Family history research is about much more than typing a name into an online database and getting instant, accurate results. Despite what some family history websites promise in their advertisements, good research takes patience, skill and a sound method.
I have been a researcher and analyst for most of my life, and I know I am good at it. Yet it took me almost twenty years to find the origins of my great great grandmother, Sophia Jane Squires. It took about fifteen years to find the origins of my three times great grandmother, Mary Tew. I still have not found the origins of another great great grandmother, Mary Doolan.
Researching female ancestors is, in general, more challenging than researching male ancestors. That is not to say men are never difficult to trace, but this post focuses on women: why the problem exists, and how you can adjust your research strategies to address it.
I will start with the problem itself, because understanding a problem properly is always the right place to begin. Then I will look at its causes, before setting out the strategies and sources that can help you trace your own female ancestors.
Three women, three challenges
Sophia Squires, Mary Doolan and Mary Tew are all ancestors on my maternal side, and each illustrates a different version of this problem.
Sophia’s mother is never named in any source I have found, and the birth date on her death record is not plausible. Mary Doolan appears only in the baptism records of her children and a single mention on her partner’s death certificate. Mary Ann Tew was an Irish orphan girl, but not one of the well-documented ones. One source suggested she came from Dublin and gave an approximate birth date. That was all I had to work with for years.
My examples are from Australia, but the research methods in this post apply wherever your female ancestors lived.
The problem: why female ancestors are hard to find
In general, we know less about our female ancestors than our male ones. They often seem to vanish from the records, or appear from nowhere. Identifying the right woman with any certainty can be genuinely challenging.
Because we know so little about them, it is also easy to make the wrong assumptions and reach conclusions the evidence does not support. Sophia’s partner, my great great grandfather, was a Chinese man called Samuel Hen. My mother once found a photograph of a man called Sam Hand, his English wife and their child. In her eagerness to find anything at all about Sophia, she decided this must be them: a similar name, a man who looked Chinese, from roughly the right region.
But Sophia’s Samuel was a shepherd and gold miner. There is no evidence he ever ran a boarding house, and no evidence he ever used the surname Hand. Nothing about that photograph should convince anyone it shows Samuel and Sophia, but the same mistake has been made by other descendants of Samuel and Sophia.
When you hit a research challenge, it is tempting to grab at anything that looks like an answer. This is exactly when you need to be more careful, more systematic and more thorough, not less.
Why the problem exists
There are three main reasons why researching female ancestors is challenging: they are under-represented in the histories that have been written, under-represented in the sources genealogists rely on, and often misrepresented when they do appear.
Under-represented in the histories
Historically, women have been left out of accounts of the past. This is the result of patriarchal bias and the methods historians have traditionally used.
If you studied history at school, as I did, you probably remember learning about explorers, bushrangers, politicians and soldiers. I struggle to remember learning about any women at all.
The historian Ann Curthoys made this point in 1970, writing that ‘women did not appear in most Australian histories in any important way, and that the nature and effect of the family in Australian society was not discussed.’ (1).
A brief timeline shows how this developed. Many of the earliest surviving histories were written by clergy, who generally held negative attitudes towards women. Nineteenth century histories of Australia focused on legendary male figures, such as Ned Kelly and Matthew Flinders. In the 1930s, local history became popular, often sponsored by local councils, and these histories primarily told the stories of the men who wrote them and the men who went to war.
Women’s history is a relatively new field of study. In Australia, it emerged in the wake of the women’s liberation movement, typified by works such as Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda in 1976, and early work focused on challenging mainstream, male-authored histories. It tended to concentrate on exceptional women: royalty, aristocracy, activists, artists and inventors.
During the late twentieth century, historians increasingly turned their attention to the lives of ordinary people, including women. By the 2020s, books devoted to the experiences of ordinary women, such as Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women, had become possible. As a result, the amount of historical research available about women is still smaller than that available about men, but it continues to grow.
Under-represented in sources, collections and repositories
Women are also under-represented in the sources genealogists depend on. There are several reasons for this, and it is worth considering three of them.
The first is legal and social status. Historically, a woman’s legal identity was subsumed under her husband’s. Australia inherited laws from England, including the laws of coverture, under which a married woman had no independent legal existence. She could not enter into her own contracts, sue or be sued, and any property she brought to the marriage was held by her husband. Married Women’s Property Acts, passed across the Australian colonies between 1884 and 1897, restored many of these legal rights, though other social and economic barriers for married women persisted well into the twentieth century. These layers of legal disadvantage help explain why women appear in sources far less often than men.
The second is imbalance and bias in how records were created. The institutions that produced records sometimes omitted any reference to women. Baptism records, for example, might mention the father but not the mother and men were often the informant on records. Records were also created within cultural contexts that often marginalised women’s experiences. Childbirth, for example, was considered a private matter and was rarely documented in detail.
Women also left behind fewer extended first-person accounts, particularly those from rural and working-class backgrounds. Educational opportunities, domestic responsibilities and social expectations limited both the opportunity and the incentive to record their own experiences (2). Consequently, genealogists are less often able to hear women’s voices directly through diaries, journals and memoirs than they are for many men.
The third is bias in the collection policies of repositories. Institutions that collected records and placed them in archives focused their efforts on men, since women’s experiences were considered less historically significant.
Together, these three causes mean that fewer sources about women have survived.
Misrepresented in sources, collections and histories
Women are often misrepresented in the sources, collections and histories that do exist. What little information survives can be biased, inaccurate or misleading.
Search online for an image of a convict woman today, and you are likely to find modern dress-up costumes rather than anything historically accurate. This is symbolic of a wider problem. The persistent myth that all convict women transported to Australia were prostitutes misrepresents the reality of these women’s lives, a myth historian Portia Robinson challenged directly in her landmark study, The Women of Botany Bay. It also reflects the broader biases genealogists must work to see past when interpreting historical records.
Sophia’s first husband, John Squires, issued a public notice after she left him in 1857. It portrays her as entirely at fault and demands that anyone who finds her should have her locked up. It is a striking example of how one-sided an historical source about a woman can be.
In summary
Researching female ancestors is challenging for three connected reasons. They are under-represented in the histories and the sources. When they do appear, they are often misrepresented. And even when we do find something, the information can be so vague that we cannot be sure it relates to the right woman, or it simply does not tell us what we need to know.
Because they are so often defined through the men in their lives, women also frequently lack an identity separate from their husbands or fathers. They tend to change their names on marriage, or appear in records without a first name at all, listed only as “wife of” or “widow of”. When they are mentioned, it is often under a husband’s surname, or with no surname at all. In my own family tree, 293 people have no recorded surname. Seven are men. Two hundred and eighty-six are women.
Setting your research goals
Once you understand the problem and its causes, the next step is to define your research goals. What is it you actually want to know about your female ancestor?
Everyone’s goals will differ. For my three women, my goals relate to their origins, so that is the focus of the strategies below, though the same general approach applies to any goal. If origins are your goal too, useful questions include where she was born, where and when she migrated from, her ethnicity and social background, and who her parents and ancestral lines were.
Strategies for researching female ancestors
Next, you can begin choosing strategies that address your research goals and the challenges of researching female ancestors. Some are well-established genealogical techniques, while others reflect more recent developments in research methods and women’s history.
Methods for researching women have been evolving since the 1970s. I will start with the standard, conventional approach still recommended in many family history guides, then move on to more advanced strategies.
Strategy one: research the males in her life
Because men are generally better represented in the histories, the sources and the repositories, the first and most obvious strategy is to learn about a female ancestor by researching the men connected to her. This is not a bad strategy, but it has real limits. Treat it as a starting point, never as your only strategy.
Here is how this played out for my Mary Doolan. Despite extensive searching, the only sources mentioning her are the baptism records of her children and the death certificate of her partner, Samuel Bassett. That gives me very little: a name, and approximate birth and death dates. Researching her partner was the logical place to start.
Samuel Bassett was born in Timsbury, Somerset, England, in 1812. He worked as a canal digger before being transported to Australia as a convict for housebreaking. Convicts tend to generate a great deal of documentation, since colonial governments kept detailed administrative records to monitor them.
Using Samuel’s convict records and the baptisms of their nine children, I built a reasonable timeline of Samuel and Mary’s life together, beginning around 1845 in Tallawang and Gulgong in western New South Wales, where their first children were born. Their last child, George, my direct ancestor, was born about 1862. Samuel lived until 1894, but I have found no record of him between those dates, so I do not know when Mary died.
It is possible she died before him. There are two 1881 marriages of a Samuel Bassett in the same district, one to a Mary Ann Silk and another to a Mary Ann Hodges. However, his death certificate names only Mary Doolan as his spouse, which suggests he did not remarry.
Researching Samuel gave me indirect evidence about Mary’s life, though it remains sparse. One further clue is worth noting. Convicts generated a lot of documentation, so if Mary had also been transported, I would expect to find her in convict records. I have not, and that absence suggests she was not a convict herself, which is a useful clue in its own right.
When you use this strategy, look at three distinct groups of sources.
Collective sources show the family unit together, with all or most members mentioned in the one record. Census records and shipping lists are good examples. These are valuable because they provide evidence of the relationships between family members.
Direct sources are about the man, but mention the woman directly. Death certificates, wills, probate records and obituaries of the men in her life often fall into this category. Samuel Bassett’s death certificate, which names Mary Doolan as his spouse, is a good example.
Indirect sources are about the man and do not mention the woman at all, but can still provide useful context. Land records and occupational records are typical examples.
If you use this strategy, work through all three groups of sources. That is what makes your research reasonably exhaustive, rather than a quick and incomplete search.
Strategy two: research her family, friends, associates and neighbours
The next strategy broadens the search beyond the men in her life. It is an extension of the FAN Club method developed by American genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills. It involves researching friends, associates and neighbours – to which I add another ‘F’ for extended family.
The same three groups of sources apply here: collective sources, direct sources that mention her, and indirect sources that provide context. The difference is that FFANs takes you further, into her wider social network. Which church did she attend? Was she a member of any clubs? Did she do voluntary work? What was the social history of women in the communities where she lived?
For Mary Tew, my Irish orphan, I am fortunate that Irish orphan girls have fascinated historians and genealogists in both Australia and Ireland. Studies of girls in her situation help me understand what her life was probably like, even though none of them mention Mary by name.
Strategy three: work through the five step research process
The next strategies are more advanced problem solving techniques. You may not need them for day to day research, but they come into their own when you are facing a tricky research challenge.
The five step research process helps you work through a challenge systematically. Start by establishing your research aims and objectives, and framing clear research questions and hypotheses. Then undertake scoping: work out what you already know, what evidence you actually have, and whether your existing conclusions are properly supported by evidence from the best available sources. I call this establishing your Solid Foundation. This process helps you understand the research problem better before you start searching for more sources.
From there, you can apply a tool such as my Tree Health Assessment Tool, to evaluate the strength of your evidence and check the accuracy of your family tree.
When reviewing your existing information, look for missing information, missing sources or citations, missing people, misleading information, and conflicts or inconsistencies. Use what you find to develop new research leads, such as locations, timeframes, sources or people to investigate.
A good research plan, incorporating a research log of what you have already checked, will help you work through these leads. Timelines, mind mapping and evidence summaries are also useful tools for analysis and documentation.
Strategy four: think creatively about where she might be hiding
When applying problem-solving methods to a female ancestor, creativity matters. Develop alternative hypotheses and test them, before deciding which one best fits the evidence.
Ask yourself: did she remarry and change her name? Is she living with one of her children? Did she move back to be near her parents? Did she revert to her maiden name? Is she using a different name altogether? Could she be in an asylum or a workhouse? Is she working in someone else’s household?
Mind map every possibility you can think of to generate research leads, then add them to your research plan so you can work through them one by one. Look for evidence that supports a hypothesis, as well as evidence that rules out competing possibilities.
Strategy five: use DNA evidence
If your female ancestor is not too far back, DNA evidence may give you the clues you need. Ethnicity results can be helpful, and evidence from DNA matches can sometimes be the missing piece. In some cases, YDNA or mtDNA testing may also be useful.
DNA evidence was essential in finding Sophia’s origins, but so far it has not given me reliable evidence for either of my Marys.
Strategy six: deliberately rely on indirect evidence
Every strategy above involves indirect evidence to some extent, but it is worth naming as a strategy in its own right. Because our female ancestors are under-represented in the histories and the sources, we often have no choice but to rely on it.
The key is to embrace this deliberately, rather than treating it as second best. Use indirect evidence as contextual information, without expecting your ancestor to be named outright. The naming patterns a woman gave her children, or the religion she practised, can offer real clues to her background, even when no source mentions her directly.
Your research problem may be solved by accumulating many small pieces of indirect evidence rather than discovering one source with good direct evidence.
Strategy seven: apply informed imagination
This strategy takes the use of indirect evidence a step further, in a method known as informed imagination. It means taking indirect and contextual evidence, along with any direct evidence available, and using it to build a picture of what your ancestor’s life was probably like.
The emphasis here is on evidence. Do not simply invent details. Draw on well-researched histories and studies, such as social histories, one-place studies and studies of social networks, rather than movies or stereotypes.
For Mary Tew, this means taking the evidence and documented experiences of other female Irish orphans and using them to construct a plausible account of her own life, on the reasonable assumption that her experience was broadly similar.
As part of this approach, it is worth looking beyond traditional genealogical sources to material culture. Visiting museums, historical societies, historic houses and art galleries can provide insight into the lives of women and their families. Look closely at the clothes they wore, the equipment they used and the pastimes they enjoyed.
Strategy eight: wait, and try again later
The final strategy is simply to wait and try again. Do not dismiss this as giving up. It is a genuinely effective approach, as my search for Sophia’s origins demonstrates. DNA evidence was not available when I began researching her. Her mystery was solved only once a new source and a new technique became available.
The sources and tools you need may not exist yet. They may appear next year, or the year after. You may also need time to develop your own research skills. As you become a better genealogist, your chances of finding what you are looking for improve as well.
What I found
I introduced Sophia, Mary Doolan and Mary Tew at the start of this post, so it seems only fair to share what I found, using a combination of the strategies above.
Sophia turned out to be the daughter of a convict from Cornwall, England. DNA evidence provided the major breakthrough in her case, though every other strategy played a part.
Using immigration records and a process of elimination, I found evidence supporting the conclusion that Mary Tew was indeed an orphan girl from Dublin, Ireland, who arrived in Australia in 1855.
I have not yet found conclusive evidence of Mary Doolan’s origins. There is indirect evidence pointing towards indigenous ancestry, but it is not yet strong enough to convince me. I keep trying.
Key messages
If you take away only a few points from this post, let them be these.
Persevere. Do not give up. Be creative, and try something new when your usual methods stall. Use a mix of strategies, not just the conventional ones, and accept that when researching female ancestors, you will usually be relying primarily on indirect evidence. Be brave enough to add a little informed imagination, but always base it on evidence. And share their stories. Doing so helps other researchers, and it acknowledges the contribution women have made to our history.
Where to next
Researching female ancestors takes patience and a willingness to look beyond the obvious sources.
If you would like to learn more about research strategies for family history, The Good Genealogist covers this in more detail, and I teach it through my courses with the Society of Australian Genealogists.
About the author
Danielle Lautrec is a researcher, genealogy educator and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists. Danielle convenes the Society’s Legacy Software Users Group and the Source Citations Group and is co-convenor of the Society’s DNA Research Groups.
(1) Ann Curthoys, “Historiography and Women’s Liberation,” Arena 22, 1970, p. 37
(2) Curthoys, p. 38