Revisiting and Reflecting on Brick Walls

There comes a point in most family history research when the path begins to narrow.

At first, the records seem to come willingly. One name leads to a certificate, the certificate leads to parents, the parents lead to place, and slowly a family tree begins to take shape. But then the easier discoveries become fewer. The hints slow down. The sources begin to dry up. The generations that once opened so readily begin to resist, and the researcher — in this case, an Australian-based one — finds herself facing that familiar sight: a brick wall.

Lately, I have been revisiting one of mine.

Though truthfully, it feels less like a single wall and more like an entire ring of them.

What the fan charts reveal

When I recently looked at these two 7-generation fan charts, the pattern was hard to ignore.  

(These charts are available on Ancestry.com but only extend to 7 generations at present).

Sources Fan Chart  - Where the Documentary Trail Holds

This Sources Fan Chart reveals where the all important records, documents, and supporting evidence have been gathered across the tree. It also shows where the documentary trail begins to thin, especially beyond my 2x great-grandparents.

Hints Fan Chart - Where the Hints Begin to Fade

The Hints Fan Chart tells its own story. In a few branches, possible leads still appear as far back as seven generations. But for much of the tree, the hints have all but disappeared, suggesting that many of the most accessible online discoveries — on Ancestry and elsewhere — have already been found.

Together, these fan charts reveal something I have been feeling for some time: there is one very large brick wall surrounding all of my 2x great-grandparents.

That does not mean I know nothing about those families, nor does it mean every line simply stops at that point. Rather, it is at that level that the number of reliable and accurate records begins to fall away sharply. It is where I can no longer always feel certain that every connection is fully correct, proven, and supported in the way I would like.

Inside that circle, I have been able to build a fairly solid picture of many family lines, supported by multiple records and sources. Beyond it, the landscape changes. Reliable evidence becomes scarcer, hints are fewer, and the amount of accessible data drops away sharply.

That contrast is now impossible to miss.

Why the wall is there

Much of this comes down to time, place, and the survival of records.

Country Of Origin Fan Chart - (7 generation only, from FamilySearch)

Many of my ancestors came from Ireland, and Irish family history is well known for presenting these kinds of difficulties. There is the familiar shortage of surviving material before the early nineteenth century, shaped by the destruction of so many census records, the losses in the 1922 Public Record Office fire, and the relatively late start of civil registration for births, deaths, and marriages - 1864.

A large number of my ancestors also came from the United Kingdom, particularly Kent, Cornwall, and Devon. Here too, the smaller number of records from the 18th and early 19th centuries often reflects the nature of what has survived rather than the absence of family lines. Before civil registration began in 1837 in England and Wales, most family history evidence depended on parish registers, bishop’s transcripts, and other local records, which could be uneven, incomplete, lost, or simply hard to trace. Movement between parishes, along with inconsistent spelling of names, can make those earlier generations even harder to follow.

By the time I reach back into those generations, I am often no longer following a neat and continuous trail of records. Instead, I am piecing together fragments — small clues scattered across whatever has managed to survive.

That does not mean the families are not there. It simply means that their documentary footprint has become fainter, more fragile, and much less certain.

And that, really, is the heart of the brick wall: not always a complete absence of information, but the point at which the surviving evidence becomes too thin, too patchy, or too uncertain for me to feel fully confident that I have the right family in the right place.

What has helped along the way

Revisiting this enormous brick wall has also reminded me of something more encouraging: how much has been achieved despite it.

Over the last sixteen years, I have used a wide range of genealogical websites, archives, and resources, with varying degrees of success. These have included:

• Ancestry, FamilySearch, Findmypast, MyHeritage, Geni, WikiTree, Roots Ireland. The Genealogist (England), Scotland's People
• Trove (Australian - excellent source of digitised newspapers and government gazettes), 
• the National Archives of Australia (excellent source for immigration and war service records), 
• as well as the National Archives of Scotland (NRS) and Ireland, 
• the National Library of Ireland (excellent for Church & Civil records, Census records, Griffith's Valuation records & Irish Townlands),
• State Library of Queensland
• BDM (birth, death and marriage) databases in Australia, Ireland, Scotland and England, 
• family history societies, 
• local historical societies, 
• Facebook genealogy, family tree & history groups
• and a wide variety of cemetery indexes and cemetery records.

Not every source has yielded the same results. Some have been rich and rewarding, while others have offered only an occasional clue. But together they have helped me extend quite a number of family lines further than I once thought possible.

Australian immigration records have been especially valuable. Time and again they have provided details that were missing from earlier Irish records, giving me clues about family origin, migration, and identity.

Obituaries have often helped fill in family relationships when official records were sparse.

Catholic parish registers have also been important, though only when I already knew enough to search in the right place. That has meant learning not just names, but geography — understanding the difference between a townland, a parish, a civil registration district, a barony, and a county. In Irish research, place matters deeply. Without the right place, even the best database can remain silent.

The same has been true of Griffith’s Valuation, which has only been truly useful when I could narrow a family to a specific townland.

I have also learned to look carefully at surname variations. Historical names are rarely as stable as we might wish, and a family can remain hidden until the right spelling — or the wrong spelling — comes into view.

In one Irish-based family line, one of the most valuable breakthroughs came not through a website or archive at all, but through contact with descendants who held an extraordinary bank of family knowledge. That was a reminder that sometimes the next clue lies not in an index, but in another family’s memory, papers, or carefully preserved research.  

Reaching out more widely has helped as well. Contact with DNA matches, distant cousins I had not spoken to — or in some cases had not even seen since childhood — and the owners of other online family trees has led to some especially meaningful discoveries. Those connections have brought treasured family photographs into my hands and opened the door to conversations about relatives I knew little about, or had never heard of at all. In some cases, they have added previously unknown facts and small personal details that no official record could ever fully capture.

Progress, even with the walls

There has been progress though.

Family Lines Fan Chart - How Far the Lines Reach

This chart shows how far I have been able to extend my family lines. Some branches now stretch back several generations, though usually supported by only one or two records, while others stop abruptly where the records thin to nothing at all.

So, in some branches, the walls stand much higher than in others, and that is where I have arrived now. The easiest discoveries have largely been made. The most accessible online hints have, in many cases, already been followed. What remains is slower work: revisiting old assumptions, searching more widely for context, using place-based research, and paying closer attention to small details that might once have seemed insignificant.

One branch that reaches much further

There is, however, one striking exception to this pattern.

In one particular branch of my family, I have been able to trace the line back as far as my 14th great-grandfather, John Kelsham. That kind of reach is very unusual in my tree, and it certainly has not happened because the records for that line were abundant in the modern sense. In many cases, the trail rests on surprisingly few documents — often wills and probate records, or a birth, marriage, or death record, and sometimes only a small combination of these.

What made the difference was not the sheer volume of records, but the nature of the families involved.

John Kelsham belonged to a branch connected with the Kelsham, Hemersham, and Fullagar families, which were deeply intertwined in Kent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These families intermarried across generations and formed part of the Kentish yeomanry and merchant class. Because they were relatively well-established, better known in their local communities, and more visible in surviving records than many of my other lines, it has been possible to push this branch much further back than the rest.

That has meant I have been able to draw not only on the surviving formal records, but also on oral histories and other material that has remained more readily available for these families. Together, those sources have allowed me to extend this line back into the mid to late 1400s.

No other branch in my tree is quite like this.

Most of my family lines do not connect to families who were so prominent, so interconnected, or so well documented. Most do not belong to people whose position or circumstances left such a clear documentary trace behind them. That is why so many other branches meet the familiar limits of surviving evidence much sooner.

So this long-reaching Kent branch is best understood not as the norm, but as the exception — a reminder that in family history, how far a line can be traced often depends not only on effort and skill, but on the kind of lives those ancestors lived, the circles they moved in, and the records their world happened to leave behind.

Where to go from here

So where do I go in my family tree research now?

Perhaps the answer is that the next stage has to be quieter, slower, and more deliberate than the first.

It may mean returning to lines I once thought were exhausted and looking again with more experience.

It may mean shifting away from broad databases and toward local and place-based research.

It may mean studying the people around my ancestors rather than only the ancestors themselves — sponsors, witnesses, neighbours, travelling companions, burial places, naming patterns, and the wider networks that connected families to one another.

It may also mean accepting that some brick walls are not there because I have failed in any way, but because history itself has left gaps that cannot always be bridged.

That is perhaps one of the hardest lessons in family history: not every silence can be broken, and not every family connection can be proved to the standard we would most like.

What remains

I know that a great deal is missing at the outer edges of my family tree, but I am also very aware of what has been built.

Sixteen years ago, many of these family lines were far, far shorter. Some ancestors were little more than names. Now, many of them stand in a fuller context of family, place, migration, and story. I may still be surrounded by brick walls at the level of my 2x great-grandparents, but I am no longer standing at them empty-handed.

What those walls represent is not simply absence, but uncertainty — the point where the surviving records no longer give me the firm footing I would need to say, with complete confidence, that every part of the research is absolutely right.

In the end, I have used Ancestry, my family tree blog, and my own digital storage to gather and preserve the sum total of what I have found so far. Those tools now hold the accumulated results of years of searching, checking, comparing, and slowly building outward from one generation to the next.

So perhaps this is not simply a story about reaching a dead end.

Perhaps it is also a story about reaching a point of reflection.

A brick wall revisited is not the same as a brick wall first encountered. To return to it after years of research is to return with greater knowledge, better tools, and a deeper understanding of the families behind the names.

The walls are still there.

But so is the work already done.

And so is the possibility that one day, somewhere in an archive, a parish register, an obituary, a headstone, a newspaper notice, a descendant’s collection, or a record not yet digitised, another small opening may appear.

For now, that is reason enough to keep looking.

The Story of The Farrell Family and Bridge Street

An Address With A Story

For the Farrell family, Bridge Street in Charters Towers, Queensland, was not simply an address recorded on certificates and electoral rolls. It was home — the family place that gathered Michael Farrell, his wife Susan Farrell née Muldowney, and their children together across the years, and then, little by little, watched that family circle grow smaller.

Bridge Street in Context

In the late 1890s, Bridge Street was more than just a line on a town map. Running beside Lissner Park, one of Charters Towers’ earliest and most important public reserves, it placed the Farrell family close to concerts, public meetings, commemorations, and the everyday rhythm of town life.

By the early twentieth century, this part of Charters Towers had already been shaped by substantial municipal works — kerbing, drains, and footbridges — while the park itself gave the street a distinctive civic character. 

“Bandstand in Lissner Park, Charters Towers, ca. 1905.”
Source: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland,
via Wikimedia Commons (public domain in Australia).

With its band rotunda, fountain, memorials, and public gatherings, Lissner Park made the Bridge Street neighbourhood feel like far more than a merely residential pocket of town. It was part of the social heart of Charters Towers.

For a family living there, home stood beside a place of music, ceremony, community, and the ordinary bustle of a settled mining town.

The Farrell Family Home 

Michael Farrell and Susan Farrell nee Muldowney,
Photo taken c.1900

My maternal 2x great-grandparents, Irish-born Michael Farrell and Susan Muldowney, made the establishment of a permanent family home a priority after emigrating from England with their English-born children in 1887. Back in England, family life had been marked by constant movement around County Durham, in and out of overcrowded, unhygienic, bleak colliery housing.  To create a settled home of their own in Queensland must have meant something profound.

Sometime in the late 1890s, within ten years of immigrating, Michael and Susan Farrell had established a family home right in the heart of Charters Towers rather than in some out-of-the-way corner of the town. That in itself feels remarkable. They were not people of wealth, but working people whose lives in England had been shaped by colliery districts, and it was one of their daughters who paid for the rest of the family to come out from England. All the more reason, then, that the making of a settled home in such a central part of town speaks of determination, family support, and the importance they placed on creating a place of their own.

After settling into their own house on Bridge Street, and from that point on it became the centre of Farrell family life in Charters Towers. Sadly, I believe there are no surviving records that show exactly where on Bridge Street the house stood, and it is highly unlikely that the home still exists. Even so, the address remains deeply woven into the family story.

It was where the younger siblings grew up and came of age, where working lives began, where departures were marked, and where family ties continued to hold, even as the household itself changed.

The two older daughters, who had emigrated to Australia before their parents, had already begun lives of their own by the time Michael and Susan established the Bridge Street family home. The second-eldest daughter, Helen Ann, had married in mid-1890. Margaret, the eldest daughter — my great-grandmother — married in 1892. Yet marriage did not entirely sever their connection to the family home.

One of the details I find especially touching is that when Margaret was heavily pregnant with her second child, my grandmother Sarah, she chose to travel to her parents’ house on Bridge Street. There she gave birth with her mother Susan acting as midwife. It is such a small detail in one sense, but it says so much. The family home became a place of care and refuge — somewhere to return to when life called for closeness.

A House That Slowly Grew Quieter

Once Michael and Susan had settled into the Bridge Street home, changes came early. Elizabeth, the third-eldest daughter, moved out upon her marriage in 1897. Son Patrick left home around that same time, when he began working as a miner. James seems to have gone not long after, around 1900, as his own working life took him to various places across Queensland. Michael left upon his marriage in 1901.

In the way of so many large families, the house that had once held parents and children together under one roof slowly began to empty as adulthood carried each one outward.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the electoral rolls offer a small but revealing glimpse of how the household had changed.

The records for 1903, 1905, 1908, 1909 and 1913 list only father Michael, mother Susan, along with their eldest son Thomas, as living at the Bridge Street family home.  The once-busy household of parents and children had grown considerably quieter.  

Then, in the rolls for 1915 and 1916, another familiar name appears again - the youngest son Matthew, who had returned after time away looking for work to live once more in the old family home.  In mid-1916 Matthew then headed off to war, leaving Australia until he was repatriated and medically discharged in 1918.  After his return, he moved back into the family home.

The Place They Returned To

Throughout the 1900s, however, Bridge Street remained the entire family’s anchor point. It was still the place the family returned to for weddings, celebrations, funerals, and those important moments that gathered scattered relatives back together again. 

The small social notices in the local paper make that visible in such a human way. 

In 1912, married daughter Elizabeth — Mrs Frank Shaw — was noted as having spent a few days as the guest of her mother at Bridge Street before leaving for Sydney. 

In 1913, Matthew Farrell, then of Torrens Creek, was mentioned as staying with his mother there. These are only brief newspaper items, but they say something very real: even after sons and daughters had moved into lives of their own, Bridge Street was still the place that meant home.

A House of Grief as Well as Gathering

The funeral notices connected with the house on Bridge Street are especially moving.

In February 1905, the funeral of little Edward McCane — the eight-year-old grandson of Michael and Susan Farrell, and son of Owen McCane and Margaret Farrell — was announced as leaving from “Mr. M. Farrell, senr., residence, Bridge-street” to proceed to the Charters Towers Cemetery. That one notice alone makes clear that the family home was not only a private domestic space, but also the place from which grief was gathered and shared among the wider family circle.

Over the years, other funerals also left from the Bridge Street home to proceed to the local cemetery. 

When the patriarch of the family, Michael Farrell, died in 1917 aged 83, the newspaper noted that the funeral cortege left his wife’s residence in Bridge Street. His obituary adds still more texture to the family story, describing him as an old resident of the field, born in Ireland, aged eighty-one, and a man who had spent many years employed at the Waterworks (also known as the Charters Towers Pumping Station). It also captures the sadness of wartime in the Farrell family, recording that one son, Patrick Joseph Farrell, had been killed in action, while another, Matthew James Farrell, was then serving at the front.  (James, the other son who had also seen active service in France, was actually still overseas at the time - recovering in a hospital in England).

The matriarch, Susan Farrell, née Muldowney, was farewelled from her late residence in Bridge Street in 1919.  She had passed away at the age of 77.

Son Matthew Farrell’s funeral left from his late residence there in 1922 after his death at the youthful age of 35. 

Then, in 1923, the funeral of Hannah Margaret Farrell, née Hynes — wife of son Michael Farrell junior — departed from the residence of her brother-in-law Thomas Farrell in Bridge Street.  Hannah (sometimes known as Margaret) passed away at the age of just 42.

Taken together, these notices give the address a deep emotional weight. This was not only the house where children were raised, where married daughters returned, and where sons came and went between work and war. It was also the house from which the family carried their dead out into the town for the last time.

War, Loss, and the End of the Household

That wartime thread runs quietly but powerfully through the story of the Farrell children. Patrick left for war in 1916 and never came home again. James also served overseas during the First World War, as did Matthew, the youngest son, who otherwise remained most closely tied to the family home until his death in 1922.

Thomas, the eldest son, stayed at Bridge Street longer than any of the others, remaining there until about 1925, when serious illness led him to move to the home of his sister Margaret. By then, the old household that Michael and Susan had once presided over must have felt vastly different from the busy family home of earlier years.

That is the part of this story that lingers with me most. Bridge Street was not only a place where the Farrell family lived. It was the place that held them across a generation — through migration, marriages, childbirth, working life, war, grief, homecomings, and gradual parting. Over time, as family members died, married, moved away, the number living there dwindled until only one remained.

That slow thinning of a once-full household feels like such a familiar pattern in family history. A house that once knew the noise and movement of many lives becomes quieter, room by room, until it stands as a witness to all that has passed through it.

For me, that is what makes Bridge Street so meaningful in the Farrell story. It was more than a location in Charters Towers. It was one of those rare family places that held people together for a time, and then quietly let them go.

An imagined view of the kind of timber Queensland house the Farrell family may have known on Bridge Street, Charters Towers, in the 1890s to early 1900s.  Sadly no photo of the original family home survives, and no surviving records show exactly where on Bridge Street it once stood.