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.
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