It has been a while since the past update but yes we are still around just that other things and real life sometimes get in the way of family history.
The website has been updated several times since the last post and there will be another again shortl. I have been working on the Neww Zealand Halstead's recently and two families in particular.
The first is William HALSTEAD born 1837 who married Mary METCALFE on 6th August 1859 in Halifax, Yorkshire and on the 10th August the same year salied from Liverpool to New Zealand arriving on the 1st December. Mary and son William Henry HALSTEAD (actually born on 27th July just before they married) arrived sometime later as they are both on the 1861 census in the UK but the next child was born in South Island New Zealand in August 1864. Mary must therefore have arrived prior to July 1863 for the child to be William's but we are still struggling to find her arriving but with no outbound lists is a case to chasing newspaper articles.
The second relates to a young man sent to Australia in 1829 as a convict except that he wasn't a HALSTEAD by birth having gone under several aliases. Leigh Dines HALSTEAD became quite successful in Australia and rasied a large family. His eldest son Edward went to New Zealand and became a well known vet and so did several of his children
One of my New Zealand contacts pointed me at FamilySearch (not directly but as a result of sending a link to a passenger list) and I had forgotten how much material is actually going online from them. It is worth checking out their WiKi page for a town or even country. In this case the New Zealand one at https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/New_Zealand_Genealogy includes a link to online resources. This list lots of places to go hunting - some will be on paid sites like Ancestry, MyHeritage and Findmypast but others will be on their own site and these days of course many will have links to the actual images not just transcriptions.
