Finding Irene ...

 Trying to find Irene Lily May Hoggan's death record got under my skin, so I decided to do a little detective work - otherwise known as brushing up my genealogical research skills.

I backtracked my searches on Victoria's Births, Deaths and Marriages website and there was definitely no death record, nor was there a death record for her husband, Arthur Burge.

And even though we are looking at a time when divorce was rare and expensive, most people simply making their own informal arrangements, I checked for a divorce record, and there was none. 

In a moment of frustration I simply tried a google search on her full married name, and strangely that worked - I stumbled across an Ancestry list of family trees and there she was, living in New South Wales.

Ancestry of course obscures most of the information unless you sign up.

 

I don't have a subscription to any of the family history giants any more, but what was not obscured suggested that Irene Lily May may have died in New South Wales.

At this point I could, I suppose, have waited to Monday to use my local Library's Ancestry subscription - you can only use the subscription from one of the Library desktops - to check further but I had enough bits of puzzle - having a slightly unusual name helps - to track her down online using open source materials.

 

A quick search of NSW's BDM site confirmed  that she had died in Manly in 1958 almost twenty years after her husband, who appears to have died in 1939.

The fact that this was relatively straight forward is a tribute to how simple it is to carry out basic genealogical research using open source materials - despite what the glossy ads tell you you don't need a subscription to one of the behemoths for basic research given so much is publicly available online.

If you are doing a lot of work in this area, a subscription to the behemoths can be worthwhile, if only to reduce the cost of access to copies of original documents, and even then your mileage may vary...