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Archiver > NEW-ZEALAND > 2011-08 > 1313973252


From: Ainslie <>
Subject: [nz] Family trees online
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:04:12 +0930


Hi folks,

Meet another frustrated with distant connections posting mis-information
on their family tree sites!!!

When I found a website back in the mid/late 1990s which had mention of
my mother's birth family details so inaccurate that I had to contact the
wesite owner to ask for the information to be corrected.

The website owner emailed back to say he would attend to it, that it was
his wife's family and he had done all the research. I gave him the
correct information and he 'promised' to get onto it as soon as he had
leave (he was in the Aust Army based in Canberra)
The mis-information is still there! and I wonder how much of that has
been cut and pasted into other family trees since then.?
I wrote to him again a couple of years ago, again asking him to correct
the information, he said he was a Scout Leader and preparing to take his
troop off to a jamboree in Sydney and would get onto the task as soon as
he returned. Its still not corrected!!

My mother was the 7th child born to William & Lillian Gower. William
and his brother were working on Ned Oxenbridge's gold claim on the
Shotover River, near Queenstown at the time. Will and Lillian (Ned's
daughter) married and began a family but Lill died within a few days of
my mother's birth and she was adopted by an aunt and uncle on the
Oxenbridge/Stroud side of the family while Will Gower took the older
children back to Tasmania where his family help him raise the children.

This website had Will's wife shown as being a woman of Maori background
which was not true.

I keep having extended family connections emailing me asking for more
details about the Maori background - for some reason more 'acceptable'
than the truth which is that WIlliam was the grandson of Dolly Dalrymple
- the daughter of one of the displaced Tasmanian aboriginals (exiled to
Flinders Island by the white settlers in Tasmania) and a white sealer
working in Bass Strait.

Cheers
Ainslie.

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