I was born Dianne Fay Alley to Sydney Alley and Jean Wiltshire in 1948 in Brisbane but when I went home with my Mum, I was Dianne Fay Richardson and my parents were Bert and Fay Richardson. Yes, I was adopted, however I wasn’t told that until Bert (Dad) and Fay (Mum) had both died in 2001. I presume that for the first ten days of my life, until the adoption was finalised, I lay alone in a hospital cot. … Continue reading
How difficult it is sometimes to write in great detail about my ancestors! I wrote my paternal family history with relative ease, so why am I struggling with my maternal family history? I have researched them reasonably thoroughly and there’s plenty of data to work with. There may be many explanations for this apparent literary lassitude. My ancestors were average people and very few of them had extraordinary lives. I am older, elderly in fact and the creative juices appear … Continue reading
This is going to be a bit of a “Do as I say – not as I Did” story. A cautionary tale perhaps. So here we go. Early last year I was looking through our calendar of things to be done and spotted an April sized hole in 2025. “Do you want to go to Ireland in April 2025?” I asked Marg. “Sure” she replied. That was the extent of our forward research, and I got busy on the computer … Continue reading
On my 15 July 2024 story I introduced my Neville line and the fascination it has held for me for many years.[1] Now I aim to write about the child of the last Neville in my direct line, that is my 2 x great-grandmother Mary Geary, who I briefly mentioned in my blog of 7 April this year. As genealogists we struggle to find information about the women in our families and it is much the same for Mary Neville … Continue reading
Mum was moving into a retirement unit, and we sat on her bed as she tipped out a box of old photos and cuttings. I picked up some yellowed pages, stapled together in the corner. I flipped through the pages until I came to a longer entry for “FRANZ, Frederick Leopold Theodore”. I read how he was part of a missionary group who arrived in Australia in 1838 where they founded a mission in Moreton Bay at what is now … Continue reading
