1/4 of all 19C Western Australian profiles are in wikitree!

Question

UPDATE 2022-02-04: I've realised that the histogram counts from Wikitree+ also include marriages. Bringing that into the mix the 25.5% figure I calculated below is actually more like 22.0%. Still an impressive proportion. I will probably post an update with progress towards the end of the year and with the updated calculation methodology.

(discussion is largely around colonists, with indigenous persons being largely absent from official records for this period, and to a slightly lesser extent, wikitree)

Calculation Method

Count of births and deaths in wikitree is taken from the Wikitree+ histograms here. I added together "Western Australia, Australia" and "Western Australia". Other known variations are negligible.

Control counts come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics product, Australian Historical Population Statistics. These numbers only start in 1848 (which is odd because civil registration commenced part way through 1841).

For 1829-1847, I've assumed profiles in wikitree represent 90% of the real total, with 5% known missing from wikitree, and 5% unknown missing. (more on this lower down). This is pretty much true for 1829-1842, but may be undercooking it a little for 1843-1847.

The Result

25.5% of births and deaths from 1829 to 1899 are in wikitree. This is not across the board though, with numbers ranging from 77% around 1848-1851, tapering down to 12% at the end of the century.

Post the nineteenth century, the proportion and number of profiles collapses after 1905, due to a change in the information provided in vital records making it much harder to build trees. (note the chart below only goes to 1905)

If past growth is anything to go by, there should be 30% coverage within around six to nine months.

What does it do for connectedness?

Well, it is quite easy to connect unconnected profiles in 19C Western Australia. My median connection distance to people who spent their life in Western Australia appears to be in the low 13s, if not 12s, and I don’t seem to be any farther from a living person with 19C Western Australian ancestors than 16 degrees. I think this would hold true for anyone else with Western Australian Ancestors from this period.

Pre-1848

For the period 1829-1842 all (well, c. 90%) profiles of people that were born, died or married in Western Australia are in wikitree. This has been pulled together from a number of sources.

Spreadsheets are here: Births, Marriages, Deaths.

Additionally, these profiles are all sourced, generally presentable and are generally connected to all their first degree family (at least within WA)

This was largely already the case, what I've been doing is filling in the gaps.

Discussion

Has anyone conducted a similar analysis for other times and places?

For me, I think of how useful wikitree will be for socio-historic demographic research when it's "complete" for an area.

What would the life tables look like for people born in 1830s WA? The age profile of people getting married? How many people never married or didn't have kids? What proportion ultimately stayed in the state? The emigration pattern of those that left?

What do you think wikitree could be useful for as a database when it's "complete" for an area and period?

Comments

Thanks, Mark, this is very interesting and reflects what I've found on looking for connections. It also encourage me to keep working on adding Western Australian profiles.

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Hi Judy! I run into your profiles a lot. Some of the better ones.

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Thanks, Mark. I see your name on edits a lot too. :-)

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Mark, this is an interesting post, and I am going to do some thinking before commenting at length.  But would you please explain what "WA" means?  In the U.S. (where many of your readers surely are) it is an abbreviation for the state of Washington.

P.S.  I know "Western Australia" is right in your title, but you didn't use the abbreviation until some way through your post.)

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WA = Western Australia

Saves time writing in full each time, and figured context was sufficient.

I can’t tell you the time I’ve spent tracking down every instance of WA for Western Australia in profile place names and expanding them. Well, nearly every instance, I still find them from time to time. Otherwise profiles don’t appear in the correct country report.

Also SA for South Australia, because SA is also used for South Africa.

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Thanks.

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I'm nowhere near West Australia, but I'd like to say I'm enjoying the discussions in this thread anyway.

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Eva, I find a lot of this discussion interesting. Mark's collection of information seems to me quite original. Some comments like Scott's "I think in part it is that the chosen timeframe is tractable for Australians" are notable.

Answer 1

Mark, this is great analysis, thanks for preparing it!

I have been focused on Victorian (Australian) profiles for some time now and often think about how useful statistics of this kind would be for the state - but haven't had a crack at collating to date!

Comments

It would be interesting to see. It's only a half hour to hour exercise to look at the numbers.

I haven't worked out how to extract the numbers from the histogram, so I hover over each bar and copy the number to a spreadsheet.

I think Victoria would be harder to get to 90%, because of the sheer volume of people passing through as part of the gold rush. WA has few people just passing through.

I feel Western Australia is relatively easy as there was little immigration for a long time, and there are some excellent secondary sources. But I'm also very familiar with the sources so I'm biased to feel that way.

Answer 2

Wow, great work, Mark. That's incredible data and very encouraging. I have family who migrated from the Eastern Colonies, mainly around 1895 as a result of the mining boom, so will increase my effort. Regards, Ken

Comments

I too find it very encouraging!

I have ancestors who arrived both pre boom and during the boom.

I'm ethnically 3/4 Western Australian, although I've only spent one year of my life there.

Ethnically Western Australian is a joke of course, but the DNA Story on Ancestry places me as part of the "Australia, Western Coast British Settlers" community, so I'm going to run with it.

Answer 3

Thank you so much for this. Fascinating.

You prompted me to do a little polishing of my WA forebears.

Comments

Great! Thanks.

Currently, you’re breaking my connection distance rule of thumb! We’re 16 degrees separated, but that’s through my spouse. Our connection through Western Australia is 17 degrees. I’m sure it will come down soon, though.

Answer 4

Nice work Mark. I'll enjoy going carefully through all the information that you've provided for us. It's definitely encouraging to consider how much progress has been made in getting those early pioneers on WikiTree. Thanks so much!

Comments

Thanks Gillian!

I'm hoping that someday someone else might find the spreadsheets useful for running their own thoroughness exercise over them.

Answer 5

Awesome job!  I’ve been working on going through some local historical books to source what I can of our WA pioneers.  There are some great resources in Battye Library worth following up for filling in the gaps.

Comments

If only I had access to the Battye Library! There are so many important resources not on line, starting with the 1832 and 1837 Census.

I only recently learned of Rica Erickson’s “Convicts of Western Australia, 1850-1887”, again not on line, and also “The Brand on his coat” which seems to be more detail on a subset of convicts. I may even end up buying them.

The Battye Library also seems to have a great collection of personal letters, which I occasionally find references to when googling individuals.

Then there’s the numerous books written by my deceased cousin Bonnie Milne, only one of which I’ve laid my hands on, and which are in the library as well.

Very frustrating at times.

Answer 6

Total profiles currently on WT are around 29.5 million (see the home page).  A breakdown by century suggests that those living in the 19th century represent a large percent of the total, maybe half, which would be, say, 14.5 million.  [https://www.wikitree.com/photo.php/b/b4/Connection_Facts-1.jpg Bernard Vatant chart].

 Re the population of the world in the 19th century...For convenience, let's take 1850.  According to worldometers.info, it was 1.2 billion (there might be better sources).  So, taking 14.5 million and dividing it by 1.2 billion, we get 1.2 percent of the world's 1850 population currently on WT.   Maybe inexact, but there's some room for error without defeating my main point.  I have a hard time believing it's skewed 20 times in favor of Australians.

 I  wonder if you could address this?

Edited to clarify.

Comments

There might have been 1.2 billion people in the world in 1850, but wikitree is heavily skewed to people from Western Europe (or with European origins). Even within that it's skewed towards the modern English speaking world. Looking at this chart I would suggest wikitree covers one fifth of the worlds population in any depth at best. (Europe on that chart needs to largely exclude Eastern Europe).

That suggest a skew towards Western Australia of only about four times. I couldn't say if the state is representative of Australia as a whole.

My general impression is that Australians, mostly descended from relatively recent immigrants, take a stronger interest in genealogy than, say, your average European. Anecdotally, I can flail around in England for what feels like forever trying to connect to existing profiles, and it is not like that in Australia at all.

Western Australia too is relatively small, especially in the nineteenth century, and it only needs a relatively small number of active genealogists who happen to be on wikitree and take an interest in it to get the numbers up.

As a counterpoint, in Germany, huge amounts of parish records aren't even indexed, making genealogy there very hard. I'd be willing to bet Germany is underrepresented in wikitree.

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I wouldn't be surprised if Mark's findings were similar for other parts of Australia. I'm English, my direct ancestors are all English but I frequently find my weekly connections go through 3 convict  'uncles' transported to Australia. (I haven't put some  later free emigrants on here  but there were a number from the mid 1800s onwards and I suspect these would also connect very easily).

The (European) population of Australia was only  10, 263 in 1808, 332,338 in 1848 and 1, 050, 828 in 1858.  It didn't reach 20 million until the 1960s. In contrast there were about 10.5 million in Great Britain in 1801 and in England alone  about 16.8 million in 1851.In 1961, there were  almost 53 million in England. ( Not surprisingly lots upped sticks and went to Australia. Even today, with very different immigration policies, the largest number of Australians born outside the country came from England)

stats from various wikipedia articles.

Genealogists in Australia don't have to go back very far to find their immigrant  ancestors and because the population was small are likely to soon link  up with branches from other families .

Many of the earliest immigrants were convicts . In 1828, New South Wales had a (European )population of 36, 598 of which 15,728 were convicts. These are often extremely well documented. There was a small marriage pool(in 1828 only 24.5% were women) In the case of convicts, marriages often  took place before the end of  their sentence and these were recorded on their records  by central government.Free emigrants came by ship and again the documentation is often there in the form of passenger lists. From immigration to today is likely to be 200 years or less.

It's still a great achievement to have such a large percentage of profiles on wikitree.I suspect that the  hurdles to jump from today back to the early 19thc  may be bigger than in some other countries.  Restricted access to some records in the 20th century and in particular,  the lack of extant  household records for 19th.c. censuses may make things a bit more difficult for Australian genealogists.

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Thanks Helen for your contribution!

Australia actually doesn’t completely lack Census records, just nearly so. There’s some partial surviving returns for 1859 in WA for example.

We do however, generally, and it varies by date and location, have excellently detailed birth, death and marriage records.

Death certificates for instance can list all children and their ages, both parents, all spouses, dates and locations of marriages, place of birth and number of years spent in each Australian colony.

(Except, ironically WA, given they’re  the subject of this piece, prior to 1895, when they’re as deeply uninformative as any UK death cert)

Sorry, gone off topic from Julie’s question…..

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Not at all, Mark.  I find this all very interesting and really do want to understand the whole picture.

As I was reading Helen's answer, I was reminded that I have a number of DNA matches who live in Australia, and have never been able to find my shared ancestor(s) for any of them.  It sounds almost like that ought to be easy!

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I agree, Mark. We have quite a few very active Western Australian (WA) researchers and I often come across their profiles. We don't have the long history of say, a US state and the earliest births in WA only go back to 1830 (very few of them).

I found your research encouraging ad motivating. It makes me feel that I'm having an impact. I've added geanalogies for several of my friends and amazingly often find some connections to my families(I only have one WA family but my children, through their father have many links).

Thanks for all your hard work.

Judy

Answer 7

Does the denominator for these calculations include indigenous Western Australians, or only the white/second peoples?

It's an interesting statistic and would be interesting to track for other places (I am interested in South Australia) and times. Unfortunately, the structured Wikitree data only contains birth, marriage and death locations, not migration dates (unless intuited through voyage categories) so doing absolute calculations will be difficult.

To address the challenge of why these counts appear skewed towards Australia, I think in part it is that the chosen timeframe is tractable for Australians, and provides an easy target point (immigration) to push to. I have over 60 South Australian-resident ancestors, and only 6 (parents and grandparents) were born in the 20th century. I have put them all on Wikitree and made what connections I could. I am now working back the other way, adding the rest of each migrant family group. Once a few of us have done that, it becomes a "completeness" project to add profiles for any remaining migrants on the early ships, as they were the friends and acquaintances of our ancestors (three months together on a ship roughly the size of two modern articulated buses!)

Comments

Hi Scott, there’s a fine print disclaimer at the top that the numbers largely refer to colonists. But I think I made the font TOO small.

Regarding migration, it could only work for ultimate migration place, that is to say where they died.

I’ve worked out before that for most of the 19th century, about 0.3% of the population of WA were my blood relatives. You don’t need too many people like me to add just their own family to quickly build it up to 25%.

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You are right - I missed the tiny disclaimer.

I was thinking it would be interesting to look by decade, or even smaller time frames, which requires knowing what country people were in with finer fidelity.

I have no idea how to calculate what percentage of the colonial population I might have been related to! South Australia had somewhat distinct English- and German-speaking populations in the 19th century which could be interesting to analyse separately, too.

I see we are 17 degrees separated with the connection through my wife. I don't think I've added enough of my own WA relatives to have made any links in to it yet. I find there are a few people/relationships that are gateways to lots of other connections.

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Working out the percentage related was time consuming and fiddly and ultimately pointless!

I've edited the post to increase the font size of the disclaimer.

Answer 8

 - Evening Mark Dorney - thanks for your observations on West Aust. Also suggest you add 'tag' Western_Australia and Statistics to your post - -

 - You mention the 1832 SRC Census, there are about 1305 Profiles + deaths in the book which I have, = 1832 Census https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Swan_River_Colony_1832_-_Census_Tree = this page gives some overview information, and if anyone requires more info , please e-mail me.

 - Another profile is = [[Sandilands-283|Frederica Lucy (Sandilands) Erickson AM (1908-2009)]] Frederica Lucy (Sandilands) Erickson AM = with Links to the Battye, and some of her writings.

 - Also a couple of early Profiles , on my wifes side , West Aust. = Abraham Matthews Moulton = and  = Harrison Blechynden = for the SWest-WAust -

 - A NOTE for non Aussie readers = Australia (CoA) 1901 on, did/does not keep Census personal records. And the six States are responsible for BDM's , as were the original 6 Colonies. (the 6 systems therefore are different)

 - The 'Battye', and  the State Record Office (SRO) have loads of info, but little money to digitize it. = James Sykes Battye = Yet by 1945 there were still only 175,000 volumes . . . more . . adb.anu.edu -

 - enjoy - jea

Comments

Linking everybody to the 1832 Census is one of my many ideas for a Western Australian project.

I've added the tags you suggest.

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Mark, I agree with your comment regarding the 1832 census.

Something to fill the time during a 14 day quarantine period. My contribution to Wikitree increased a lot after returning from South Australia in 2021.

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 - Mark Dorney , and  Steve Thomas , try cat    = 1832 Census, Swan River Colony =

 - cheers - - ja