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Researching the past.
We've had a few lovely days exploring the cemeteries at Charters Towers.
The poineer cemetery contains the graves of some infants from our family who didn't survive the harsh conditions and lack of medicines on the Goldfields. In the newer cemetery is the grave of our Norwegian Great-great grandparents. It's ironic that the ironwork around the graves was probably the work of my great grandfather, who was a blacksmith, though he shifted to Townsville in 1885 and carried on his trade there. We've been told that it's not much use re-erecting the marble gravestones, as now and again vandals target the cemetery, which is a great shame.
My Dads country school near Ingham was in operation for 75 years before it was closed. He attended there with his sister and cousins, members of a large family. At the 75th Anniversary reunion, he was the oldest ex-pupil, and had the honour of cutting the cake. It was quite an emotional moment for him!
I'm sure many of us have a lot more history to record. I now have six folders, with many families, all interlinked....and that's only in Australia.
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We have a few more places to visit, Rim, but it will be in the cooler months. We got sunburnt on that trip to Charters Towers! We have ancestors in Cairns and Ingham, and there are two cemeteries in each city.
I wish I'd asked my parents more questions about their past, but it's amazing how an overall picture can be built up with factual information coming to light through research.
G'day Linda. I've only been visiting GOT intermittently since completing the 2011 blog/'toon marathon. Unfortunately, when you get 'wrapped-up' in something like that, other things (like home maintenance etc.) tend to take a back seat ... or, that's what happened in my case anyway. The storm damage we suffered on xmas day was the 'exclamation point' on the message, if I needed a reality check. Sooo ... my blogging and cartooning activities have had to make way for re-developing amateur 'skills' at fixing some of the things around the place which have been neglected for too long. Meanwhile, we still await the insurance-sponsored expert attention to storm repairs. Our claim has been approved but, like people affected by the mounting natural disasters around the country, there's a long, long waiting list ahead of us.
In earlier days, my wife and I used to seek out historic cemetaries around Melbourne and central Victorian goldfields (which aren't all that far from us by car). We spent many summer weekends revelling in the wealth of history stored on ancient (and often primitive) headstones or markers. We too were often dismayed by the inordinate number of infant and early childhood memorials/epitaphs. We may complain about how crook things are for us from time to time ... but, life in colonial Australia (and the first half of the 20th century for that matter) would've been an unrelenting hell if judged by current living standards in general.
We took the 'morbid' funereal fascination with us to the UK in 1996 ... only to be disappointed by the lack of legible headstone inscriptions in most of the 'historic' graveyards we visited. Logstanding and almost universal use of sandstone seemed to be the problem ... not simply the vastly longer sweep of history.