Trove Tuesday: Obituary for Leucina White

With all of the new newspaper titles coming online of late on Trove, the wealth of material for the genealogist can be a formidable task to sort through. In my Trove Tuesday post on the Obituary for Rev. John Auld back in March this year, I talked about using obituaries to flesh out the history of an ancestor. In this particular post I want to show how obituaries can be used to help build some branches in your tree, even when there is only a brief mention of an ancestor in the obituary text.

In this example I stumbled across an obituary for Leucina White, the mother-in-law of Maxwell Patrick Auld that appeared in The Muswellbrook Chronicle in 1955.

Obituary of Mrs Leucina White

Source: OBITUARY. (1955, July 8). The Muswellbrook Chronicle (NSW : 1898 - 1955), p. 1.
Retrieved August 20, 2013, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107757902

Listed as living siblings of Leucina White are:

1. William
2. Alma (Mrs Cliff Andrews)
3. Ethel (Mrs Brice Deards)
4. Charles; and
5. Dorothy (Mrs Max Auld)

Mention is also made to Leucina White's husband and three additional children who had passed away previously. Also listed are the four pallbearers:

1. Brice Deards (son-in-law and husband of Ethel)
2. Max Auld (son-in-law and husband of Dorothy)
3. Douglas Andrews (grandson of Mrs White and son of Cliff and Alma Andrews)
4. Donald Andrews (grandson of Mrs White and son of Cliff and Alma Andrews)

Verifying some names with NSW BDM indexes

A quick look on the New South Wales Births, Deaths & Marriages online index website reveals the following information:

• Lucina [sic] Bridget WHITE - death was registered in Mudgee with Edward and Mary listed as her parents (NSWBDM Death index number 14748/1955)
• William H. WHITE married Leucina B. LARGE in Gulgong circa 1904 (NSWBDM Marriage index number 1228/1904)
• Maxwell Patrick AULD married Dorothy Phyllis Elaine WHITE in Mudgee circa 1951 (NSWBDM Marriage index number 28365/1951)

Between the years 1904-12 there are four children of William and Leucina WHITE listed in the online birth indexes. These dates in turn can give us an approximate date of birth for those children.

That said, the objective of this post today was to show how, with just a mention of a name in an obituary (in this case Max Auld), one can place several more branches on the family tree with very little effort!