How can it be that a well-connected Irish bookbinder with a wife and seven daughters, and who worked for decades in the Victorian city of Cork just disappears in every historical record that could tell you who he is.No birth, death or burial records denotes the start and end of James Journeaux’s life: if it … More Ancestors with Secrets
Sheedy Macnamara family of Glenomeara, Clare, Ireland … More Sheedy Macnamara of Glenomera, Clare
Local community are up in arms about the surge in commercial racehorse training on Killarney’s coast in southwest Victoria and have launched a Petition to take the fight to State level. Warrnambool City Council’s sudden ban on racehorse training on it’s beaches has seen an immediate surge of training at Killarney, which is also part of the Belfast … More Saving Country: Killarney Beach coastal environment under commercial racehorse training stress
It’s a startling experience when you discover some five generations of your family have successively worked in occupations centered around one industry. It is one of those ! full-stop moments where you just have to pause and wonder particularly about family commonalities beyond genetics. The surprise is that irrespective of era or gender or even … More White-Williams’: Ivybridge Migrants
With over two decades of experience in researching family history records I really should have seen it coming: ‘Colonial Maul’ as a death cause for my ancestor’s brother instead should have read ‘Colonel Maule’, and it was actually the name of a ship. It had started off as a really exciting day to finally find a reference to James Brabner, the missing … More Mauled English: the fate of James Brabner
Grandmother Jean Lovel Booley and grandfather Bob Williams taken in Ballarat in the late 1920’s. picture courtesy of Leigh Williams of Ballarat For nearly two decades I have wondered how a girl from Ouyen in Victoria’s Mallee district married a boy from some 350 kms away in Ballarat, but the answer is so simple I should probably … More A Home Affair: how grandparents meet
A grassy single plot within the Ballarat Old Cemetery hides the heartbreak of an immigrant family who fled political unrest in England to seek a new start in colonial Australia, the proposed new land of opportunity, health and wealth. No gravestone exists in this country cemetery in Victoria’s west to count the mounting death toll as Suffolk-born Robert Francis Booley (1829-1875) … More A Grave Matter: Booley family plot at Ballarat’s Old Cemetery
There is growing accord among the historians at least that our mystery 1938 Ballarat ‘Bell School’ photo is instead the every well known ‘Bell School’ in Melbourne’s northern suburb of Preston. In the absence of any evidence that a Bell School ever operated at Ballarat, I have to agree with one experienced historian who says I have … More Mystery Ballarat School unravelled as Preston Bell School #4309
UPDATE 18th MAY 2016. This mystery school identified as the BELL SCHOOL #4309 in Oakover Street, Preston (Melbourne, Vic). READ HERE FOR THE UPDATE I can easily find my Dad in this old school photo, but it seems finding the actual Ballarat -based school is another matter entirely! Extensive inquiries and searches have failed to locate the … More Ballarat’s? mystery ‘Bell School’
In 1925 a grieving widow donated art works to Victorian galleries in the hope her late husband would not be forgotten, and though that’s pretty much what happened Warrnambool however, has a special way of remembering talented Australian Impressionist Tom Humphrey (1858-1922). Warrnambool’s Art Gallery (WAG) is set to rehang Humphrey’s formative work The Way To School’ … More Way To Go! Art Remembering: Warrnambool Impressions of Tom Humphrey
