Shirley has been researching her extended family history for over 30 years.
In that time she's traced at least 11,451 people, from among 2,100 families, who lived over the last 6 centuries.
The information Shirley has gathered are accessible via this website, which forms part of the Indidem* project.
The project aims to consolidate and publish Shirley's research, and thereby enable it to persist into the future, in circulation and informing similar research.
The other aspects of the project are detailed in the Achievements section, below.
Shirley recorded her research in several databases. So far the most current database has been assessed and partially published here: it contains 11,451 entries and mentions 12,184 people.
Records
Shirley's substantial collection of research notes and documentary evidence has been assembled, with a view to digitising, and either archiving or publishing.
Artefacts
Shirley's collection also includes a range of artefacts including historical photos, personal items and other inherited keepsakes.
Timeline
Key research and project milestones.
1980-1985
First sparks
Shirley's interest in family history was sparked in the early 1980s. While the moment of inspiration is lost to time, the search itself has captivated Shirley to this day, resulting in an unwavering enthusiasm for and dedication to the work.
1985-2010
Evolving research methods
In the early years much of Shirley's research was conducted using parish records, cemeteries, local libraries, usually visited in person, plus community historical groups and genealogy networks via post correspondence. With the internet came more opportunities to better identify and connect individuals, as genealogical records were digitised around the world, and significantly improved correspondence, through email and online genealogy networks.
1995-today
Reporting on the puzzle
Not long after starting her research, Shirley began assembling and distributing book-length reports on a range of significant family members. To facilitate the publishing process, Shirley explored several database systems, and ultimately developed the current data set using the Personal Ancestral File software, which is now discontinued.
December 2019
Shirley's 90th birthday celebration
Shirley's approaching birthday has prompted this review of the research to date. We hope that reassessing the research, and continuing Shirley's publishing goals, using new technology and formats, will help the work persist into the future.
December 2019
Indidem Project is launched!
After some preparation during 2019, this website and the other aspects of the project outlined below were presented at Shirley's party, to mark the official launch of this next stage of her research.
Achievements
Activities to date and future directions.
Click each image to read more.
Database
Collecting the people
Map
Charting the territory
Poster
Displaying the results
Archive
Future records & artefacts directions
Wikitree
Future data directions
Our Team
Three among many.
Shirley
Emeritus Researcher Extraordinaire
Allison
Editor in Chief, analyst & archivist
Jessica
Designer, analyst, developer & archivist
Sincere thanks to the many generous people who have contributed to Shirley's research efforts over the years.
Your interest in and support for this next stage is also much appreciated.
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Contact Us
If you have questions or would like to contribute to the project we'd love to hear from you.
Since our own contact form is currently playing up, we request that you use the secure Wikitree form instead via the button below.
Statistics
Visualising the relationships
To properly demonstrate the scale of the research and see ‘who’s who in the zoo’, a map has been drawn from the main database records.
The map is an actor-network diagram. Network diagrams are commonly used in contemporary social network analysis and are based on the actor-network theory of academic sociology. This format was chosen instead of the traditional family tree or pedigree chart because they tend to emphasise horizontal sibling relationships - which in this case, with up to 12,000 people involved, could lead to a map that’s too unwieldy and unnavigable.
That said, this map is complex and challenging to read, at least initially. It’s only at first draft and will continue to be refined and improved over time.
To improve readability an interactive digital version is now available from Polinode. It’s publicly accessible for the moment, although in the interests of privacy only limited information is displayed. In due course the map will be placed behind a secure access portal.
To access the first digital version please visit (link).
For instructions on using the interactive features please see (link).
The link above will open the WikiTree website; if you’d prefer to open it in a new tab, press Ctl/Cmd on your keyboard then click the link.
About WikiTree
Out of the many genealogy websites available today, the Indidem project has adopted WikiTree. Through WikiTree we hope to enable Shirley’s research to persist into the future, in circulation and informing similar research.
WikiTree is an online project aimed at building a single, shared family tree. It’s also an active, dynamic community of volunteers, who collaborate on equal terms (since there are no ‘premium’ memberships), to ensure the research published on WikiTree is accurate and authentic.
Why
WikiTree has been chosen for several important reasons.
The first reasons are that WikiTree is not owned or run by any kind of religious or for-profit organisation, and the sensible folks who do run WikiTree have made robust plans for future-proofing and protecting the database.
Collaboration
More importantly, it’s a friendly community with a very active and supportive forum. These features are supplemented by a wealth of help, on the website itself as well as on youtube and a range of related personal family history websites, and how to information on the blog. Altogether, these should help us learn how to use the system effectively, and by extension, help keep the work of migrating and finessing Shirley’s research under control.
Profiles
A key aspect of WikiTree is ‘one profile per person’. This is the best approach for ensuring comprehensive family records, since they can often suffer from myths, inaccuracies, and missing data. Our project sees no advantage in systems that enable a proliferation of records, because reproducing errors, even accidental ones, can lead to disbelieving and diminishing the value of the research.
Privacy
Privacy is a major concern for our project, as it is for the whole internet these days. WikiTree has impressive privacy controls: no less than 7 tiers ranging from unlisted to public. This will allow for uploading Shirley’s research in its entirety, while simultaneously securing the scores of profiles that are likely to identify living people (and any others that are a privacy concern for relatives or descendents).
Honour code
WikiTree has established an honour code to help moderate behaviour and maintains standards. It’s something that contributors are encouraged to sign, in order to participate fully and develop their own profiles, and it’s actively policed by the community itself. This honour code will help protect Shirley’s research, and ensure that all those who wish to collaborate and further develop their corner of it, abide by their best intentions.
Price
WikiTree is also the right price: free, with guarantees to remain so. As a result, the only cost or obligation imposed on anyone else who’s curious about Shirley research and interested in exploring it further is the honour code mentioned above.
How
The work of migrating Shirley’s research to WikiTree will be slow. Firstly, while WikiTree accepts GEDCOM format records, which can easily be produced via Gramps, the quantity of records per import is capped at 5,000. This has obvious implications for migrating a database of around 12,000 people. Also, WikiTree strives to achieve accuracy through reference to sources, which means that Shirley’s data and archive will need to be closely assessed prior to migration, and some profiles may take time to write up. Consequently we may be best to proceed in batches, either by family group, starting with Shirley’s immediately family, or according to specific request.
Next steps
A start will be made on migrating Shirley’s data at some point in the near future. At that point, the database linked to this website will be taken down, and the single source of truth for Shirley’s research will become WikiTree.
As mentioned at the top of this website, Shirley’s research collection includes a substantial pile of notes and documentary evidence. A separate collection of photos has also been assembled. Considerable further investigation and review is needed, as well as some form of digitising. After weeding, WikiTree will be useful for publishing some, but it may not be appropriate for all items. An archive may be developed, but questions remain as to how it might be made accessible for those with a need to use or refer to it.
The link above will open a full size version of the poster. Click the back button to return to the website after opening, or if you’d prefer to open it in a new tab, press Ctl/Cmd on your keyboard then click the link..
About This Poster
This infographic style poster was created as a display and conversation starter for Shirley’s 90th birthday celebration. A framed print was given to Shirley, and copies were also given as gifts to those who attended on the day.
The poster is designed for printing at A1 size.
Statistics
The left hand side of the poster shows a few key statistics drawn from Shirley’s database.
How many people?
11,451 is the official number of people, according to the number of entries in the database. Due to some idiosyncrasies in recording some couples and family groups together, however, Shirley actually identified closer to 12,184 people during her research. In addition there are some duplicate entries, numbering less than 100 at this stage, which is pending further investigation. One goal in developing the interactive Polinode map was to improve the identification of unique and duplicate entries.
How many families?
2,119 different family names are recorded in the database. There is scope for this number to increase, though, as there are 253 people whose family name is unknown, which amounts to 2% of the total population.
In terms of the size of the families, 963 family names appear just once, and the average family size is fairly small at 5 people. At the other end of the scale though, the Cook, Ashcroft and Irish families each number over 200 individuals. The next most substantial are the Thorntons (134), Braithwaites (130), Dawsons (107), Smalls and Shuttleworths (102 each).
To identify and document the largest families Shirley undertook significant original research, plus often benefited from sharing her research with like-minded family historians, who in turn provided her with results from their research.
How many men & women?
The proportion of men and women discovered to date is roughly equal. Men can be easier to trace due to retaining their surnames, so it’s not surprising that the majority of people in the database are male. Only 236 could not be identified to the extent of knowing their gender; many of these were children who died in infancy.
How long did they live?
Unfortunately birth and death dates are only recorded for a minority of people identified during Shirley’s research. This is due to the unavoiable difficulties that emerge in tracing people through incomplete or inaccessible primary source documents.
Some figures: less than 4,000 people (35%) are recorded with a full birth date; a less precise year of birth is recorded for 7,934 people. At the other end of life, a full death date is recorded for 2,626, while the year is known for just over 1,000 more people (3,727 in total).
For those whose birth and death were recorded, the poster includes a population pyramid which demonstrates quite nicely the fact that women tend to live longer than men. It also shows quite clearly that the first decade of life is quite risky, and equally so for boys and girls; closer analysis of Shirley’s data reveals that the number of deaths in infancy (0-10) and middle age (40-59) almost halved in the 20th century, compared with the 19th century. So the demographics of Shirley’s database also provides evidence for the dramatic improvement in life expectancy in the 20th century.
When did they live?
Shirley’s research focussed mainly on fairly recent history: 65% of those whose year or date of birth are known were born in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exact reasons for this concentration are uncertain, but access to records and the relative youth of Australia as a country no doubt significantly influenced the course of Shirley’s research.
Which couples connect the clans?
The people identified by name on the poster were significant for bringing a number of key families together. The list is by no means exhaustive, and in fact omits a range of very important people, who either mark the first recorded members of key families, or clarify how some of the ‘clans’ are composed.
Those presented on the poster are not necessarily people who had the most children, or dramatic life stories, extraordinary names or heritage. Their inclusion is largely pragmatic, in that their clear identification helps with navigating and exploring the map; the extent of the list is due to limitations of space on the poster.
Map
Most of the poster displays a static version of the map, which was drawn using data from Shirley’s database; for more information on how it was achieved, see the Map article.
When coloured by family name, the map is fascinating but a little overwhelming, and it needs to be interactive to be understandable. For printing on the poster and appreciating Shirley’s research at a glance, the variety was reduced to about a dozen ‘clan’ groups.
The ‘clans’ that were assembled for colouring the map are somewhat artificial and idiosyncratic. The goal was to show Shirley’s family history in relation to Shirley herself. So the families chosen to ‘lead’ each ‘clan’ were firstly ones that directly reflected Shirley’s origins, and after that the most numerous families were selected.
Click and drag with your mouse or use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
To zoom in and out, use the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one, or press the up and down arrows on your keyboard together with the spacebar (ie, zoom in = up arrow + spacebar, zoom out = down arrow + spacebar).
To zoom out completely, and see the whole map at once, press s on your keyboard.
To locate a person…
Use the search box in the right hand panel to find them by name. Because living people are partly de-identified (only the initial of their first name is present), you may need to search by family name.
When a person is selected on the map, the other people they’re connected to will also be highlighted; for a list of these people, click on the Edges tab in the right hand panel.
Understanding shapes…
This digital version of the map uses round dots for women while square dots indicate a man; where a person’s gender is unknown, a diamond shape is used.
Like with the poster version, larger dots indicate a person with many relationships.
About This Map
This map was created to show all the people present in Shirley’s database, both in one view, and in relation to Shirley herself; at the same time it demonstrates the scale of Shirley’s research.
The map is a type called an actor-network diagram. Actor-network diagrams are often used in social network analysis and are based on the actor-network theory of academic sociology. In these diagrams a set of people (actors) are displayed as a group, which is organised according to how they connect or relate to each other (in a network).
This format was chosen instead of the traditional family tree or pedigree chart because trees tend to emphasise horizontal sibling relationships, and as a result, ‘go wide’ very quickly. In this case, with so many thousands of people involved, a traditional tree would be huge and unreadable.
As far as we know, using an actor-network diagram to display family history research is a first.
Data
The map was drawn using data from Shirley’s database.
Firstly, data was exported to some simple text-based files (csv) using Gramps, the program that also produced the online database. The data was then tidied, for instance so that dates were written in a standard format, from which a century of birth could be identified; the cleaning and analysing process took several months. The data was then organised into a list of people (actors, aka nodes) and a list of all connections between two people (called edges) for creating the network.
After some research into map types and software options, the Australian platform Polinode was chosen. Polinode produces beautiful maps and is easily accessible because it’s cloud based.
Layout
Polinode comes with sophisticated layout options that group parts of the network into clusters, according to the various connections (edges) present between each person (node).
Achieving the layout used in the poster took time and experimentation. The layout options, especially force directed, almost immediately assemble nodes into loose groups, but a perfect arrangement can take a long time to run; the layout used in the poster took about 12 hours altogether. This is partly because there’s so much data to compute, but also because the data starts off scattered randomly.
To apply a new layout to the map, click on Layout in the left hand panel, then choose ‘Force directed’ from the drop-down list in the bottom panel, then click the Start button. Note, your layout will not save; if you want to keep a copy of your results, try one or more of the Export options in the left hand panel. For more information, there are tutorial videos and documentation provided by Polinode.
Colours
Polinode helps distinguish between individuals and groups using different colours and shapes. Polinode is able to show different colours for all 2,119 families identified in Shirley’s database.
When coloured by family name, the map is fascinating but a little overwhelming, and it needs to be interactive to be understandable. For printing on the poster and appreciating Shirley’s research at a glance, the variety was reduced to about a dozen ‘clan’ groups.
The ‘clans’ that were assembled for colouring the map are somewhat artificial and idiosyncratic. The goal was to show Shirley’s family history in relation to Shirley herself. So the families chosen to ‘lead’ each ‘clan’ were firstly ones that directly reflected Shirley’s origins, and after that the most numerous families were selected.
To safeguard the privacy of all living people recorded in the database, who have been included in this map, all entries without a death date have been partly de-identified. For each, their first names have been reduced to an initial, and the year of birth has been removed. In addition, only a few other details were uploaded to Polinode as ‘attributes’ of each person.
We sincerely value the privacy of everyone identified and added to this database during the course of Shirley’s research. If there are any oversights, errors or omissions, or if your presence in the data used for this map makes you feel uncomfortable, please tell us immediately via the main contact form. Please also note that the future direction for this data is for it to be transferred to Wikitree, as outlined in the Wikitree section of this website. This decision is partly based to the strength and range of Wikitree’s privacy controls.
The link above will open a web-ready version of Shirley’s database. Click the ‘Return to main site’ link to come back here, or if you’d prefer to open it in a new tab, press Ctl/Cmd on your keyboard then click the link.
Some instructions on using this website version:
Below the database title is a basic navigation menu with 3 tabs: one to return here, while the Individuals and Surnames tabs lead to indexes of names.
There’s no built-in search for the whole database however you can search the text on each page: press Ctl+F on your keyboard to open the Find box (for instructions on this, visit Wikihow).
Links within each record, including in the family tree chart at the bottom, will take you to a range of related records, like family members’ records, events and places.
To see when a particular record was last updated, check the “last change” statement at bottom of that particular page.
About This Database
Over the years, Shirley recorded her research in several databases, using a few different programs. Most programs were ultimately too difficult to use or didn’t produce the kind of reports that Shirley sought for publishing her research.
The database reviewed for this project is the most extensive, and has been in use continuously from October 2001 until now.
This database was originally created using the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software, a popular free program once provided by the Mormon Church. The software was last updated in 2002 and support for it ended in 2013, so another option was needed to future-proof Shirley’s research.
Conversion
The first goal in assessing the database was to find a way to extract the data into a program-independent format that could act as a complementary, searchable index for a digital archive of Shirley’s records and artefacts.
One of the few file export options provided by PAF was the genealogy industry standard format GEDCOM. After some research, the open source Gramps Project was then identified as the best candidate for converting Shirley’s data from GEDCOM into other formats.
Publication
Further exploration and experimenting with Gramps resulted in finding a built-in publishing option, called a Narrated Web Site, that could easily produce a comprehensive and accessible version of the database, complete with indexes and interactive family trees.
The link below (and at the top of this post) opens a website version of Shirley’s database, from Gramps, that is intact and up to date, although some details have been obscured for privacy reasons.
To safeguard the privacy of all living people recorded in the database, all entries without a death date have been de-identified. For each, their first names have been replaced with the marker [Living], plus birth dates and most notes have been removed; at the same time, connections to other family members have been retained, and identifying remarks may exist in the notes of a deceased person or a life event.
This way of publishing the data has been adopted to meet the spirit of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Historical research, archives and genealogical records are a special category of personal information that have been largely exempted from the regulations. Consequently there should not be a legal issue with this publication of Shirley’s research.
We sincerely value the privacy of everyone identified and added to this database during the course of Shirley’s research, regardless of legal exemptions. If there are any oversights, errors or omissions, or if your presence in this database makes you feel uncomfortable, please tell us immediately via the main contact form. Please also note that the future direction for this data is for it to be transferred to Wikitree, as outlined in the Wikitree section of this website. This decision is partly based to the strength and range of Wikitree’s privacy controls.
