The Australian branch of the BATEMAN family seem to have found their way to the forefront of my family history and are demanding my attention.
A couple of days ago there was the postcard of the ship that my 2x great-grandmother Dorothy Isabella BATEMAN sailed to Australia on, I am trying to finish sorting out the BATEMAN surname folder and one of my goals for this year was to explore the Australian branch of the family further.
These last couple of days I have been doing some digging around online and have accumulated even more information to process and sort out. Now I have reached a stage where I need to decide what to do next? I am at the point of having to invest proper time and money before going much further.
Do I have the time to learn about a completely new country? Which sort of record types are available? Who holds what? What is online and what is not? There are some great websites I have already discovered, but I need to explore them further. Do I have the time and is now the right time to do it?
The answer is that I do want to do it, but first of all I need to get all my organising done. The more I think about it, the more this project seems like a good idea. It is a perfect compliment to some of my other more local projects, because I am sure it is going to be pretty much all done remotely, whereas something like my GEERING research is going to be mainly in local archives.
So my first step is to post a summary of what I already know on this blog, just in case their are any cousins already researching the family from the other side of the world. Then I need to check online trees to see if anyone else has posted any matching data. That should give me time to get my data sorted, define what I want to achieve, and learn where I need to be looking to achieve it.
John, I have tweeted about your Bateman post with the tags #genealogy and #Australia. Hopefully someone with Bateman connections might read it.
Regards from downunder, Geniaus
Thanks Geniaus. Fingers crossed there are still some cousins out there, waiting to be found. I will be writing more (what little I know) about the family in the next few weeks.