World War II Invasion of Sydney Harbour, 31 May 1942 by Japanese midget submarines In October 1907, my grandfather, John Fuller Junr., on his World Tour, observed the Japanese nation during his ten day working holiday in Tokyo, when he described Japan as a hermit nation. A hermit nation is a country which isolates itself from the world with its customs, language and culture – rather like modern North Korea today. There would not have been many men from New …
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Many trees on ancestry.com incorrectly list Frances Paynter of Boskenna as the son of William Paynter of Trelissick (1609-1669) and his wife Jane Keigwin of Mousehole (1603-1640). This is due to a combination of two factors. One is a 1930 Paynter Family Tree uploaded to some trees on ancestry.com without authorship. The other most confusing issue is a conflicting account of the Paynter family of Boskenna by John Burke Esq. in his book, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the …
Just when I thought I had finished researching my Cornish family history, I found a book mentioning William Camborne alias Paynter of Deverell, Cornwall from Burke’s Family Records (Indexed) by Ashworth P. Burke, 1897; a database recording the genealogy of the junior houses of the British nobility. Burke explained that “details of family origins, surnames, events and locations are recorded for about 300 British cadet lines; some are accompanied by coats of arms.” Cadet being the terminology used for the …
The Patterson Family of Bathurst New South Wales, The Early Years (1887-1914) and Sydney (1915-1942) including an account of Alfred Andew Patterson (1859-1932), head gardener of Machattie Park from 1890-1907. My husband Geoff Rundle never knew his maternal grandfather, Alfred Walter Patterson, who married Sylvia Lenore Farrell on 20 December 1915 at St Michael’s Church, Surry Hills. It was explained by my husband’s mother, Valmae “Val” Lenore Rundle nee Patterson, that her father, Alfred Walter Patterson had died from heart …
The Griffin Family of New South Wales and of Knockbrack, Brosna, Kerry, Ireland Having completed two family chapters on The Patterson family of New South Wales and Sweden, I was now ready to write up my research into my husband Geoff Rundle’s great grandmother Margaret Mary Griffin, the wife of Alfred Andrew Patterson. The Griffin family was amongst my earliest and most successful areas of Irish research, during the formative years of my genealogical research. Nine years later I am …
The Patterson Family of Bathurst, Chapter Two (1915-1960) My continuing family history about the Patterson family of Bathurst, New South Wales begins with the tragic death of Margaret Patterson. The obituary of Mrs A. A. Patterson shows that poor Margaret died suddenly on 17 March 1920 in Bathurst, whilst sitting in her buggy in front of Mr. E. J. Gartrell’s baker’s shop in William Street. The newspaper records that Margaret had been residing with her son Thomas Patterson of Roselea, …
Whilst researching my Robson family, miners from Wallsend and Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northumberland, I came across the Russell Wallsend Mine disaster which occurred on 23 October 1821, nearly 200 years ago. It took quite some time to piece together the history of the Robson family and in this quest I had an amazing collaboration with Sandy Murray, another Robson family researcher. It was Sandy who showed me how to find the Bishop’s Transcripts from Durham and Northumberland from FamilySearch.org, a …
George Edwin Wise (1850-1933) was my paternal Great Grandfather, the maternal grandfather of my father Reginald George Robson (1915-1980). George was born in Cork, Ireland on 22 October 1850, just a year before his family migrated to Australia in 1851. It is thought that business opportunities in a new land was the reason for the family migration at a time when Ireland was in the midst of the potato famine which caused a depression, increased crime and religious rioting. For …
My mother, Lavinia Robson nee Fuller, died in January 2016. I was feeling melancholy in the months after and searched through her photo albums and then moved onto her dad Johnny Fuller’s scrapbooks, finding his 1907 diary of his trip around the world. After all my family research since 2011, I found myself looking at the Fuller family history with different eyes, noticing things I had previously overlooked, or things that earlier didn’t mean anything to me, were now substantial …