With the continuation of COVID and its restrictions on movement of people and lockdowns, 2021 has been a difficult year; a year of disrupted and/or cancelled regular, enjoyable activities with no travel to compensate for these losses. To fill in time, I decided to sort through all the family documentation that had been handed down to me over the years and was now laying hidden at the back of a cupboard in an overlarge lidded tub. On opening the tub, … Continue reading
By Victoria MacGregor. Since the late 1980s, when my mother gave me a detailed family tree document, I’ve lingered around the perimeter of getting into family tree research. It recorded the names, birth and death dates of her father’s side of the family. Mostly his distant cousins. I pulled that old, faded Xerox chart out the day after I finished my fourth 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle about three weeks into Covid19 lock down in 2020 and was struck by the fact … Continue reading
Regular readers will have met the Priestley family in my September post. That post told the story of Robert Priestley and his wife Jenny/Jane Tattersall, from Lancashire. In a family of 12 children, their only daughter Hannah married my 2 x great uncle Josiah Hall, one of the sons of Joseph Hall and Hannah Radford, whom we have also met earlier. My September post also highlighted the relatively short life of their fifth son, Enos, who had migrated to Victoria … Continue reading
Can a life be affected if begun in war? Perhaps for William Thomas Phillips, born in Portugal on 6 December 1813, during the Peninsular War, this isn’t a question which needs to be asked. He was only four years old when his parents, James and Lydia Phillips, and older siblings, Henry and Jane, finally returned to peacetime in England in 1817 following the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Aged nine when the family arrived in New South Wales, Australia … Continue reading
By Bev Murray. I remember when I was a young child, my grandmother, told me a fascinating but tragic story about a lady who lived a long time ago. “One day long ago,” she said, “one of your ancestors went outside her home to get some wood and she never returned. She disappeared and was never seen again.” “What happened to her?” I asked and my grandmother explained, “It was thought that she had been taken by the blacks”. This … Continue reading
