More Than Hatching, Matching and Dispatching: Giving Your Ancestors Texture and Colour

I first heard the phrase “hatching, matching and dispatching” during a Society of Australian Genealogists course, and it stuck with me. I think it captures what so many of us feel, that genealogy isn’t just a hobby, but a kind of duty. A call to preserve stories and bring light to the forgotten corners of history.

Family history is not just a list of names, dates, and burial plots. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. If all we ever do is record the “hatching, matching and dispatching,” we end up with a tree that is technically correct but emotionally hollow. Sterile, even. And sterile is the last word I would use to describe the lives our ancestors actually lived.

I believe our job as family historians is not only to uncover the facts but to bring texture, depth and meaning to them. To imagine what their lives looked like. Smelled like. Felt like.

So how do we do that?

It begins with refusing to stop at a birth, marriage and death certificate. The real work starts when we take what we know and begin to explore the world around our ancestors, piecing together their context as carefully as we might a missing photograph or a crumbling headstone.

Here are some of the ways I do this in my own work:

1. Newspaper Archives: Reading Between the Lines

Trove, Papers Past, the British Newspaper Archive, whatever your region, there is likely a repository of digitised newspapers waiting to be searched. And while birth and death notices are helpful, it’s the smaller, forgotten corners that often bring the most colour.

Look for local events. Social columns. Court appearances. School awards. A lost horse. A flood that washed through the area. These seemingly minor snippets reveal a living, breathing world. You might even find your ancestor mentioned, racing pigeons, playing cricket, attending a Temperance League meeting.

Even if their name never appears, reading what filled the pages of their local paper will tell you what they would have seen, talked about, or worried over.

A newspaper clipping of an interview of Richard Couche, a man I am researching. Here we have an incredible source -- his own words.

2. Military Service: Beyond a Service Number

If your ancestor served in the military, don’t stop at the service record. Yes, it’s vital. But what unit were they in? What battles was that unit part of? What was the weather like on the front that week? Were there any letters home from other soldiers published in the paper?

Read regimental histories. Search unit diaries. Learn about the conditions of camp life, transport, food, rations. Try to imagine the fatigue, the boredom, the fear, the camaraderie.

If your ancestor was wounded or killed, find the war diaries or casualty reports that mention their final days. It's not morbid. It's respectful. It's the closest we can come to standing beside them in those moments.

My great-grandfather, Tommy Edwards (right), during WW2. Likely taken in Burma (Myanmar).

3. Using AI as a Tool, Not a Crutch

This is where things get controversial. But I’ve found AI can be a helpful tool, not for finding facts, but for imagining scenes based on the facts I’ve gathered.

For example, if I’m researching an Irish Protestant woman living in rural Queensland in 1922 (which I am), AI can help me sketch out what her day might have looked like. What she might have worn. What time she’d have risen. What newspapers were on the table. What political tensions hung in the air.

It’s not a substitute for research. But it can help you feel your way into the story and imagine a moment more vividly, especially if writing is part of your family history work. Think of it as a creative scaffold—used carefully, with discernment.

For a wonderful example on how to approach this I would highly reccomend checking out this article at Jenealogys Scrapbook:

Jenny’s Scrapbook of Family History Stories

4. Understanding Historical Context

You do not need a PhD in history to understand the world your ancestors lived in. But you do need curiosity. Find out what was happening socially, economically, politically and even geographically in their time and place.

Read widely. What industries were rising and falling? What laws were being passed? What epidemics were sweeping through the town? Were there strikes? Were there fires? What churches were active? What did schooling look like?

If your ancestor moved, why might they have done so? What ships were running at the time? What did it cost to travel? Were they pushed out or pulled in?

The more you know about the world they inhabited, the more clearly their choices, and their silences, begin to make sense.

5. Reading Other People’s Diaries and Memoirs

This is a trick not enough people use. If you can’t find a diary written by your ancestor, find one written by someone like them. A miner’s wife in Ballarat. A schoolteacher in Glasgow. A soldier from the same battalion. A farmhand in Alberta.

The vocabulary and daily rhythms will tell you so much about the unspoken aspects of life, what they assumed, what they never needed to explain. These can fill the gaps that official documents never could.

October 22nd 1922. Pages from the Queen Maria’s Diary pertaining to the crowning ceremony of King Ferdinand at Alba Iulia. From WikiCommons.

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Write It Out

It’s one thing to know your ancestor’s life. It’s another thing entirely to tell it. Try writing a vignette from their perspective. Or from the perspective of a sibling, a child, a neighbour.

Try describing a single day, built from real facts but written with imagination. It doesn’t need to be published. The act of writing will teach you where the gaps are, and show you where the story comes alive.

Bringing It All Together

This is why I do what I do. Not just to collect evidence, but to tell stories. To honour lives. To breathe colour into the grey.

You are allowed to wonder. You are allowed to imagine. If you do it with care, humility, and honesty about what you know versus what you believe, you are not doing bad history. You are doing the kind that lives.

After all, our ancestors were not lines on a chart. They were people. Just like us. And they deserve to be remembered as such.

Photo from my Great-Grandmother, Joyce Harvey’s, Australian military file.

You can contact me here via the contact form, on Substack or on my Facebook page Knext Gen Genealogy

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