looking at THE FAMILY TREE ...

I hate housework, but if you can do it on automatic you can use the time to meditate on other areas of life. While vacuuming the bedroom I went over the interesting discoveries I'd made on an ancestry site the night before.  Taking my Dyson out to empty I passed the TV  - showing a Star Trek episode.  Seeing the 'SS Enterprise' uniforms, reminded me of the old sci fi movies that predicted we'd all be wearing skin tight metallic onesies by now when I realised the characters were talking about family history and almost the exact thoughts I'd had a few moments before - family stories can be passed down incorrectly, names mispelled or confused, secrets hidden ... etc.

In the days before the wikis and sites like Trove  and all those ancestor-dot-coms, learning family history relied on the family memory. Researching details involved finding birth, death and marriage certificates which often had to be viewed in the archives of the church where they were registered, head stones, newspaper archives and military records, also requiring you to be there in person or finding old letters and diaries. Now we save all that time and travelling because libraries, history buffs and anyone who has worked out a way to make money from this interest, have put so much on line you can almost do it all from your desk.  

Ancestry is usually the activity of the over 50's, possibly because that is when people are adjusting to changes in their life and many find they have the time and also because you need to live quite a few years before looking back is interesting .

Once you begin you can become addicted, a bit like a metal detector on the beach, you don't know what you'll find but there is no end to the finds. My family tree now has over 300 'characters', many of them people I'd never heard of until this year and twenty of them new this week.   Only the closest branch of my tree resembles the family group I knew of - amazing how people will gloss over some things, leave someone out, just never pass on information and every generation has those who are not interested.  I relied on conversations with my mother and her mother ...  and they had reasons for not sharing the whole truth or for getting it wrong.

One problem is finding family.  For those of us who are of British descent the easiest way is to follow the surname - fine if it's something fairly simple like Stone or Frost - easy and common enough to work with. Then you get some difficult ones like some European family names, changes in spelling or language as people move around. In Denmark the number of surnames is limited and it's not easy to trace an Anderson or Jensen. My grandfather's family changed their name to Weston at the start of WWl.  Before that the name had been Swertman, or Schwertmann or even Schwertdmann - the further back you go the more letters in the name.  I'm not sure how other cultures would do it.

So, it occurs to me that we limit ourselves.  What about the women? - and what is this 'family name' thing we have invented, for boys only.  I can see that following the surname is the easy way - the Family Name or Blood line - except that it isn't. Every man who marries and has children has mixed that precious blood line with another - it's watered down by the blood line of another family, over and over, with each generation.

When I look at my mother's family I started with two surnames but by following the women as well as the men I now have more names from each generation ... more than several, those families had 8 - 10 children and if half of them were women who married that is 4 or 5 new surnames in the family and their children are related to me as blood cousins.  This is why it's fun... but also dangerous ... can you imagine how much time it all takes?

I planned to limit my search to those who were born overseas and died in Australia. This shortens the paternal branches of both my grandfathers as their fathers immigrated but both mothers are from old Aussie families and there seem to be some very feisty ladies on the list. I'm interested in finding out more about the one wife from Tasmania, maybe they were convicts (shhhh, don't tell Ma-ma). The new surnames I've found through the woman in my family include Wilmington, Weeks, McHugh and Earlam on my mother's side and on my father's, King, Noble, Styles, Hammond, Kirk, Webster, Wood and Green.  Not too difficult and makes me feel very rich in relatives.

My big find this week was one Russell Henry Morehead, or Henry Russell Morehead, depending on which document you read. He was born in 1897 at Greendale, near Wallacia NSW, one of seven children. At the age of 21 his occupation was Dairyman when he enlisted in the AIF and went off to fight in the Great War. His sister, Ivy Elizabeth Morehead, of "Wanatta" Ewart St, Dulwich Hill, was listed as his next of kin, possibly because their father, Thomas Morehead was deceased. 

My grandmother was Eva Morehead. Her grandparents arrived in Australia on a ship named Wanatta.  She grew up on a dairy farm at Wallacia, NSW and had relatives living at Dulwich Hill, so this is definitely my family.  Russell would have been my grandmother's cousin. He was 9 years younger than Eva, and his father, Thomas, would have been her uncle or great uncle, a branch of the family I have not yet pursued - and this is exciting.

On 17th July 1918 Russell's ship left Sydney, but on the 31st July he was taken to the ships hospital and diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. A week later he was admitted to hospital in Durban, then sent to Cape Town and returned to Sydney in September - discharged as medically unfit in October 1918, one month before the war ended. 

He later married Dorothy Emily Weeks, who was 13 years his junior, bought property at Wiseman's Ferry and they both lived happily and prosperously until 1999, always including his sister Ivy in their lives. If only I'd known, I was not far from them through the 1970's and 80's. I had lost touch with all my mother's family because some relatives suffered embarrassment over situations during the depression - but that's another long story.

Russell Henry Morehead - photo 1918

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Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.

David Ogden Stiers

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understanding a CHANGE OF NAME

I have just begun to paddle in the lake of ancestry - the 'in' hobby for the retired.  No, I'm not making fun of it, just teasing a little until I get used to this stage of life. It was almost a year ago, at my favourite aunt's 95th birthday party - well done Aunty Joan - when Heather, a relative of Aunty Joan's late husband, mentioned her ancestry work and asked me a question about my grandfather. Then she whipped out her pink laptop and clicked on Ancestry.com to show me what she thought was an error. 

I've always had an interest in family history. As a child my favourite bedtime stories were those Mum told of her childhood and I picked up some of the names and relationships.  These stories formed a base for the rest of my life and looking back I can see how important they were.  Maybe if more families went into details about who they are and where they come from our young adults would be more secure and able to see the big picture, instead of just their selfies.

I've talked to other relatives at times so my family story collection is constantly being added to, and edited as I discover the 'true' facts about events and lives. Funny how people are happy to talk openly about some things but add to or change details of events they feel a sensitive about. There was great fear about how you appeared to other people 100 years ago. 

Sadly, it's mostly my mother's family story as Dad's was out of reach geographically and also personally as they/we did not keep in touch. I have not yet joined Ancestry.com - because I haven't had the time to devote to this that would justify the expense.  But Heather introduced me to Trove - a collection of scans of newspapers and magazines from something like the 1750's up to the 1950's, and this has certainly kept me busy. I've found amazing things including my grandmother's wedding notice, lists of people who attended the charity balls she organised after WWl, my parents wedding notice and my birth etc.  I've even discovered a few bits and pieces about my father's family which is exciting. Back in the days before emails and facebook every event or announcement went into the newspaper. Heather also put me in touch with the daughter of my grandfather's brother and that led to some very interesting insights.

So, the error in Ancestory was to do with Mother's father.  Mum's sister is Aunty Joan but she, understandably, gets a little confused these days and I became the back up memory.  I knew that my grandfather had changed his name at one time - I thought it was before he married Eva, my grandmother.

I found this in some notes Aunty Joan wrote for me about 10 years ago, and these are her words:

'I was born on 2nd May 1917 in our family home, which had been designed by my father, at Ryde, NSW.  The house had gardens and an orchard. Other houses were few and far between. Opposite us was a Chinese (market) garden where men worked all day, often carrying two buckets of water on sticks across their shoulders. They had a primitive hut in the garden.
Father had been born Otto Wilhelm Schwertmann, but the war of 1914 – 1918 forced some businessmen to adopt more English names. Father chose the names of English towns and became Otford Wilton Weston. Hundreds of people with German names were interned in camps though they had been nothing but good citizens. German names were frowned on for many years. Even when I went to school at ten or twelve years of age, we called out rude things to children with German names. I’m glad Margaret and I were saved from this, although we were completely unaware of our good luck at the time'.

This is a good family story, but from talking to other people and checking in Trove I've found that it wasn't my grandfather who changed his name, it was my great-grandmother who insisted on it.  And, it was done after Ot, as they called him, married my grandmother, Eva. They married on 20th June 1914. A newspaper notice dates the name change as 24th June 1915. My grandmother, who I knew very well as she lived with us for years, never let on that she had originally been Mrs Schwertmann. I have no memory of my grandfather who died when I was a baby.

There was a bad reaction from a number of family members to Eva marrying a German. Many years later, when my mother divorced my father and then married an actual German that negative reaction surfaced again. BUT ... and this is delicious, my cousin discovered that my grandfather had not really come from Germany. The town where my great-grandfather was born is/was technically in Denmark! The borders moved back and forth a bit over the years. I think it's really wonderful and would like to blow a few raspberries to that long gone generation who protected themselves with hate and also, because my father's grandfather was Danish and that gives me Danish blood on both sides. Sadly Mum and Dad never knew that.

But back to the name change.  Mum always said her father had been born in Germany. His father, Christian, had come to Australia for the Sydney International Exhibition, held in 1879. He was so impressed with Australia that he returned home to Germany and came back with his whole family, including my grandfather who was almost 10 years old. This cemented the idea of German ancestry.  The true story as I have now discovered, is; Christian Swertman did come to Australia for the Exhibition, as a single man from Denmark, with a contact address of c/- the Bank of Hamburg, London. He married an Aussie girl named Grace Noble, a teacher from Victoria with Scottish ancestry. They had three children; Otto, Hubert and Olga. Christian was killed in a street accident in 1896 when Otto was about 10 years old.  At that young age my grandfather found he had a family to support. He went to work selling newspapers and eventually put his brother through school and himself through university while assisting his mother, grandma Weston, and sister Olga. Later Hubert disappeared and his two daughters went to live with grandma Weston. Otto became a well known Sydney Architect and a humanitarian.

About her husband, my grandmother once wrote;  'Father, (her husband Otto) had a wonderful voice, and I enjoyed singing too. It was lovely having friends and family gather around the Pianola and we would sing far into the evening, forgetting about the time'.

In 2000, my second cousin Ian, who was a bit younger than Joan and my mother, and who, until his death in 2013 was the keeper of the family history, told me;

'Eva and Ot had lived a wealthy life until the depression. When Ot didn’t have work he was depressed and often refused to get out of bed. They became very poor, eventually they were without a business and they lost the house.  They had always been the ones to help other people and didn’t like to take help. This stressed the marriage and probably contributed to their separation.'

Pride was such a problem for that generation, or was it fear of judgement or class discrimination?  In all the years that the family stories were told by my mother, grandmother and aunts, it was never mentioned that Eva and Ot lost everything in the depression. I did know that they separated. Eva took Margaret, the youngest, and moved to a small flat over a shop and Eva went back to nursing.  Mum told me that her mother 'worked with a doctor, visiting sick people in their homes, to change dressings etc. She got to know many people and their life stories.'  It sounds a lot like the District Nurse work that my sister did in the 1970's.

Joan went to live with relatives and Ot moved in with his former secretary and her children, who soon became more his children than his own daughters. In Eva's family it was always hinted that the hard times were caused by (bad) Otford leaving Eva and the girls. Eva was still angry with him forty years later.  Isn't life interesting - it's like a soap opera?

I am so glad I listened to the stories my relatives told. While it's only a tiny part of the full story it is somewhere to begin and so much better than nothing. And it's very entertaining to smooth out the wrinkles and discover a fuller picture of people with real lives, and jobs and mistakes and problems. I think they all did the best they could for the time they lived in... and what more can any of us do?  I'd encourage everyone to ask about their family history and/or write their own life story to hand down to the next generation, it could be important to at least some of them one day.

Oh, and that error on Ancestory.com (I'm not promoting them, it just keeps coming up), someone had changed my grandfather's Christian names to the new ones he'd chosen but left the original surname.  It's all fixed now.

 

Photos taken between 1928 and 1932
My grandfather, Otford - my grandmother, Eva - my aunt, Joan and my mother, Margaret

"It doesn't matter how many say it cannot be done

or how many people have tried it before;
it's important to realize that whatever you're doing,

it's your first attempt at it."

it's all in the NAME

Getting the name right is a good trick - purely functional or loaded with meaning a name is an introduction to an identity. A handbag is a handbag unless it's named Gucci, and that can make a big difference.  

I've always like my name, in fact I prefer it to any other name I've ever heard. My mother chose it for me.  Darling, romantic, Mum. Her teenage dream of becoming a movie star or a fashion model - Mannequin as they called them then - was dashed by WWII. Her career as an Army Sergeant had been exciting but, after the war she was looking forward to having her own family. I can see her in my mind, from her own description, almost eight months pregnant, curled up on a lounge chair in her lace trimmed house coat, strawberry blond hair draped over her shoulders as she picked up the Woman's Weekly (and they were weekly magazines then). Mum loved the clothes and shoes, hair styles and makeup, which she couldn't afford then, so usually turned to the fashion pages first but there on the cover, six weeks before my birth, were photos of four French mannequins recently arrived in Australia to work - Suzanne Combe, Lydia Lepiat, Janine Lequievre and Maggy Sarragne. In that moment of romance and longing the planned name Katrinka disappeared from my life and in came Janine.

Click on photo to enlarge

Before the purchase of that Women's Weekly my mother had rejected all the names she considered ordinary. Her Aunt Flo, had passed on a list of suitable, family approved names which began with Helen and Elizabeth and went to James and Walter. Not for my mother. She really hoped for a girl and wanted an interesting and unusual name. Strangely she had in mind Paul for a boy. Strange because Mum's sister already had a little girl named Pauline and her best friend, Zel, had Paul on her list for her baby due less than two months after me. I wonder what was going on there?  Paul was born to Zel, and I'm glad she got to use the name.

*

click on photo to enlarge.

While Janine was an interesting and unusual girl's name, I was given my mother's name, Margaret, the most popular Australian girls name ever, as a second name. 

That may have come from Dad, as Margaret was the love of his life, and sadly also the reason for his greatest heartbreak. In Dad's family second names were used more than first names, which were often given to honour family members.  My Dad was named after his father's brother, who died as a child. As Dad's second name was William his family and friends called him Bill - of course. But not Mum. She preferred his exotic Danish first name which was Peder.  So, if I had turned out as a boy, would I have been Peder Paul, Paul Peder, or Paul William? Hopefully not one of my grandfathers' names - Rupert or Ott.

Amazingly to me, names go in and out of fashion. I once heard a comment on the Mike Walsh TV show that 'all the Shirleys had sons named Michael.'  Fascinating.  I started to take notice and found my mother actually knew two Shirleys, who had sons named Michael. According to a News Ltd analysis of Australian baby names, from 1790 to 2010, the most popular Aussie name is John, with 262,000 boys being given this as their first name over 220 years. David follows with 197,000, Then Margaret tops the female names as most popular ever with 96,458, but has not been used much since the mid 1940s. The next in line for girls names are Sarah (81,195) and Elizabeth (77, 239). There must be much more variety in the names given to girls.

Boys names especially are handed down through families. Is it that people don't use their imagination or are there more important reasons for recycling names - to cosy up to a wealthy relative maybe or ensure the passing on of land?

My grandmother was Eva, a name I have always liked. Her siblings, born in the 1880s and 1890s, were Claire, Mabel, Walter, Ida, Ada and Florence. They married, except 'poor Ada' who died, Otto, Thomas, Hector, Elsie and Gordon. Flo didn't marry but Charles was her lost love. These were all popular names of the day.

They had children, not as many as was common then because my grandmother, and her siblings, made a pact to have only two children each to avoid the extreme poverty of their childhood. Ada and Flo didn't have any children and Ida's only child was a son named Ian. Eva had daughters, Joan and Margaret (my mother), Claire had Yvonne and John, Mabel had Claire and Frank, and Wally's boys were Andrew and John. Not a lot of originality there. In my mother's day the popular names were, Betty, Shirley, Dorothy, Joan, Jean, Nancy and Doris. How my mother wished to be Margot or Marguerite when her father called her by the nickname Peg.

I went to school with the girls on Aunty Flo's list, Barbara, Patricia, Judith, Susan, Carol, Bev, Gail and Helen. There were also lots of James, Anthony, Phillip, Graeme, Norman, John, Alan, Michael, Ronald and Robert though the boys didn't use those names. No, they were Jimmy, Tony, Phil, Grae, Norm, Johnno, Al, Mick, Ron and Bob.

Coming to the generation of the 1970's, my daughters school friends were Kylie, Melissa, Amanda, and Joanne. Elizabeth was still around.  Boys names still included David, Michael, Matthew, Paul, Daniel and John. But other names that would become very popular had appeared;  Adam, Mark, Scott, Steven, Simon, Darren, as well as Julie, Sharon, Kim, Melanie and Fiona.  Still mostly Anglo names from our British past but there was much more variety. Bible names had long been used and more Hebrew based names were coming to the list, like Saul, Sara and Rebecca. 

Possibly my mother's influence prompted me to give my children unusual names and it isn't always easy. You can choose what you think is a totally undiscovered name and suddenly find it's the new fad. When my son Jared was born I thought I'd found a name no one else had heard of, but before he was even six weeks old there seemed to be Jareds everywhere - even actors on TV!  How did that happen?  These days Jared* does not use his excellent name but goes by an acronym of his full name - Jay.

Names can be geographical of course and growing up in Sydney was far more conservative that I realised at the time. Moving to Qld in 1986 seemed like going back in time in some ways, but I found people who were a little more creative and adventurous than I'd known before. Queenslanders seem to accept what they are offered, even if it's a hippie name or the parent's names joined, like Elm, Kallan and Ronosa. I had never before heard the names Desley or Kingsley or Trilby which in Qld went without comment.  In Sydney migrants often gave their children anglicised names but in Qld they didn't and we met Mario, Greta and Davide.

In the years between my first and second marriage I prayed for a husband/companion/friend, whatever, asking God for a man with an unusual name, so I would recognise him.  Of course I forgot this prayer almost immediately as we so often do and it wasn't until Rory and I had been married for several years that I thought... ...... oh!

My daughter's name was considered unpronounceable by many people and I was sometimes referred to as the mother-of-the-girl-with-the-funny-name. In Queensland there were two girls in her class at school with names that were so obscure I can't attempt to spell them.

So here we are in the 2000eens and good old Jessica, Emily, Sarah, Olivia, Georgia, Chloe, Sophie, Hannah, Isabella, Emma, Charlotte and Lily are all on the popular list with Jack, Joshua, Harrison, Thomas, Ethan, James, Riley, Luke, Liam and Samuel, but people are having fun and newer names appear like Sienna, Trinity, Sawyer, Cassidy, Hailo, Queenie, and Deva for girls and boys have Kix, Neon, Pawk, Rysk, Bond, Tron and Zaniel on their birth certificates...... are these designer names?  

Other fads have been - using the same initials for all members of the family, even if you have to spell Colin with a K or stick a silent H on the front of Alan, find unisex names for everyone or give the twins names with the same meaning - Ivan and Sean or Jonathan and Dorothy, all gifts of God.  I'm amazed that people can spell Alicia more than 20 different ways, including such creative  constructions as Alysceah and Aeleeshea. It's a lot of fun. Then you get the family who dropped the ball on one name giving Skye, Blossom and Heath a baby sister named Betsy. 

So, we can drop names, defend our name or drag it through the mud. We can be named, name names or call names. We can make a name for ourselves, be known by name only or be name unknown. But we don't get to choose our own birth name and that makes it interesting.

FOOTNOTES:  

* I love the photo of my parents with Aunty Joan and cousin Pauline. It was taken before I was born, possibly before I was conceived, as Pauline was 20 months older than me.  Sadly, the only person in the photo still alive is Aunty Joan, who had her 95th birthday in 2012. Mum died at 54, of lymphatic cancer, Dad at 65 of bronchial cancer and my cousin of breast cancer in her mid 50's.  

* Jared is a common first name of Biblical derivation, mostly in English-speaking countries.  In the bible, Jared was the sixth link in the ten pre-flood generations between Adam and Noah; he was the son of Mahalaleel and the father of Enoch, and lived for 962 years. (Gen 5:18)  The meaning of the name is 'he who descended' (as in descended to earth). The name could also be understood as 'he who shall rule'.