The biggest roadblock in writing my Kunkel-O’Brien family history in 2003 was trying to give my readers a flavour of the ancestral home village in Bavaria. I struggled with this stumbling block for weeks, but during a day’s creative writing class at the NT Writers’ Centre a lateral approach came to me. Instead of being … More Writing family history -roadblock in Dorfprozelten
Favourite Food Thinking about this topic I’ve realised how strong has been the influence of my mother’s grandparents –my great-grandfather was a confectioner and pastry cook and the family owned tea rooms in Charters Towers in the late 19th century and prior to that a confectionery business in Ipswich, Queensland. Judging on a few newspaper … More 52 Weeks of Personal History & Genealogy-Week 5 -Favourite Foods
The lack of shoes is not indicative of financial poverty -this is a sub-tropical area.
Shelley from http://twigsofyore.blogspot.com/ has invited us to submit an Australia Day post on our blogs. She suggests that we “Find the earliest piece of documentation you have about an ancestor in Australia. If you don’t have an Australian ancestor, then choose the earliest piece of documentation you have for a relative in Australia” On Wednesday … More Australia Day 2011 meme: the importance of church records and archives to my early documents.
The house where I lived, until I left home as an adult, is a typical Queensland house of its era, in a near-city working class suburb. It is on stilts to gain the benefit of cooling breeze, but also to open up underneath for the typical working tasks, sort of like a combined men’s and … More 52 Weeks of Personal History & Genealogy: Week 4 Home
As hard as it is to believe these days, when (and where) I was growing up, very few people actually owned cars and those who did were generous with their availability. Dad’s family had owned a car for quite a while when he was young but I don’t know why they sold it. My … More 52 weeks of Personal Genealogy & History: Week 3 Cars
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve recently been transcribing the copies of some pages I got on the Inishail Kirk Session records when I was in Scotland late last year. In this post I’ll focus on what I found while trying to learn more about my 3xgreatgrandfather’s pauper status in 1851. The Kirk Session … More Inishail Kirk Session -Poor’s Funds
I’ve recently been transcribing the copies of some pages I got on the Inishail Kirk Session records when I was in Scotland late last year. My focus was on trying to dig out a little more on my earliest ancestor in that area, Duncan McCorquodale. I had searched the fencible lists in the Argyll Archives … More Inishail Kirk Sessions -Scandal & Delinquency
Yesterday I spent hours trawling through Trove again as much has been updated since I last spent a lot of time there. I decided to hunt for my grandmother’s brother(s) who were excellent bagpipe players. I’d found a couple of articles the old-fashioned way by winding through hours of microfilm but Trove turned up much … More Treasure Trove – McCorkindale pipers
Some weeks ago I mentioned not being able to find my wedding photo in the AWWs which have been digitised under Trove despite using a range of relevant search terms. http://www.trove.nla.gov.au/ Today I went searching under the publication date and learnt something new – the AWW obviously published different “Social Pages” for each State and … More Lost in Trove -Qld pics in Australian Women’s Weekly
Family history across the seas 