Pieces of History
15th September 2023
On December 10th 1852, David Wilson married Euphemia Hay in Dundee Scotland. They were my great-great grandparents.
The Place of Pride and Shame in Genealogy
18th September 2023
Comments in social media recently have prompted me to think about the place of Pride & Shame in genealogy.
The Life and Times of Martha Wiggins
18th September 2023
Originally I was confused about who “my Martha Wiggins” was because there were two girls of that name in Tasmania in the right time frame.
History in Three Centuries
25th September 2023
The year 2023 marks the 121st anniversary of the birth of my Nana. Gertrude Ellen Wilson was born on the 25th of September, 1902 in South Melbourne.
A Story of Love and Loss
2nd October 2023
I have a letter found in my Grandfather's desk, which illustrates the lengths to which we need to go to work out what our ancestors were doing. I sometimes think they intended to hide things from us, but I guess they just never imagined that we would be trawling through their letters and their lives 100 years or more after they had died, or what kinds of things we'd be able to find out.
Names in Genealogy
24th October 2023
A genealogy question on Mastodon, about households containing people with identical names, started me thinking about the number of different version of names we find in old documents and I wondered if it might be explained by the tendency in times past to name children after parents or grandparents, or other significant family members.
Growing Up Non Indigenous in Australia
8th January 2024
My Mum once made a passing remark about my son’s girlfriend (now wife) being ‘foreign’. The remark wasn’t intended as criticism. To my mother it was just a fact because my future daughter-in-law’s mother came here from Sri Lanka.
Changing Names
28th February 2024
Both of my Mum’s grandmothers were called Sarah Jane.
Brief Lives
15th November 2024
A remark made between two of my dad's cousins had caused me to assume that my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Henderson may have died from dementia. The comment - "oh, isn't she the one who went mad" - was passed on to me by my mother, who was notorious for getting things wrong when it came to my dad's family, so I thought I should investigate it a bit further.