Over the past few years I have managed to research and create a rather large and detailed family tree. Today I managed to come across a treasure trove of information and my family tree now contains 364 individuals dating back as far as 1576. In the family tree there are 40 different surnames ranging from Bray to Vigars and 14 generations.

Quite a few people have asked me where I get all my information from. Well there is no one archive for all this stuff. I started out by asking family about what they knew and if they had any documents, luckily my Mum had an old family tree that helped me get started. There was also an old family bible that had all the births and deaths of family members written in it which was a great help. However I found that these sources usually hit a brickwall around the early 1800’s, so from there I had to look up old church baptism records etc over in England which helped me piece together my family tree. Finally the internet has a number of fantastic tools that can be extremely useful if you have detailed records of a generation or two as there are sites that use that information to match it to census records etc.

Now there was one problem I encountered and that was divorce and pre-marital “relations” which were frowned upon in previous generations. In these instances many families went to great lengths trying to cover up these things which resulted in records being falsified or destroyed. Luckily I only had a handful of cases of this but one result has been a portion where my family tree splits in two since I have no idea who was the ‘real father’.

The reason for this post was to talk about the software I used. To actually create my family tree I use a piece of software called GenoPro. This software is fantastic and is extremely easy to use and unlike other software available gives you great flexibility. It cost me $49 USD which isn’t particularly cheap but I purchased this software years ago and continue to receive upgrades to the latest version for free. They also give you a free trial so you can see if it suits your needs before you hand over your hard earned cash.

I have also used the website Ancestry.com.au which helped me find matches to information in my family tree. This site helped me find a family tree done by a distant relative which had some very useful information.

So pretty much I have been spending the day looking at records of people that died over 400 years ago, but admittedly I always get excited when I find the “next generation”.