From the Rhine to New South Wales – The Gersbach Story

The  Society of Australian Genealogists’ “Hang Outs”  are giving me the perfect opportunity to turn my research into a systematic record — and then into blog posts! Yesterday’s session let me tie together the stories I’ve shared over the past two weeks with my favourite topic:  genetic genealogy . If you’ve done a DNA test and would like help understanding your results, feel free to contact me via the email above. You can read about  Jane Feeney , my second great-grandmother, [HERE]. You can read about  Anton and Margaretha Gersbach , my second great-grandparents, [HERE]. Next, I’ll be showing how DNA is helping me map my genetic makeup through my paternal grandmother,  Essie Woodlands  — and why genetic evidence is so important for  proving  our family trees. Louise Coakley is an Australian genetic genealogist, member of SAG and publisher of  Genie1 .  DNA does indeed have amazing power and I hope the information in this post de...

Starting this first post for the Gersbach family blog has been a long time coming! Today I “virtually” joined a meeting of the Society of Australian Genealogists, where the theme was  emigration . It inspired me to share the remarkable migration story of my many-times-great-grandparents — and the broader German emigration scheme that brought them here.  This story builds on my earlier post about Jane Feeney, my great-great-grandmother, who arrived in Sydney in April 1849 on board the  Digby  as one of over 4,000 young women brought from Ireland under the  Earl Grey Famine Orphan Scheme . You can read that post  HERE .  Jane’s daughter, Margaret, married Francis (“Frank”) Gersbach. Frank was the son of   Anton Gersbach   and   Margaretha Songen , who arrived in Sydney in September 1855 before settling on the Macleay River in northern NSW near Kempsey. Anton and Margaretha were both from the picturesque wine towns of  Eltville ...