Welcome! My name is Val Burge of Sydney, NSW, Australia. This is the index to a history of both sides of my family tree - or as a friend said about it recently, my family 'forest'. 

It's about where they came from in Britain, who their ancestors were, their occupations, daily lives, some of their joys and tragedies, when and how they came to Australia, and what happened after that. The earliest I've managed to go back so far is to 1612 - but I'm working on it! 

I began my research in about 1992. At that time my father Lindsay Burge (since deceased) had already spent considerable time corresponding with various people in England, then searching records offices and parish records in Somerset whenever his travels took him near there. He was researching the Burges, so I focused on the McLeans. Since his death, I've taken on the whole family. It went slowly for ten years or so, but now the internet has taken off in a big way for researchers of family history, and my knowledge has grown enormously over the past few years. My current family history covers thousands of names, a dozen or so major family lines, and many smaller 'offshoots' to the main family tree. 

This began as simple curiosity, but for me turned into a labour of love, a way of knowing who I belong to. I'll never forget the moment, as an adult, standing in the middle of a cemetery surrounded by dozens of family graves, and knowing at last that I belonged. As a youngest child of a very much youngest child, I'd never had the opportunity to know even my grandparents, let alone any of their families. My father moved away from the village where my family settled in Australia when I was a young child, so I had all ties broken with my roots. I know them now!

This site is slowly growing, I'm working my way through the ancestors of four sets of great grandparents and their descendants - adding pages as the mood takes me.

Before Redbank, Lancefield, Ballarat, Geelong and the Barossa Valley in Australia, the major geographical areas are Frome, Whatley and Batheaston in Somerset, Dilton Marsh, Corsley and Corsham in Wiltshire, Peckham in London, Horsham in Sussex, Brown Candover in Hampshire, Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, Patshull, Albrighton, Beckbury, and Chelmarsh in Shropshire, Pattingham in Staffordshire, Ilfracombe and Berrynarbour in Devon - and a great great uncles line of the family in Mespotamia, Ohio, USA.

The Scots line are from the tiny isle of Taransay, in the Outer Hebrides and Fort William, both in Invernesshire.

I also have quite a few pages of early photographs of my families in Australia, as well as feature pages on some areas - see links below.

The people in my family are all ordinary people (with the possible exception of one who appears to have had a brush with royalty :-) See the Burge's in Batheaston!) I'm not writing out of a sense of enormous pride in an outstanding family, I'm not writing about anything out of the ordinary at all... The lives in these pages stand out purely by their ordinariness, it is the ordinary that's not recorded in history, the obscure that is lost. Many of these people have almost become lost to the world in general, and my direct family had no knowledge of most of them at all. It's a delight to me to put them all into one place, to have them available to my childen and those of my brothers, sister and many, many cousins... and all of my cousins were lost up until I started researching. Through researching these pages, I have come into contact with 'lost' family in Australia, but also in England, Wales, Scotland, Canada, America and New Zealand. Truly a worthy enterprise!