I knew nothing about Eileen Evans my paternal grandmother, or her early life until I started doing family history in the 1990’s, many years after her death in 1969. Stored in the bottom of a wardrobe was a shoe box of photos, inherited by my father from a maternal aunt and his mother’s cousin, Evelyn Walls. There were a lot of photos of people I didn’t know, and my first reaction was to want to throw them away. I … Continue reading
‘A little German girl about ten years old … [left his service] because of the brutal treatment she received at the hands of her mistress, who was in the habit of beating her with a whip … [ she then] showed a large sore on her leg which she swore had been occasioned by the blow of a whip.’ This news item, from the 3 December 1864 edition of the North Australian, was of a court case held in Brisbane … Continue reading
My great grand-uncle James Porter arrived in the frontier settlement of colonial Brisbane in Queensland in 1849. He emigrated with his parents and siblings, including my four-year-old great-grandfather, Robert. James was fourteen on arrival, young enough to be amazed by the difference between colonial Australia and his birthplace of Scotland but old enough to remember his early perspectives. He wrote sixty-two years later in 1911, that his memory was better for events that occurred in his younger days than in … Continue reading
Inately proud of her extended family, Lill kept in regular contact with her extended family and friends. How do I know this, you may well ask? Primarily through her marriage, which came about through meeting her future husband while visiting interstate family on both her mother & father’s sides. Then there is that little book collected by many a young girl in the past, their autograph book. I have a copy of Lill’s little book, but more on that later. … Continue reading
On 8 July 1838 at the Bethlehem Church in Berlin, six couples were married by Pastor Johannes Evangelista.[1] They were part of a group of twenty recruited for a Christian mission to the indigenous population at Moreton Bay. My great great grandmother, Dorothea Caroline Weiss, sometimes called Caroline or Maria, was one of the women who married that day. But she was not married to my great great grandfather yet. Her new husband was Heinrich Moritz Schneider (Moritz), a medical … Continue reading
