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Rose and the Frenchman.

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By Sharyn Merkley. Among the many fascinating stories often repeated by my Great Grandmother Rose, was the one about our French ancestry. According to Rose, her mother, Elizabeth Foulger, descended from De Fouriers who had escaped the French Revolution. A mysterious Frenchman had once remarked on Rose’s similarity to someone he knew well, and she had a photograph to prove it! So, she must be French? Right? As a child, I accepted the story until I figured out that the … Continue reading

Genealogy in COVID 19 Times Was Amazing and Never Boring.

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By Shauna Hicks. Since 16 March I have been mostly at home except for food shopping and medical appointments. There has been some reading, cleaning, and gardening but mostly I have had the luxury of spending more time on my own family history. I have tidied up paper files, sorted and tried to identify family photographs, cleaned up computer files and directories, worked through DNA matches, undertaken some new research on various sites and completed some serious writing of stories … Continue reading

Scrutinizing Passenger Lists: Missed anything?

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By Dr Jennifer Harrison. How exciting it is to finally identify the ship on which our forebears sailed from Europe to start new lives in Queensland!  Taking the next step by consulting the actual passenger list and sharing the voyage with an ancestor, often proves even more informative. How many, both new dabblers or quite experienced researchers, really consider the listing and scrounge all the information available on each Queensland passenger record.  Many deplore that we do not share the … Continue reading

Where was he from?

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By Bob McAllister. Beginning family history researchers quickly come to rely on a very small set of good quality documentary records relevant to any particular ancestor. So we are accustomed to wringing every last drop of information from each record that we do find. That is one of the reasons why I am so embarrassed to look back at my earliest searches to see the gems that I overlooked, failed to recognise the significance of, or simply ignored on first … Continue reading

The Kate and her companions who brought immigrants into Brisbane.

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Stephanie Ryan State Library of Queensland A researcher was intrigued to learn that her ancestors, who arrived by the Susanne Godeffroy and Melmerby in 1865, Wansfell in 1866 and Royal Dane in 1869, all made the trip from Moreton Bay to Brisbane in the Kate. What was the Kate? What was the journey from the bay to Brisbane like? The Kate, a 150-ton iron, paddle-wheel steamer especially designed for Brisbane’s bay and river trade, was built in 1864 at Newcastle-on-Tyne … Continue reading