Two more small clues about John Mason

In a previous post (John Mason - where did he come from?) I explained my reasons for thinking that the John Mason who married Catherine Murphy in Sydney in 1841 was probably the convict named John Mason who was tried and sentenced to transportation for stealing cotton in Limerick, Ireland, in 1833. He arrived in Sydney on the Parmelia in 1834.

However, there were still several other convicts who could potentially have fitted the bill. The next most likely after 'John from Limerick' was a John Mason, born in 1813, who was tried in York in 1835 and transported on the Royal Sovereign. I've now discovered from the New South Wales Convict Indents 1788-1842 (on Ancestry.com.au) that this John Mason was Protestant, and could read and write. Which means that he is very unlikely to have been the John Mason who married Catherine in a Catholic church, and who signed his name with an X.

Another small piece of information I gleaned from the New South Wales Settler and Convicts list, 1787-1834, was that the John Mason who arrived on the Parmelia was assigned to an Alexander Fotheringham in Sydney. As yet I haven't been able to find out much about Alexander Fotheringham except that he seems to have been a shipwright who owned several properties around Sydney.

If you would like a copy of a spreadsheet listing all the details I could find about 19 of the convicts named John Mason who arrived in NSW before 1841, please contact me and I'll email it to you.

Follow-on weddings

In a previous post I mentioned that Esther Lambert and Matthew Cragg seem to have been together at a wedding some time before their own marriage. Their names appear as the witnesses at the wedding of Grace Lambert and John Singleton in Preston in 1831. Esther and Matthew married two and a half years later in 1833.

This wasn't the only occasion when the witnesses at a family wedding were to marry each other. In October 1890 when Matthew and Esther's grandson Matthew Ward married Elizabeth Anne Brown in Rastrick, Yorkshire, the witnesses were Matthew's father John Ward, his brother John Willie, and John Willie's future wife Mary Hannah Butterworth.

John Willie and Mary Hannah married in Smallbridge, Lancashire, in March 1893. The witnesses at this wedding were John Willie's sister Esther, and Travis Kershaw. Five years later, in March 1898, Esther and Travis were married in Milnrow.

If nothing else, the timing of these 'follow on' weddings suggest that the couples knew each other for quite a while before they married. But that's not so surprising given that many people in the past married someone from the same village as themselves. It would be interesting to know if the same thing happened in any of the marriages on the Beales side of the family, but I don't have enough details about these marriages to know who the witnesses were.

Is it worth subscribing to commercial family history sites?

For the first couple of years of my research into family history, I didn't subscribe to any of the commercial family history sites. Most of the time I went as far as I could by using non-commercial sites such as familysearch.org (provided by the LDS), freebmd.org.uk, freecen.org.uk, and the Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerk project. The data in the last three are all provided by an army of incredibly generous volunteers who have spent hours transcribing records so that others can have access to them.

It was perhaps fortunate for me that most of family lived in Lancashire - the Parish Clerk projects in many other counties are not nearly so comprehensive as the one for Lancs. I also found the New South Wales Government State Records online service and the Genealogy SA online database very helpful in researching my Australian ancestors. Sometimes I discovered useful information simply by Googling a person's names and dates.

Over time I became quite adept at squeezing as much information as I could out of the commercial sites' free indexes. But often I found that I just couldn't confirm the leads I had without purchasing some pay-as-you-go credits to access the full database. Eventually I decided that life would be a whole lot simpler if I forked out the money for a subscription. Most sites cost around $20-30 per month for a basic subscription, which is the cost of a couple of magazines or a weekly coffee. It's certainly much easier to do the research if you can click on links to your heart's content without thinking "there go another 5 credits" if some turn out to produce irrelevant information.

One of the reasons for not subscribing earlier, apart from a (familial?) miserly streak, was that the sites all have different sets of data, and none of the sites offered everything I wanted. In the end I went with Ancestry.co.uk because it seemed to be the most comprehensive, and didn't ask for separate subscriptions to access the Australian site. But I still sometimes find information on other sites and use pay-as-you-go to purchase it. (David Whybrew's army records, for instance, could only be found on FindMyPast.co.uk.)

Most of the commercial sites also offer other benefits, such as  being able to upload your family tree so that you have access to it online (and make it available to others if you choose to), the chance to connect to other people doing research on the same ancestors, and 'hints' about possible links to your tree (though sometimes these seem to be quite ridiculous and clearly churned out by a computer programme without being checked to see if they are reasonable.) Many offer these options even with a free account. Some also provide the ability to create all sorts of charts and booklets (MyHeritage.com is one example of a site that does this.)

Overall, I could probably have reduced the amount of time I spent researching quite a bit if I'd taken out a subscription earlier. Having said that, the amount of genealogical information available online is growing all the time, and I could also have shortened my research time if I'd started five years later. I'm full of admiration for those who researched their family history on foot and by mail before the internet made it so much easier.