Lifestyle

I recently took a trip to Brisbane to visit my Grandmother, and while I was there, I scanned her photographs. One piece I was most excited for was the battered and bruised photo album my great-grandfather, Walton Hooper, kept from 1939 until his tragic, premature death in 1948. With all the pages scanned and digitised, I’m taking a trip through the photographs he took over the span of a decade — including many taken during his time at war. This is photograph #2 in the album.

Yesterday, I attended a virtual conference hosted by the Society of Australian Genealogists on professional genealogy — and wow, did I learn a lot! I had no idea there were so many different career paths where genealogical skills come into play. I heard from people working in asset recovery, intestate estates, and even those helping children born through international prostitution trace their fathers. The diversity of stories and specialisations absolutely blew me away. One o

In the late 1800s, my Great-Great-Grandmother, Trijntje Jans Boumans, endured a series of heartbreaking losses that are all too common for families of that time. Trijntje had eight children, but only four would survive into adulthood. In 1885, her baby boy, Wiebe Gerrits Haringsma, passed away at just five months old. He was her first child. A tragedy, yes, but she wouldn’t see losses for a decade after that. Perhaps she thought herself lucky, she had escaped a fate many wome