During this first week of Family History Month I’ve been posting daily on my previously much-neglected Instagram page. Mainly about the writing task, given that my credentials as a family historian have been honed by the work required to write up what I've uncovered as a researcher as I wondered where I came from. My various books cover a broad spectrum of history, broadly grouped into themes.
The first theme covered the earliest years of European settlement of Australia, featured in the convict branch of my tree. That lot came to Sydney because they had no choice!
In the Cornish branch of my tree, economic conditions in Cornwall sparked the arrival in South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland of hardworking miners and farmers in the 1860s and 1870s.
The London branch of my mother’s family turned out to be very diverse people, but I grouped them thematically as Transport History (innkeepers, mail coaches, railways) and Gentry (science, medicine, arts, religion). Around 1880 representatives of both groups headed separately for Australia. Railways accountant Philip Boulton came to ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ from London seeking better health, while the adventurous Flockton sisters came to Queensland, responding to advertisements in the English papers offering free, escorted migration passages to the colonies for educated middle class women.
Hard times in Northern Ireland in the 1840s motivated all of my father’s Irish farmer forebears to sail away to Geelong and Melbourne.
Exploring some of these issues will continue in my Instagram posts throughout August. Hopefully I will shed some light on the detective work needed, and the research and writing tasks involved in publishing stories with a family history focus. Join me there!