Sometimes you can just be lucky.
After months or even years you can stumble on some little piece of information, or a big piece that fits the puzzle or something anew, that changes everything. This has happened to me three times where the BIG picture has changed completely with one tiny snippet passed on by a thoughtful person, who had no idea at the time how valuable it was, after literally years of looking.
Sometimes you have all the pieces but can't quite get the puzzle to fit, sometimes exploring in depth but to dead ends. Other times you have only a few pieces, needing only a few more for the jigsaw to be complete.
What happens next is an amazing and exhilarating overwhelm of questions and more need for information which keeps you up night after night delving into it, jotting down more questions and following more leads. It can be so exciting. However, it can be difficult not to be overloaded with the modern age. Once you had to wait for the postman, but now, with electronic media (what a godsend in these situations) information comes flying through at a rate of knots.
What to do?
I personally have a photo file of every horse we have ever bred or owned. Some of the oldies are yet to be stored electronically. But everything electronic is stored in an individual folder with appropriate labeling. And duplicated on a portable hard drive. Of course that takes time.
To speed up the process of collating information, I also have a Word Document for each horse in the same folder. I then cut and paste all info into it, by date and who gave me the info, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for later cross-referencing. You cannot expect to remember who messaged you what, or which email has which snippet, even though search facilities are pretty good these days.
So I just paste the information in, unedited into date order, for sometime later when I come back and have a need to look at it again, to edit it to put into some sort of order.
I highly recommend you do the same.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who have relevant information are not as diligent, and word of mouth is very poor for recall. Important lines and history is so easily lost within a few generations or even sooner. I recently was chatting with one lady who had some good horses, but upon inquiry into the bloodline, her response was "I don't know, I am not really into that sort of thing."
We are so lucky in this country that most breeders of good horses kept a "horse book", a stock book, for example. These are now in the hands of Companies or down-generations who may not appreciate the value of their records.
Information about the performance or breeding records, historical data etc is sooooo important. If you stand a stallion or breed horses, how can you tell someone about the virtues of your horse, its genetics, advertise it successfully if you don't know anything about it? Are you for real? You're a breeder but you have no idea what you are breeding from??? What is your stud's point of difference? - is it an exceptional bloodline or an unusual one? How will others know, if you can't put that story together for say, a website or FB page or flyer? Why should they bother to purchase your stock? It's not that you have to have it "in-their-face" but just simply available!
And if you breed unregistered horses, well that makes it even harder to track. Some people don't even record who they bought a horse from or sold it to. (Shows just how much they valued the horse, IMO)
Please everyone, do your best for your own breed, your own bloodlines, to ensure that such information is not lost.
This is the reason I have put information from my own research into my new book “The Rannock Legacy.” It is so future generations can have the information I have collated, especially my grandchildren, but also others who may have a horse descended from our bloodlines. A reference book which can be referred to again and again, when looking up pedigrees OR indeed just to enjoy stories of people like yourselves who like to to learn more about the Australian horse in general and our history.
You can pre-order The Rannock Legacy, before the price goes up upon publication in April. The first draft looks amazing. It has 26 Chapters and around 400 photos. The book is sure to become a collector’s item and because it records history, it will not date! Get your copy
Cheers.