Ancestry DNA Adventures Part II

I've been making an effort to review at least a page or two of matches every day. It's a tedious process and I'm looking forward to when Ancestry provides us with better data management tools.

Discards - these are any matches that have a private tree, have no tree attached to the DNA results, or have a minimal tree with less than about a dozen people.

Stars - these are matches with a primary name I'm looking for or one of the places I'm interested in. The places this first pass are Norfolk and Staffordshire in England, and Australia. I should have looked for more but didn't realise this when I started.

No Stars - these are matches without any of my primary names and none of the places in my search.

Primary Names Not Yet Found - Beecroft, Cockle, Ettridge, Fokard, Tissott
Names with 1-10 matches - Davy, Freedman, Brothers, Tomson
Names with 10-25 matches - Fielding, Hewitt, Gooch, Sutherland, Reeder, Casey
Names with 25-50 matches - Barnard, Bull, Lindsay, Dickerson, Norton, Cobb, Hardy
Names with 50-100 matches - Williamson
Greater than 100 matches - Wells, Bailey, Parker, Baker, Walker, Wright, Thompson, Taylor

Status of my matches as of 15 March 2013.
Matches Reviewed: 2900
Matches Discarded: 650
Matches not reviewed: 400
Total Matches: 3300

Founders & Survivors - Vandemonians on the Victorian Goldfields

I just received the latest copy of the Founders & Survivors April newsletter "Chainletter". This issue of their newsletter looks at Vandemonians on the Victorian Goldfields, a Vandemonian being a convict who was transported to Van Diemen's Land and who then made his (or her) way legally or otherwise to the goldfields of Victoria.

 

My great grandfather Henry Tissett (Tissott) was one such convict. When he was 13 he was sentenced to death for cattle stealing, the sentence later being commuted to transportation for life in Van Diemen's Land. He eventually made his way to the Victorian goldfields and spent the rest of his life there, mining, farming, and this and that.

 

Founders & Survivors is a partnership between historians, genealogists, demographers and population health researchers. It seeks to record and study the founding population of 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania. Many survived their convict experience and went on to help build a new society. They are concentrating on Tasmanian (Van Diemen's Land) convicts because the Tasmanian records are better and more extensive than those from the other colonies. Tasmanian convict records can be viewed online from Archives Office of Tasmania convict records online .

 

Now I have to add details of my 2 direct-line convicts to their database.

(1) Great Grandfather Henry Tissett (Isabella)

(2) Great Great Grandfather Robert Wells (Moffatt)