Greg's McNamara Family History Magpie

Welcome to
Greg's
McNAMARA
Family History in Australia
MAGPIE

In the course of my research I have come to realise the way to make connections is through pattern matching, not just name searching. There is no point looking just for my James McNamara, there are too many of them. The key is finding a relatively unique pattern into which the name fits.

magpie photo

I personally find scanning lists of associated names helps me quickly decide whether a fragment of information from a fellow researcher fits into any of the name patterns in my own research. I find single name lists of very little help (although they inspire lots of interesting email exchanges) and I find the multiple little gedcom-html files people generate from their databases helpful but hard work because they mostly display just one name in relation to parents, not siblings as well. They are not pattern scanner friendly!

Consequently I decided to create the MAGPIE (McNamara's Australian Genealogical PIEces). Don't you just hate acronyms? The MAGPIE is my attempt to make patterns in family names more quickly and easily recognisable on the web. Hopefully this will facilitate people tracking down and filling those gaps in their McNamara family nest of twigs (and mine).

The MAGPIE concept is something I dreamed up but if you think it will work for your family name go ahead and copy it. Just acknowledge my idea with a link to the MAGPIE page using a comment about the original MAGPIE.

NOTE: The MAGPIE nest must be viewed with a graphics, frames and JavaScript enabled browser. The pages are not graphic intensive but graphic viewing must be turned on to view these pages properly. Netscape 3+ and MSIE 3+ are equally good for this task.

Enter the MAGPIE NEST here.



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Designed and maintained by Greg McNamara.
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Last updated February 2002.



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