours, on the other hand, do not easily fit into the family tree (unless they were somehow related to your ancestor).  You could use a program like One Note to add their information, or create an Excel spreadsheet to store the details.

The kinds of information you would want to record could include:

• The event / organisation / location that connects your ancestor to their FAN club member
• The dates the event took place / the dates your ancestor and their FAN club member overlapped their membership / residency 
• What role the FAN club member played in the event / organisation
• What role your ancestor played in the event / organisation 
• Notes on the relationship (if speculative, add the words 'possibly', 'thought to be', etc.)
• The source of the information 

Timelines are another option.  Record the known dates of your ancestor's life, such as when they attended school, rented, bought or sold property, testified in a court case, when and where children were born, etc.  This could reveal when their FANs entered and exited their life.

Case Study: The Nunnery 

The Nunn family arrived in Ipswich in 1858, purchasing land at Dinmore (known then as Nunn's paddock).  There was already some family history research on David, Rachel, and their children, and a few potential photos have been located and family stories passed down.  Unfortunately, David and Rachel left no written record.  

 

Their neighbour, though, was a prodigious diary writer.  A quick search on Picture Ipswich revealed references to the Nunn family in James Ivory's diaries.  Ivory recalled how his neighbour's cow got into his cabbages and other minor irritations the family caused him.