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Lieutenant John Learmonth of the 2/3 Australian Field Regiment
At the end on Crete he took to the hills, and said he’d fight it out with only a revolver. He was a great soldier … “I wonder,” mused my brother a few years ago now, “whether things would have been different if we had had uncles.” I stopped short. I treasured my two aunts.…
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Stony barriers
This blog is the final of four blogs written for National Family History Month 2016 and describes volcanic stony barriers that are a little more than they seem. A land of sweeping plains? Thousands of years ago my favourite place may have been part of a verdant plain. Thousands of years ago before the volcanoes were active.…
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Wool staplers and wool classers
The 1891 shearers’ strike is just one consequence of the many pressures applied to the wool industry which has been in decline since Hargreave’s invention of the spinning jenny. some of these pressures include: the mechanisation of weaving through the use of power looms, the mechanisation of shearing through the introduction of powered hand pieces…
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Autosomal DNA and Probability
The general wisdom is that matches on autosomal DNA are only accurate for up to four or five generations (or to second cousins). Beyond this limit any matches that may occur probably occur by chance, not by inheritance. This is because there is always the probability that any match of any kind of 5% or…
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Genealogy Do Over – Week 2
In my interviews for Genealogy Do Over Week 2 I returned to when I started collecting my family stories. I went back to my first official family history visit which, coincidentally, involved going back to my first home, Squattleseamere. For my second interview I went back to the time of big shearing teams at Dunmore. I looked…
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Ships and Drays
[wpgmza id=”8″] How’s school going? This was a question I was often asked as a child. I generally mumbled “alright” in reply. But I remember one time particularly – when Grandpa Learmonth asked me about school. I had a great deal of respect for him and he deserved a considered reply. So I asked him how…