Human Error Maketh Huge Work for Family Historians

One of the major headaches in Family History is that old records were written by hand and records available today either involve trying to decipher the rushed scrawl of say a Census enumerator wanting to get to the warmth of his home and to replenish his belly or looking at perfectly clear typed records which over the years has been subject to so much transcription. Either way bad handwriting, writing down what an ear hears from illiterate individuals with an English accent with which they are not familiar, or making an erroneous transcription all heaps confusion, frustration and time to Family History research. Consequently not only do we need to seek out records relating to the actual name we are researching (in my case Hookins) but we also have to an eye out for the many cases of Hookings, Hoskin(g)s, Hukins or even in once case Horkins all of which because of their spelling means they are often contained in lists far apart from each other.
I was very fortunate to make contact with Neville and Glenda in South Australia who kindly told me about and sent me copies of a number of records in South Australia including copies of actual gravestones. Many of these were Hookings or Hooking folk and when I began delving into the South Australian records to which they gave me the links I ended up with:

6 Birth Notices and 24 death notices from newspapers
17 Marriage records
36 Death Records
37 Birth records
15 Cemetery Memorials
3 Gravestone photographs

When I began pulling all these pieces of information together I was able to form 17 separate family units to which these records referred.
One of the most significant was a record of Thomas Hookings who was born in 1855 in Crowcombe in North West Somerset in the area where much of my research has centered. Familiar also because the names of the parents quoted matched people in my own records and when I looked at that record I saw that I also had Thomas there as one of their children but they were all Hookins then. However after Thomas left these shores and arrived in Australia in 1874 on board a ship called Darra his name changed to Hookings which name his descendants then took from that time onwards.
There follows a photo of that ship which was described in its day like this:
"The Darra was a speedy clipper ship--130 feet long and 33 feet in the beam. Built in Aberdeen,
Scotland in 1865 for the tea trade with India, the ship had more lately carried immigrants from
England to Australia. A recent run from London to Adelaide had been made in seventy days—a
record time."