Race to the bottom is what happens when you give an impatient person a genealogy subscription and four grandparents’ worth of trees to chase down at once.

I’m not a professional. What I am is someone who fell down a Trove rabbit hole one afternoon and hasn’t really climbed back out. Initially I was not verifying much of anything before I posted it. But I am trying to get better. But after 6 months of chasing shiny things around the Ancestry ecosystem it’s time to get real and verify and document everything.

The mix so far: Scottish, Irish, English, German, and Danish, all somehow ending up in Australia. The Germans came out on a government assist to help build the wine industry, which honestly explains a lot. There’s a good dozen convicts scattered through NSW, Tasmania, and Norfolk Island, some of whom settled around Launceston and the Hawkesbury — Kurrajong, Richmond, Windsor — presumably once they’d served their time nicking and fencing things (looking at you, 5th Nanna Hannah and her Bible).

I’ve got the full set of eight great-grandparents, despite some intermarrying of families making things a bit confusing a couple of generations back. DNA for myself and both parents was done through Ancestry, and most recently MyHeritage, and I’m nowhere near the most qualified person working on this — my MIL is a professional family historian, and she and Auntie have both put in years I haven’t.

This site is the trees as I find them in real time: half-verified, occasionally wild (looking at you, 15th Great Nanna Elizabeth Seymour), and updated whenever I remember. Consider it a working document — things will be changed or added to as I find them.

One thing I have found enormously helpful in the last couple of months is using AI to help me look at timelines, nut out problems, put together research logs and checklists of exactly where to find exactly what information. I am sharing some of that information on here and have smashed through several brick walls already.

What fun it is finding out about these people and I have absolutely loved meeting family — online and in person — that I didn’t know existed.

And the juicy goss — that is a given.