LOST & FOUND TRACE ELUSIVE ANCESTORS!

All family historians will, at some point in their research, experience that unpleasant sinking feeling that comes when an otherwise entirely co-operative and predictable ancestor performs the genealogical equivalent of the famous magic trick and seemingly vanishes into thin air.

One minute, you’re sailing back through the generations, with every individual ancestor appearing in each census, just as expected. Then you’re plunged into uncertainty, as your forebears disappear from the records without a trace.

You might be tempted to flail around, searching blindly, and spending hours staring at long lists of names on www.ancestry. com.au or familysearch.org in the hope of stumbling across your missing forebears. However, if you take a step back, and approach the problem logically and methodically, you may be able to track down your elusive ancestors without wasting hours of valuable time.

It’s important to make sure you have a good grasp of the various reasons why ancestors might suddenly disappear from the main records. The most simple and obvious reason is that they were just doing what people do, be it marrying, dying or moving house – all the things that can pluck an ancestor from their expected place in the records.

“There are complicated reasons why someone might not be where you expect them. They might have emigrated, moved to a distant part of the country following a job or lost their spouse and gone on to remarry between censuses.”

There are also more complicated reasons why someone might not be where you expect them. They might have emigrated, or simply moved to a distant part of the country, following a job. They could well have lost their spouse= and gone on to remarry in the gap between censuses. They may well have changed their name, joined the Army or gone off to sea. It’s also possible that they had