52 Ancestors 2022 Week 3 Favourite Photo

 52 Ancestors 2022 Week 3

Favourite Photo

 

I love these two photos, the only ones I have of my mother as a baby.  I particularly like the contrast between the formal pose of the five children and the very ragamuffin look of the snapshot.

 Mum looks less than a year old in the group photo, so it was taken in 1925.  Her oldest brother, Keith (b 1912), and oldest sister, Ruth (b 1915), are standing behind her.  Missing between them is their  brother, Jackie, who died when he was 6 years old,  in 1920.

 These two older siblings were too much older than Mum to be playmates and both were married while Mum was a young teenager.  Ruth’s marriage took her away from Quirindi, their home town, and Mum saw her again on only  a few occasions before her untimely death in 1945, although they wrote regular letters to each other. 

 Connie, born 1919, was five years older than Mum so she was a teenager while Mum was still a small child. She looks very serious in this photo, holding a spray of flowers in her lap and with her feet neatly crossed.   Mum recalled her dressing up for parties and balls and doing some of the dances of the time – the Charleston and the Black Bottom. 

 Nearest in age to Mum was Royce, born in 1921, and he sits on Mum’s left with a characteristic lop-sided grin and one leg tucked up – a surprisingly informal touch in such a formally posed picture.   

 It is Royce who is the older child in the other photo.  Until the arrival of Joan (b 1928), the last of the family, it was he who was Mum’s closest playmate. 

 This photo has a handwritten note from my grandmother on the back, which suggests that it was sent to Mum many years later. It says, “I am putting in this for you to keep of you and Royce of yourselves in gone days.  Mum” 

 It is always poignant to see the handwriting of someone who has been gone so long.

 Both the children are rugged up against the cold, although Royce wears short pants as little boys always did. 

 The car is interesting.  My grandfather had always had horses and carriages for his trips to town until the accident in 1924 which threw his wife and children into the creek and broke my pregnant grandmother’s hip.  It looks as if he had bought a car by 1926, when this photo was taken.  It’s a T model Ford -very popular at the time. 

 

52 Ancestors 2022 - Week 2 Favourite Find

 

52 Ancestors 2022 Week 2

Favourite Find

 This is not, strictly speaking, a “find”.  I always knew it was there.  But having a close inspection of my grandmother’s wedding dress, almost 110 years after the wedding, was very exciting and very moving.

 I have written before (52 Ancestors 2020 – Week 41) about visiting the museum in Quirindi, NSW and being able to see my grandmother’s dress.  I had seen it before, when I was about 11 years old, and my sisters and I had actually tried to wear it.  Even at 11,  I was bigger than my tiny grandmother.

 Fortunately, it was soon after this (before it could be ruined by other fascinated children), that my grandmother donated it to the museum.

 Knowing of my impending visit, the volunteers of the museum had retrieved the dress from its tissue-lined archive box and laid it out for me.  For many years it had actually been on display, worn by a mannequin, but the fabric is now too frail for it to hang.

 

A description of the wedding appeared in the Tamworth Daily Observer on 16 August, 1911.  In it, the dress is described thus:

The bride wore a dress of cream silk striped ninon over glace silk, richly decorated with pearl and silver trimmings, with the customary wreath and veil.

The cream silk has darkened now, and the glace silk underlining has disintegrated in places.  The silver trimmings have tarnished to a rather dramatic dark grey, but the pearls are still intact.  The rich embroidery is still evident, and most of the silk tassels on the sleeves and hem remain.

The newspaper account continues:

She carried a handsome shower bouquet of white hyacinths, camellias, snow drops and asparagus fern, the gifts of the bridegroom also a costly diamond ring. 

It doesn’t mention the horseshoe attached to the bouquet, which was traditional for brides of the era.  Still attached to its ribbon, it lies with the dress.

I am so grateful that the volunteers of this small country town museum care for this precious relic of my family’s – and the town’s – history.

52 Ancestors 2022 Week 1

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2022 - Week 1

Foundations

The foundations of my interest in family history are the stories.

I was lucky to grow up with parents who talked about their childhoods and told their family stories.  My mother was a legendary storyteller who told stories that were funny or sad with the attendant laughter or tears as part of the tale.  My father was less emotional, but I realised when I began to think about this theme, that I knew a great deal about his family from the stories he told.  He was particularly attached to his mother’s family, the Whites, and very proud of their contribution to the life of his home town, Lismore, NSW.

So, when I began to research the family history, it was to flesh out the bones of these stories from my childhood.  To know more about the people who they spoke of, and perhaps to verify too that the stories were true.

I was curious about the people I had no stories for.  Who, for example, was my maternal great grandmother who had disappeared so totally from my grandmother’s life in her early childhood that she was believed to be dead, only to reappear when her death was announced some 46 years later?

And what was the real reason for my paternal grandmother’s often-voiced antipathy towards my great-uncle Michael?  Was he really an alcoholic wastrel?

Over 40 years of research I have found the answers to both of these questions and uncovered many more secrets and lies within the family stories.

In 2022, I will be looking for more.