As family historians, we avidly search for details about our ancestors from records about their births, deaths and marriages, immigration documents, electoral rolls and census records etc, and then pad out the details of their lives using various other documents and newspaper articles. If we’re lucky there will be family tales passed down through the generations or someone may even have a collection of photos that they are willing to share. Hopefully … Continue reading
By Margaret Doherty. After researching my family history for about twenty years, I was given a photo of my great great grandmother, Ann Ferguson Laird. Seeing her image made me feel closer to the person, who, along with her first husband, James Porter, took the giant step to move their family to the colony of New South Wales in 1849. Ann’s photo shows a stern woman with thin lips. She is wearing a black bonnet with the image softened by … Continue reading
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
Wikipedia offers the following explanation of the saying ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’: it “refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image, or that an image of a subject conveys its meaning/essence more effectively than a description does. It also aptly characterizes one of the main goals of visualization, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly.” I was reminded of this adage on my recent visit to … Continue reading
