By Victoria MacGregor. I enjoy writing. Short stories, essays, even the odd birthday card can have a deep and meaningful diddy penned by yours truly attached to the salutation. I’m certainly no novelist that’s for sure, well not yet anyway. But I do like to tell a story. If the subject has a humorous side, or maybe something a bit scary, or as we all can relate to, a family mystery, I like it even better. A few years back … Continue reading
by Peter Cass Well, this is the third in a row, so I guess that makes it a series! Last year’s piece was a bit big picture, what is the world coming to. This year is more family focused. My father’s father, Augustus Theodore (Gus) Cass (born 1886), joined the Melbourne and Metropolitan Fire Board (MMFB) as a fireman in about 1907. This undated photo of him, resplendent in his full uniform, must have been taken very early in his … Continue reading
by Christine Leonard. My father died when I was sixteen. At the time I was in my seventh year of boarding school in Australia as my parents lived in Papua New Guinea, where I was born. Dad’s death was a shock, completely unexpected; he was tall, lean, strong and fit. We, as in my brother and I, assumed Mum would go first; she was the one with a heart condition. There again, Dad smoked up to 80 cigarettes a day, … Continue reading
By Marg Doherty. My family history is full of Scottish immigrants who came to Queensland in the mid-nineteenth century and stayed in Queensland. With that in mind, I wondered why my grandfather’s brother, Robert James Porter, had a daughter buried in the Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney.[1] Robert married Annie McIntosh in 1907 in Pittsworth, and their daughter Gladys Ann was born ten months later on 10 June 1908.[2] Gladys died at age nine months on 6 March 1909 in Sydney. … Continue reading
The last of my Killyleagh siblings in this series of blogs is my great-grandfather, Robert Gilmour Irvine. I’ve written about the other ten siblings including the birth of Robert’s twin brother Andrew in 1849 in a previous GSQ Blog.[1] It appears that Robert was a devout Christian and in April 1867, when 18 yrs old he was confirmed along with his elder brother, James. With planning well underway for his emigration to join his brothers in Queensland, before he left … Continue reading
