‘Delightful float bowl In black and biscuit, bearing a native design’[1] For some reason I often noticed a particular black and biscuit coloured jug on display at my grandmother’s place. Perhaps it was because I was studying ancient Greek pottery at university at the time and it reminded me of the black figure pots which were made around the 6th century BC. But the figures on this jug were not Greek gods but Australian animals such as the pelican, swan … Continue reading
Bell’s Picnic Party was the title of a small piece in The Worker in May 1908. It expressed the newspaper’s view of a trip my great uncle, Joshua Bell, who was Minister for Lands at the time, was taking along the Queensland coast in May 1908 on the Government steamer Lucinda. Mr. Bell, in the fostering atmosphere Ministerial authority, is developing a great gift of conviviality—at the country’s expense…taking with him a few chosen pals and political tuft hunters…[1] … Continue reading
I am always on the lookout for information about women that provides a fuller picture of their lives to add to the information which is usually available such as where they were born, how many children they had, what their husbands did and when they died. But this is often difficult as previously women were usually invisible with few or no signs that they had lived, and even the wives of ‘important’ men were often only recorded when they were … Continue reading
Occasionally you hear a story of someone who arrives in a country looking for their ancestors and commences wandering the roads and byways. Suddenly, seemingly by chance, as they have done very little research, they stumble across a record, a house or the burial place of a long lost relative. The other story, and the most common, especially if your relatives came from Ireland, is the one where you do endless research, go up and down genealogical roads, constantly hitting … Continue reading
Do many of us who are doing genealogy research think, as we are searching Trove or gazing at microfilm to find that missing link, that one way we may find the answer is to write our story and put it out there on a blog and see whether some distant relative suddenly presents the answer? Sounds far fetched doesn’t it? I certainly thought so when I started to contribute to this blog. Perhaps I was naive because I thought you … Continue reading
