I cannot begin to articulate all of the crazy stuff I have come across.

Some highlights

1. you know how we have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a partner, whatever? In the earlier part of the 20th century, it appears, or at least in my family, we skip that bit entirely. Straight to getting married, or in some cases, getting pregnant and then married in a hurry.
2. alternatively, and so it would appear for convicts, you can SAY you got married but didn’t get married, but convicts had to apply to the Colonial Secretary (secretary of the governer of early Australia) for permission to marry
3. or you could get married, move on, get married again without divorcing
4. and if you got caught cheating and your spouse wanted a divorce, it goes in the newspaper along with the name of the person you cheated with
5. lots of my family lived within 6km of my home here in Leichhardt, lots of family in Redfern and Newtown, with some relatives living here in Leichhardt, Annandale, Marrickville, Balmain and Drummoyne. Some even lived on the same street in Redfern that I lived in when I was 20 with P and I.
6. convicts, I have about a dozen labelled convict and I suspect there were many more, an ancestor on the Lady Juliana (the infamous floating brothel), and one on the first fleet landing in 1788, and one was on the Neptune which was the most horrific transportation ship imagineable with a very high mortality rate (over 30% of them died)
7. my dna says I am 50% Celtic and Gaelic, I have a lot more popping up that were Scottish than Irish, so so Scottish….
8. mixed trees. Pedigree collapse? you know how you are descended from 4 grandies, 8 great grandies, 16 great great grandies? You should expect to have a person in your family descend from the same 2 great grandies as you, genetically, but sometimes I have a dna match descend from 3 great grandies, 4 great grandies or 5. Which means in some cases I am related to some people from not only a mix of my dad’s side (mixed in more than one tree) AND sometimes from both sides which is weird and circular, descended from both parents side. 125 years ago Sydney had about 500 000 people living here. It would have been easy to not marry back into the family folks! There were enough people from other families to go around!
9. children going to war – kids got their parents to help them lie about their age to go to WW1. Horrific, one was 14
10. King Henry VII – 16th Great Grandie? The tree suggestions say it is true but surely not? Through my Nanna Thelma