Gisby Family Ancestry

Introduction

I have always been somewhat curious about the family history of the Mudford's. Our extended family was the only Mudford family I ever knew while growing up. Unfortunately, I was never curious enough to question my father much about the family history of what seemed to be an unusual family name. I regret that lack of curiosity now, but as it turned out, my father did not know much about the family origins and I would have had to question him while his paternal aunts and uncles were alive. It was only much later that I became interested enough to start to do some serious research. The beauty of the internet is that geneological research has become dramatically easier since it's inception. I quite quickly discovered that my Mudford ancestors had arrived in Wellington in early 1842 on the Clifton, a New Zealand Company ship. That discovery really marked the beginning of my family history exploration.

Growing up I had much more contact with the families of my maternal relatives, as my grandparents on that side lived unitil I was a young adult, and we saw a great deal of some of my great aunts on both my maternal grandfather's and grandmother's side of the family. There was little knowledge of, and seemingly little interest in the ealier generations of the family, besides a few anecdotes that were part of family lore. Consequently, I really knew nothing about the earlier generations of my family; where they had come from, when they had come to NZ, and what they had done once they arrived.

My generation, the baby boom generation, came of age in Aotearoa New Zealand (henceforth referred to as Aotearoa) in an era of tumultuous change. An era when Aotearoa began to come to grips with the legacy of 130 years air brushing the history of interactions between Māori and Pākehā. The extended Mudford and Gisby families are emblematic of this legacy and the large-scale forgetting that seemed to be employed on the part of the vast majority of Pākehā. This 'forgetting' ran the gamut from personal family histories to Aotearoa's history since European contact. As will be seen in this family history many members of my extended family took part in these interactions, and we were all in some sense beneficiaries of these events.

This website is an attempt to document the family histories of my Mudford and Gisby ancestors. This website will be organized by looking at the stories of the grandparents of the baby boom generation and their ancestors. As such we will look at this in four parts, one for each of the grandparents, namely the Mudford’s, Mahon’s, Gisby’s and Hart’s. This generation was born at a time that many of them came of age in the early years of the 20'th century, such that if they were male, they fought in WWI, and then in their early middle age lived through the great depression. So let us set off on this somewhat personal journey through Aotearoa's Pākehā story of the 19’th Century and early 20'th century. The majority of my ancestors came to Aotearoa from Ireland and England between the 1840's and 1880's. The family tree I have developed over the last five or so years can be seen on my WikiTree page. Five generations of my ancestors are shown in he fan chart below.

It is relatively easy to trace the families back to their arrivals in New Zealand in the mid-1800's, but much more difficult to trace the ancestry back in Europe before that time. Where I have knowledge of earlier generations in Europe I will document that, but things get a lot sketchier and conjectural once we get back to the early 19'th century and before. The table below shows the oldest generation of my ancestors to arrive in Aotearoa with their last names at birth (LNAB).

Resources

The development of the internet has led to an explosion of geneological resources that are available online. The primary website I use to document my geneological research and family tree is WikiTree. This is a free site that aims to build a single family tree, and readily enables one to connect their family tree with those trees developed by others. WikiTree encourages users to document their research. In addition, there are strong controls on privacy for profiles of living people, with user controls over the privacy settings. A widely used website that has a vast range of resources is FamilySearch. This website is always worth searching as a starting point for research, but care must be taken with the family trees that are on the site. In my experience there is much incorrect information in those family trees. Another widely used site is Ancestry, which can be searched for free, but requires a subscription to access records, or at least to start a 14-day free trial. There are a number of country-specific websites, which can be searched for free, and provide access to official records, although there is usually a cost to obtaining those records.

Resources By Country

• New Zealand
  • New Zealand Births Deaths and Marriages - Family History
  • Archives New Zealand
  • Soldiers of the Empire
  • Papers Past
  • Auckland Cenotaph
• Australia
  • NSW Family History
  • Victoria Births Deaths and Marriages
  • National Archives of Australia
• United Kingdom
  • General Register Office
  • FreeBMD
  • FreeReg
  • The National Archives
• Northern Ireland
  • General Register Office of Northern Ireland
• Republic of Ireland
  • Irish Geneology
  • The National Archives