At 09:11 PM 18/12/2010,
Ann wrote:
Hi Graham,
I too send out a family newsletter around this time of year.
<<<snip>>>>
Such wise words from our administrator. It's true, you don't need
fancy words or professorial English to put out a newsletter. You can
do it in your own pleasant style to please yourself, and if it
pleases yourself it will please others, no doubt about that. My mind
still boggles at the amount of replies I have received off-line in
the past few hours. Seems to me this has been somewhat neglected on
the lists. Time then, perhaps, for all and sundry to think of doing
something like this for the generations that will come along in the future.
I have found that my little journal/newsletter has bound multiple
generations among the living with their past and as a result they are
most appreciative of it. It just needs one person in one family to
start something like this and it takes off like a fireworks
exploding. I originally started it mostly with my Welsh ancestry in
1996 with about an eight page journal with photos that were handed
down from the 1800s and early 1900s, then it bloomed as various rels
became interested and more technology became available and some third
and fourth cousins were discovered. What perhaps made this journal
blossom was the fact that I had also commenced a fact-based
fictionalized story from about my milling engineering grandparents
coming back from New Zealand 1892 and virtually walking into the land
boom bust here in Melbourne when all the banks closed for three
months and some never re-opened. So people were destitute, not being
able to get hold of their money and there were some who were dying in
the streets of Melbourne from starvation - the farmers having brought
down drayloads of food down from the countryside to help out but it
was never enough. Into this mess my grandparents of Welsh descent
arrived and found themselves in diabolical trouble.
So, it was a good point of time to commence this family history
journal and with it a story about their wanderings through the State
of Victoria in times of hardship and almost total drought - a 10 year
journey from town to town before they settled down the seaside city
of Geelong in some kind of peace, but then again tragedy struck.
Grandmother died at the age of 36 in a failed Caesarian operation and
with all the children around her bed she gave good advice to them for
the future and within minutes was gone. So, the eldest child at the
age of 14, Evelyn (my aunt), became the surrogate mother to the other
five children, the youngest barely one year of age. That was quite
enough for anyone to begin to write about and even though the writing
was difficult, and at times I was in tears I managed it and am
thankful that I did. So, the record of those years for that family
stands, through good times and tough times. It is all there laid out
for future generations to come and look. That, I think, is the main
reason I am doing this.
Best wishes
Graham