The body of a 69-year-old man was found by a fisherman on the western breakwater of Townsville’s waterfront. It was Thursday 15 June 1916, when Don Ingham, deep in thought about hooks and bait, nearly fell over a dark shape sprawled across the stony path on the way to his favourite fishing spot. As evening light fell on the becalmed water, this was when Don loved to fish, an incoming tide, a quiet reprieve after the day’s work: but not … Continue reading
The Illustrated London News published on 31 May 1890, on page 675, included a sketch of the Lighthouse at the Daedalus Reef in the Red Sea at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez, offshore from Marsa Alam, adjacent to the Two Brothers rocks. These dangers named for the vessel which originally surveyed the Red Sea lay on the direct route of ship traffic along the Suez Canal. The Reef had undergone a name change by sailors who, well aware … Continue reading
My next genealogy journey will be an exploration of my late wife’s family. Her name was Helen Jean Hansen (nee Barlow) and she succumbed to ovarian cancer in 2010. I intend to bring her family and ancestors to life again, figuratively speaking of course, for the benefit of their descendants. But what was my first genealogy journey? That journey began in 1983 with an evening course conducted by the Genealogical Society of Queensland (GSQ) at The Gap State School. Given … Continue reading
Readers may recall I introduced my grandfather Len in my story of 14 November, this is a continuation of Len’s tale after he returned from World War One. In 2014, I came across a website called Adopt a Digger, a centenary project to map returned soldiers from the Sunshine Coast area, particularly those who had taken up land at the Beerburrum Soldier Settlement.[1] Here I also discovered a photograph of my grandfather. It was taken at the camp in Enoggera … Continue reading
By Shauna Hicks. GSQ has scheduled me for two guest blog posts a year. Every time my turn comes around, I struggle for a topic. What is going to interest other family historians? This time I’m going to write about something that I’m working on now with my own family history. And that’s trying to tell my own story. We spend lots of time researching our ancestors, but we also need to remember that in 100 years or so, someone … Continue reading
