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Blog postIn the early 1900s, Perth had no shortage of larger-than-life characters. They included not only eccentrics like Mrs Tracey and imposters such as Harcourt Whipple Ellis, but politicians, doctors and members of the legal profession.
The judiciary in Western Australia went through a particularly turbulent time around the turn of the twentieth century, much of it due to personality clashes and politics. It began when Chief Justice Alexander Onslow, whose early years in office had been ma -
Blog postIt may not look much different, but I’ve just finished moving and upgrading this website.
Previously the address bar said “Not secure” before my web address, which was rather off-putting. Now it has a nice little lock and ‘https’ in front of the address, with the ‘s’ standing for ‘secure’. It means people can leave comments, or add their name and email address to subscribe, with more confidence. Google also prefers secure websites.
This is what “the cloud” looks like in real life -
Blog postTrust is important in any relationship. But there are two levels of trust. The first involves our expectation that the other person will do us good rather than harm and will carry out what they say they will do. Over time we learn whether or not to believe the things they promise. The second, deeper, level of trust involves our sense of safety when we are with them, and our willingness to
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Blog postJohn Ward and his family left Rastrick in Yorkshire, sometime before 1901, and returned to Lancashire. They settled in Milnrow, not far from Littleborough, where they'd been living before they went to Yorkshire. Cottage handloom weaver at work. (Image from Wikimedia.org) Milnrow, located in a valley on the River Beal, was similar to Littleborough in many ways. It had once been a quiet
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Blog postAs an experiment, I’ve set up a couple of boards on Pinterest for images related to my books. They’re both works-in-progress, but have a look and tell me what you think. I’m something of a newbie when it comes to Pinterest, so I’d appreciate any suggestions you can offer me on how to improve them.
The first is for Susan. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of Susan herself, or her husband David Whybrew. But I’ve included a few of the people mentioned in the book, as well as many o -
Blog postThe so-called Roman Road on Blackstone Edge near Littleborough.Photo by Humphrey Bolton Let's follow John and Mary Ward, as they leave Walton le Dale in the 1870s and move to Littleborough, close to the Lancashire border with West Yorkshire. How different they must have found this village in the hilly, sheep-grazing moorlands of the Pennines, to the flat farmland and market gardens around
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Blog postA couple of weeks ago I put the finishing touches to my latest book and uploaded it to a publisher. That should have produced a sense of satisfaction. Two years’ worth of research completed, 85,000 words written, rewritten and polished. Instead I felt more like muttering, “Good riddance, I never want to see that wretched book again.”
Young woman typing, c 1906 Not that I haven’t enjoyed writing the book. But I’d just spent several days trying to get the footnotes looking half-sensible -
Blog postThe sun was shining, but the air had a bitterly cold bite to it, when we left the station in Preston, Lancashire, and made our way south in December last year. We were planning to walk to Walton le Dale via the London Road (the A6), over the stone arched bridge which is famous as the site where Oliver Cromwell fought a battle with the Royalists in 1648. Instead we came to a footbridge,
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Blog postAs I’ve been doing the research for my book (which is almost finished) I’ve come across some interesting, strange, and even bizarre characters living in Western Australia in the early 1900s. It has been a constant struggle not to leave what I’m doing and go chasing after their stories on Trove.
A few get a brief mention in my book, including the indomitable Mrs Tracey, whose story Jessica Barratt has told in wonderful detail on her blog. Another is Harcourt Whipple Ellis. Even the lit -
Blog postHappy New Year everyone! The start of a new year seems a good time to decide on a theme for the posts on Clogs and Clippers for the next twelve months. Last year I chose to review some of the unsolved mysteries in my family history. Having just come back from visiting some of the locations in England where my ancestors lived, I've decided my theme for this year will be "places". I'll be
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Blog postJacarandas in flower in Hyde Park
In November in Perth, the jacarandas burst into purple-blue clouds of flowers, a colourful reminder that Christmas is not very far way.
As I was admiring those growing near our house yesterday, I wondered if Harriet Lenihan, one of the main characters in the book I’ve been writing, would have seen jacarandas in flower when she arrived in Perth in November 1897.
They’re not a native tree, but they’ve been grown in eastern Australia sinc -
Blog postBack in 2014, I described how I'd found records for a man in Australia with the same name as my Leicestershire-born great great grandfather, Thomas Brown Orton. My curiosity was piqued and I looked into this younger man's story a little. I soon realised that it was probably co-incidental that the two men were both named Thomas Brown. My great great grandfather (born 1842) was named after his
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Blog postShe was a young, childless widow, an immigrant with no property and no income. He was a respectable land owner in a small town. Their story has a touch of romance, but it's hardly the stuff of history. Why is it included in the Bible? What distinguished Ruth and Boaz from those around them, who lived and died, then rested forgotten within a couple of generations? Why does Ruth´s story appear
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Blog postA friend told me this morning that he’d finished reading my book Susan. He said he chuckled all the way through it, in fact he was chuckling as he told me. I’d never thought of it as being that humorous, so I asked him what he’d found funny. He said he loved the way it was written, and laughed at all the things Susan got up to. “She was certainly a feisty woman!” he said. It made my day to think that the story would appeal to a burly bloke, not just my female friends.
For those who ar -
Blog postThis week, 24 October, marks the 100th anniversary of the death of William Whybrew (1884-1918). He died in France as the First World War was coming to an end, only three weeks before the Armistice was signed on 11 November, and just a few days before his 34th birthday. His body was never recovered from the battlefield. He is honoured at the Vis-en-artois Memorial in Pas de Calais. His military
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Blog postOne of the disadvantages of working from home is that it IS home. All the things that need doing around the house are right there in front of you. Someone has to do them, and if you’re at home, well, why not you?
I was thinking about this – no, bemoaning this to myself – the other day as I stopped working on the chapter of my book that I was editing to hang out a load of washing. “I bet my husband never stops what he’s doing at work to hang out washing,” I grumbled to myself, ig -
Blog postThe spire, all that remains of Stowell Memorial church whereAlbert and Hannah married in 1878 I've written a little about Albert Hough and Hannah Holt before. Their daughter Alice was my mother's maternal grandmother. But there are several gaps and puzzling details in their story that I've yet to resolve. Albert Hough and Hannah Holt married in Salford, Lancashire, in August 1878. At the time
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Blog postWe’ve just returned from a brief holiday visiting family in Alice Springs, which included a two day stopover in Adelaide on the way. While we were strolling through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens we came across the Santos Museum of Economic Botany and decided to have a look.
Apparently such museums, demonstrating the variety and usefulness of plant material from around the world, were once commonplace in botanic gardens throughout the English speaking world. Now the Adelaide museu -
Blog postExcuse me while I do a little advertising. It's possible to subscribe to Clogs and Clippers and receive notifications by email when a new post appears. You'll find the "Subscribe by email" box in the sidebar. Thanks to those of you who have subscribed this way. But Clogs and Clippers is not my only writing project. By joining my more general Readers List you'll receive a regular (monthly)
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Blog postThis post is a bit of a break from my "unsolved mysteries" series. We've just returned from a holiday visiting family in Alice Springs, which included taking a 'detour' via Adelaide. The detour was deliberate - we wanted to avoid having to get to the airport in Perth before dawn for the direct flight to Alice. And besides, we both like Adelaide. While we were enjoying a walk we decided (or
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Blog postShop Street, Galway, IrelandPhoto by Peter Gorman* After my success in discovering new information about the St Leger family, I decided to see if I could find out more about another Irish family in my mother's line, Patrick and Margaret Hardman or Hardiman (nee Jenkins.) The Hardmans apparently arrived in England between the birth of their daughter Elizabeth (my maternal grandmother's great
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Blog postAd for Chamberlain’s Remedy in 1910. The main ingredients were alcohol, ether and chloroform. As I’ve been doing the research for my next book, which is set in Perth in the early 1900’s, I’ve been surprised, and horrified, to discover the treatments recommended at the time for babies who were unwell with “summer diarrhoea”. Here’s an excerpt from an article written by a doctor and addressed to mothers, which appeared in the Daily News, 26 August 1905
At once stop giving the chi -
Blog postImagine that a friend gives you a present, rather clumsily wrapped. You know that your friend has very different tastes to yours, in fact, if you were quite truthful, you'd say that they have poor taste. So you unwrap the parcel with some trepidation. Inside you find a plain white candle in some sort of glass candle holder. You try to look impressed, but the thing is unattractive, hideously
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Blog postThey say everything comes to the one who waits, and that's certainly true in family history research. Back in 2014, when I last wrote about my mother's great grandfather, Samuel St Ledger (sometimes spelled St Leger) and his defacto wife Alice Dodd, there were all sorts of loose ends and unexplained aspects to the story. To recap, Samuel was born in Manchester, in the early 1800s, and worked all
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Blog postHere's a paradox - the longer we've been a Christian, the more we come to realise how sinful we really are. We discover that our antagonism towards God runs very deep. Does this sound familiar? Before I turned to Christ, I sometimes felt guilty about specific things I'd done, but I didn't know what to do with the guilt. It was a joy to discover that because of Jesus' death on the cross, I'm
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Blog postPoverty, chastity and obedience are the traditional vows of those entering religious orders. Benedict, however, added a fourth vow for his order - stability. Benedictine monks and nuns are expected to remain within the same community for life. This might seem strange, even harsh to us. We expect to move house and change jobs several times over a lifetime. Our whole society is hooked on the
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Blog postEquitable Street, Milnrow. Matthew and his family lived at number 33 in 1911. Most of the unsolved mysteries from my family tree involve "what" "when" or "who" questions. What was the relationship between James Beales and William Beales? When was Richard Ward born? Who brought up Harriet Whybrew? They're questions that, at least in theory, could be answered by finding the right records (if
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Blog postA lot of the articles on my old website "One Candle" were out of date, and the site itself was difficult to maintain, so I've closed it. I'm planning to edit or rewrite the articles worth keeping and post them here. If you are looking for a particular article that used to be on that site, please contact me and I'll send you a copy.
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Blog postAdelaide Railway Station in 1878 Back in February 2013 I wrote a post titled "What happened to Jane and Bridget Mason?" about the two youngest of John and Catherine Mason's nine daughters. When John died in Adelaide in 1857, leaving Catherine destitute, Jane was 4 and Bridget 2 years old. At the time of writing I said that I hadn't been able to find out anything about these two girls, and
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Blog postHere's the next family history "mystery" that I've yet to solve. Robert Beales, born about 1785, was the great grandfather of my great grandfather, William James Beales. Robert and his wife Hannah (surname uncertain, but possibly May) had a number of children baptised in the church of St Peter and St Paul at St Osyth in Essex, or in nearby St Andrews, Weeley, between 1810 and 1827. Their names
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Blog postTimorous and Mr Fearing are two of the characters described by John Bunyan in his allegorical story, The Pilgrim's Progress. Despite the similarity of their names, they have rather different personalities, and come to very different ends. The Pilgrim, Christian, meets Timorous and his companion Mistrust at the top of the Hill of Difficulty. Unlike Christian who is heading for the Celestial
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Blog postOne of the things I most enjoy about having a family history blog is the contact it provides with people from far and wide. It's always a thrill to find an email in my inbox from someone who has read my blog and found a connection with their own family. Often this is followed by both of us exchanging information and photos that we would never have come across through the normal methods of
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Blog postMarket Place, Garstang Sometimes the best way to solve a mystery is to think laterally. If you can't find the information you want about someone by a direct route, discover all you can about their siblings, in-laws, neighbours and friends, and you may find a clue that leads to the answer. That was my thinking when I set out to discover the maiden name of Betty Lambert, one of my great great
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Blog postIt's hard to believe that it's a whole year since I published my book about Susan Mason. It was fun writing it, a steep learning curve to publish and market it, and a wonderful experience to get feedback from people, some of them distantly related, from all around the world. To mark the anniversary, I've made the ebook/kindle version of the book FREE for this week only. It's available on
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Blog postRose Whybrew was the fifth daughter of David and Susan Whybrew (nee Mason) and my father's great aunt, though he never met her. She is another of the unsolved mysteries in my family history research. I've been able to follow her life story as far as Chicago, USA, in 1918, but then she disappears. Despite hours spent searching, I haven't found any trace of her after that. What I do know about her
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Blog postChurch door, St Leonard'sWalton le Dale One of the most long-standing mysteries in my family history research is the date of birth of Richard Ward, my paternal great great grandfather. I know from several sources that he was the son of Thomas and Frances Ward, and that he was born in Walton le Dale, in Lancashire. The problem with determining his date of birth is that two baptism records
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Blog postHappy New Year! For the past few years I've used the new year as the time to alternate between writing about the maternal and paternal sides of my family history. If I kept to that pattern, this should be the year I switch back to writing about the Ward and Beales families, on the paternal side. But since I've now covered most of the main individuals on both sides of the family tree in this
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Blog postAs a family historian, I often find myself researching the lives of people who are not genetically related to my family. Friends, neighbours, in-laws and god-parents are all of interest, since their lives often illuminate the lives of my forebears. I've mentioned how tracing the friends of John and Catherine Mason helped me to finally prove (at least to my own satisfaction) that John was an Irish
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Blog postIn a previous post I looked at the life of the first of Alfred Pearson Bentley's sons to be named John Alfred. He was born in Salford, England, in 1873 and died there in 1933. Now it's time to look at the second John Alfred. Boston docks about 1900 As we've seen, Alfred P. Bentley left his first wife and family in England in the middle of 1879, and married Annie Jane Smith a few months later
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Blog postIf you're a member of Goodreads, you may be interested in this giveaway for my book "Susan". There are 3 paperback copies to be won. Already read the book? Please let other readers know what you thought of it by leaving a rating or a review on Amazon, Goodreads or ibooks. .goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555;
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Blog postNine Elms British Cemetery, Belgium As I've mentioned before, my great great grandfather Alfred Pearson Bentley (b 1849) had two sons named John Alfred, one born to his wife Annie Reed in Salford in 1873 and the other born, through a bigamous marriage to Annie Jane Smith, in Boston in 1884. Despite sharing the same name and the same father, the two John Alfreds led rather different lives. In
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Blog postThe Leeds Liverpool Canal at Wigan Pier Never publish in haste! I wrote my last article based on research I'd done quite a while ago, but after digging into things a bit more, I find I now need to correct a couple of statements in my previous post about Hannah Holt and her family. First, I said that her father John Holt was a boatman, and guessed that this meant he was a labourer on the
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Blog postMost of us have probably wondered at some stage whether we can really go on being a Christian until the end of our lives. Our faith seems so weak and wobbly at times. Perhaps we’ve struggled with doubts about certain doctrines, or felt puzzled and disturbed by something we've read in the Bible. Maybe we’ve tried to share the gospel with others and found ourselves flummoxed by their
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Blog postTwo voices, one song* In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul was writing to Christians who were at risk of believing that keeping the Jewish law was helpful, perhaps even necessary, for salvation. To help them understand that it was their faith in Jesus, not keeping the law, that put them right with God, he pointed out that Abraham was declared righteous by God before the covenant of
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Blog postWe all need encouragement to keep doing what we’re doing. As a writer, I’m encouraged to go on writing when someone tells me that something I’ve written has been helpful to them. Teachers are encouraged when their students do well in their exams. Trades people are encouraged when a customer recommends them to someone else, not just because of the promise of more work, but because it shows that
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Blog postMay the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 15:5-6 Photo by Riza Nugraha In a world where conflict abounds at every level, the ability of Christians to live and work together in unity should be a wonderful
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Blog post“Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Genesis 18:25 The Old Testament is vital to our understanding of who Jesus is and what he said and did. Yet it’s not always easy to read. Sometimes the problem is our distance in time and
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Blog postOh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! (Ps 107:1) In a recent news clip about children’s art being displayed in a prestigious art gallery, one child was asked how she felt about seeing her picture hanging besides works by world-famous artists. Her unsmiling response was “It shows that I’ve worked hard and that if you really want to, you can
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Blog postHe rules the world in righteousness and judges the peoples with equity. (Psalm9:8 NIV)In our judicial system, the role of judge is separated from that of lawmaker. A judge cannot change the law, initiate legal proceedings, or change the penalty imposed by the law. A judge has no role in carrying out the sentence against the guilty.This separation of lawmakers and judges is meant to ensure
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