Category Archives: Mathers family history

Two brand new uncles, a new aunt, and a flock of cousins in a pear tree

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What did I give Mum for Christmas 2013? Two brand new uncles, a new aunt, and a flock of cousins in a pear tree!

Mum never knew her maternal grandfather as he disappeared from the scene after the birth of his last child in 1905, and the family has never known what happened to him. He was an American born in Boston and in the early 2000s I hired a researcher in Boston who found almost no information except some indication that his mother existed and was a widow in Boston around 1905.

Last Christmas while visiting Mum and my sister, I decided to spend a little time searching the web yet again for some clues about him. And I was stunned to discover a marriage certificate for him in Sydney to another woman and then to discover he had a daughter and two sons who in turn had children, my Mum’s new cousins.  And they seemed to have lived in the same suburb of Sydney as my Mum’s parents. So my grandmother may easily have bumped into her half-brothers and sisters in the shops. What’s more, he described himself as a bachelor on his second marriage certificate, so he was almost certainly a bigamist. My sister found this quite entertaining http://irenewaters19.com/2014/01/18/weekly-photo-challenge-families/.

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Origins — the fascination of ancestors — recent, ancient, extreme

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I have had an interest in the history of my family since childhood, when I wrote a short history of the Mathers family that drew heavily on documents and recollections of family members, particularly those of a great-uncle and great-aunt born in Scotland in the 19th century. When I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy as a teenager, I was fascinated by the genealogical charts in the Appendices to the Lord of the Rings. For some reason, I find the tracing of connections to a larger history deeply satisfying. Over the last ten years, I returned to researching my ancestry using the powerful tools offered by the Internet, with access to databases and historical records that I would not have dreamed possible before.

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