Week 2 - Favourite Photo - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Genealogist Amy Johnson Crow has started a genealogy challenge for 2018. "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" is a series of weekly prompts to encourage us to share some of the information about our ancestors that we have accumulated.  This week's prompt is "Favourite Photo", and it has led me to look back through the collection of family photos I have accumulated - both in printed and digital formats - and pick out a few that stand out for me and think about the stories behind them. 

This is the wedding photo of my maternal great-grandparents, James Nicholas Clark and Pricilla Veronica Mulholland.  James worked as a contractor and eventually as an overseer for Brighton City Council.  They married on the 3rd August 1898 in Brighton, Melbourne.  It was James's second marriage.  His first, to Eliza Hawley, ended in divorce, which was fairly rare at the time.

The divorce was reported in the Brighton Southern Cross on 14 August 1897, which I found thanks to Trove.  James and Eliza had two children, whom Eliza also left when she deserted James.  He remarried just under a year later, and he and Pricilla had a further 12 children.  My Grandmother, Gladys Daisy Clark, was their 5th child.

This photo is one of the first I borrowed from my grandmother and had copied back when I first started my family history research, and when I purchased my first scanner it was also promptly digitised.  When my grandmother passed away in 1995 I was fortunate enough to obtain the original, an old sepia photo on cardboard that I keep carefully stored away and a copy on display.  I have very few photos of this generation of my family, and even less originals, so I find this one quite special.