Part 2 of the research was to begin almost 10 years later. In contrast to the physically tiring journey to Malaysia and limitations of searching old archives and church records, I have since been blessed with new technology and the advent of the Internet. Nevertheless, the online journey to piece the puzzles discovered in 1990 and to fulfil the promise to search our family roots have been just as tiring – mentally this time.

Since we held our first mass family reunion to celebrate the finding of our family roots, the Shepherdson family have been gathering every year near Christmas to catch up with one another and to reinforce our family ties. In 1998, I was somewhat reminded to update our earlier research. So in mid 1999, I started to find time to continue the quest for our ancestral roots.

The previous research on the family tree, although significant in its findings, did not capture all the Shepherdson branches that exist in Singapore. We managed to document the entire family tree of my great grandfather and a few branches of his siblings and their families. But we failed to account for other Shepherdsons and there were many more. There were also quite a few Shepherdsons that we found in various churches in Malaysia which were unaccounted for.

The First Online Step

Armed with the knowledge obtained from my earlier research, I set forth on the Internet to search for Shepherdsons. To my pleasant surprise, I found lots of Shepherdsons being referenced on the Internet. You see, Shepherdson is a unique name here in Singapore which is predominantly Chinese. Finding so many other Shepherdsons in other countries suddenly made it seem that Shepherdsons were everywhere.

For example, a search of "Shepherdson" at Yahoo! reveal close to 700 references to Shepherdsons on the Internet. Most of these Shepherdsons are prominent people from PHd lecturers, to Authors, to Economists and Consultants. As I browsed through these links, I found a Ruth Shepherdson who runs the Singapore Eurasian Community Home Page. I was reminded quite uncomfortably of the inadequacy of my previous research as I had no idea who she is. Her name is not in the family tree we had documented; probably from the other Shepherdson tree that was not included.

I spent hours looking at the search results wondering how I was going to piece the missing puzzle – i.e locating the first Shepherdson who came from England. Then I found a Shepherdson Web site! My hopes were dashed when I discovered that it contained just hobby pages of Shepherdsons living in Australia. Although this was interesting, I was still lost!

Genealogy Online