Just a little tale of my activities today.

Between writing, creating art, singing, and reading, I like to spend down-time researching my family history. It is a long term project that I have been working on since my late teens. In those days I was reduced to wandering dusty university libraries (ah, I still remember the delightful aroma of leather-bound tomes) looking for old digests and annuals that might provide clues. Now I do most of my work online.

Brick walls tend to turn up all the time when chasing ancestors and their families. It’s kind of expected. But the good news is that more information is constantly being loaded onto the internet and, even if it isn’t, a few months can give you a fresh set of eyes. So it was about time today to do such a review.

Ancestry.com.au is home to my tree. I have several hundred of mine and my wife’s family listed, some branches going back to the 1600s and one to the 1500s. According to DNA my Long family were originally an O’Long family from Ireland. The paper trail does not reach that far back, ending in Norfolk around Downham Market for the past few hundred years. This said, Long is a very common name and the major issue with research is determining which Longs are my Longs.

Today’s uncertainty was a minor one in the scheme of things. I had taken some information about my great grandfather’s brothers