This year I have once again decided to participate in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks blogging challenge run by Amy Johnson Crow. I have done this challenge a few times in the past, and although I an a few weeks late in starting I hope to catch up fairly quickly.
On to week one (January 1-7), the prompt for which if 'Family Lore'.
I have always enjoyed listening to the family stories told by my parents and other family members, and have several notebooks filled with a variety of stories, many told from the perspective of multiple family members.
Once I started researching in earnest, I set about finding any records for many of the stories I had been told, and was able to prove - and disprove - some of them. Others generated no official records and remain family lore. The best were anecdotal, bringing to life details of my family's lives that without the stories I would know nothing about.
A favourite is my maternal grandmother's first visit to my parents after they married. My mother was a city girl, born in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. Grandmother was born in Brighton, married there, lived her entire life there, and died there. At the time of my mother's marriage, my grandmother had never been further north than the Melbourne City Baths.
In her early 20s my mother 'went bush', leaving Melbourne to take up a post as a governess on a remote sheep station near the rural town Mildura, over 500km north of Melbourne. It is here that she met my father, and after their marriage moved to the sheep station 'Para' where my father worked. Situated on the Darling River, Para was approximately an hour's drive north-east of Mildura, much of the drive on dirt roads. For my grandmother, mum might as well have been living on another planet.
When my sister was born, Grandmother decided it was time to visit her daughter and new granddaughter, so she boarded a train and made the journey to Mildura, where my parents met her for the drive out to the station homestead.
I have heard the story of this journey from my father, mother and grandmother. All agree on the shock my grandmother felt at the distance and isolation. The open spaces daunted her and the concept of the nearest neighbor being almost 30 minutes away was utterly foreign. 'Are we there yet?' was frequently asked. It was a complete culture shock.
Grandmother eventually reconciled herself to my mother's choice to live in country areas, and was much mollified when my parents moved to the town of Moama (at least we had proper neighbors and decent plumbing!), and was a regular visitor throughout my childhood. The story of her first visit, however, remains a favourite part of our family lore.
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