About me

Welcome to my blog!

My interests are family history, emigration history and travel.

If you want to read my posts scroll down the right hand column for “Recent Posts”, the categories that interest you, or click on dates which are showing in red on the calendar. You can also subscribe if you want to be advised of new posts, or click on the RSS Links.

Although I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Queenslander, I now live in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, commonly called the Top End. Our climate is tropical with all that entails -hot, humid weather; cyclones or the potential for them; storms, lightning and thunder then clear skies with no rain throughout the Dry. From time to time I’ll talk about what’s happening here & sights and sounds of the Tropics.

I started my family history in 1986, in the pre-computer, pre-digitisation era. The changes in the ways we can research family history have been enormous but those early skills can prove invaluable when brick walls come up, or to  build up a broader picture of the family and their lives. I am an avowed family historian (rather than a genealogist) with a determination to learn firstly who my ancestors were, then to learn more about their lives and the places they lived. I have Irish, Scottish, German and English ancestry with one line sitting on the English-Welsh border so I think there’s probably a Welsh connection there. The religious affiliations are as diverse with Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists being represented. In Australia the families are true Queenslanders and many lines go back to the mid-1850s when Moreton Bay was still a colony of New South Wales.  As such they played a role in the development of the new colony of Queensland after Separation from NSW in 1859. Railway lines run in the blood stream with many branches having generations of affiliation with Queensland Rail, or indeed even with Irish railways. Like most Australian immigrants, the immigrants were poor working classes but all showed a strong work ethic successfully establishing large families in the state.

I have published the family history of one set of my ancestors: George Kunkel and Mary O’Brien. It is called Grassroots Queenslanders: the Kunkel family and to my great pleasure it won a couple of prizes when it was published.

My broader research interests include emigrants from Dorfprozelten, Bavaria to  Australia especially those who came under the vinedresser schemes of the 1850s; emigrants from Broadford and east County Clare, Ireland to eastern Australia 1848-1872; and anything to do with Murphy’s Creek at the foot of the Toowoomba range, but especially its early history and people.

All my posts on this blog are copyrighted to me. While I am happy for people to reference something in them, I would appreciate that the reference lists this website. Many thanks!

You can contact me by commenting on any of the pages or posts on the blogs or via Google+.

Cheers

Cassmob