Random thoughts and observations
I discovered today that two of my great-great grandparents, Daniel Burgdorf and Augusta Springer, arrived in Sydney from Germany aboard the Reiherstieg on August 5, 1852.
That’s a story for another post, but for now I want to mention that aboard the ship with them was the scientist, magnetician, hydrographer, oceanographer and meteorologist Georg Balthasar von Neumayer.
A distant relative of mine, Theodorus Wassenberg, was a Divine Word missionary brother killed by the Japanese in World War Two.
Theodorus Joannes Hubertus Wassenberg was born at Roermond in the Netherlands on June 9, 1889.
His parents were devout Catholics and young Theo inherited their “deep piety”. In 1917 he became a brother in the Society of the Divine Word at Uden.
Today I discovered the outstanding Picture Australia website.
According to the About page: Picture Australia is an internet-based service that allows you to search many significant online pictorial collections at the same time.
When you do a search on Picture Australia, thumbnail images are retrieved from participating institutions on the fly and inserted into the search results.
I don’t get as much time as I would like to browse digitised newspapers at the National Library’s marvellous Trove.
However, a brief visit today yielded an interesting snippet regarding my great-great grandparents James and Sarah Evans.
I knew from Shire of Metcalfe rate books they owned a property at Barfold in Central Victoria between 1866 and 1876.
While checking my family history website this morning, I noticed today is the 90th anniversary of my uncle Edward Gorey’s burial.
The second of my grandparents’ 12 children, Edward (Ted) was aged just five when he died of diphtheria at Ballarat District Hospital on December 31, 1921.
Edward was born at Trafalgar on April 14, 1916.
×0
