The Family Detective

Having been on holidays last week I missed the writing for the 52 Ancestors challenge. Week 3 was to look at a favourite photograph. Week 4's theme is "curious". Instead of trying to catch up I've decided to combine the two weeks. It's hard to pick a favourite photograph. I do love the two that you will see in this post. I only was made aware of their presence when I was around 40 years of age. It upset me to know that they had been hanging around our family farm for years, stacked against the wall in a dusty storeroom. I would have loved to have known more about the photographs from the man who owned them and maybe clarified the information given to me about them from my father. We don't have many family photographs. One of the main reasons is that I mostly come from a long line of poor farming families or low paid working class people and photography was probably outside their usual means. We also have had in the past big families and my ancestors were never...

I had no idea when I sat down to write this follow up post about Hessie Lang that it has been EXACTLY 10 years since I first wrote about her. When I was researching Edward Lang I started to think perhaps some of the John Lee Ross family had enlisted as well. To my surprise I stumbled across Frederick Ross a name which I knew as Hessie's husband. When I looked at the papers it gave the next of kin as Frank Seymour of Murrumburrah. After a bit of searching Trove threw up something I wasn't expecting to see, though I know I have read this article many times. John Lang's obituary mentions his daughters and one is Mrs Seymour. I'm not sure I ever looked or wondered about who Mrs Seymour might be as I have not included her on my blog or my tree.  "Mr. John Lang."  Murrumburrah Signal and County of Harden Advocate, 7 July 1927, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article214457204 If we compare the names of the children from the obituary to those found on the death cert...

Week Two's writing theme challenges us to reflect on our favourite find in relation to our family tree. It is a big task trying to narrow a favourite find down to just one. In honesty I'm always so excited any time I can find additional proof to pinpoint records for family members or to back up family stories. Some of the best finds are ones that you just stumble across.  I've already talked about the chance find of a "Missing Friends" advert that helped me answer a long standing mystery for those trying to locate John Lees Ross' family. Another favourite was a single line in an online book that shows John Laing had gone to Braidwood as a child and was living with Michael Hart. My latest find using DNA to confirm my "unknown" Grandfather and Great-Grandfather were special moments in my genealogical digs. One of my earliest finds that transformed the information the family knew about Sarah Weatherstone from a few lines about her children to pages that...

I've now finished my two year University course and felt a bit flat not having the challenge of assignments and peer connections until one of my peers posted about Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge . By accepting the challenge you are sent a series of weekly prompts that help you reflect on ancestors and then share your writing with others. As Amy says the guesswork of "who should I write about" is taken care of . Week 1 challenges us to think about the foundations of our family tree.  By definition a foundation can be the base which everything stands on. In a family tree I'm at the base but I couldn't surely be what the family tree stands on. To think of where we came from as our foundations means we have many, many foundations and the idea of writing about those is my ongoing challenge and something I don't feel I could justify writing about in a week.  I started to brainstorm and came upon the idea of the "founding fathers...

 The following was submitted as part of my Diploma of Family History. I would love to expand on it a little more when I can. We were not to submit photographs and it wasn't a recount of war, but how war may have affected our ancestors. Please consider that some of this was written as theory, but there is a bibliography of items I researched when writing this and my references are found at the end. I encourage you to look at them and make up your own opinion about what has been written in this case study. DL Edward ‘Ted’ George Lang was a boy from the bush. [1] His family dynamics may have been a factor in him enlisting. He spent one-hundred weeks training or in hospital, and thirty-seven weeks in battle. Those weeks of warfare saw him involved in major battles in France, that ultimately led to the retreat and surrender of the German Army. In those thirty-seven weeks he was awarded a Military Medal and was wounded twice. [2] His life after returning was as filled with as many high...