Like any farm, the O’Connor’s farm at Valencia Creek had a variety of animals. In their letters to the ‘Young Folks’ page of the Weekly Times between 1906 and 1914, the O’Connor children mention not only the farm animals but those living in the wild. And they also show the roles the children played in … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – All Creatures Great and Small
Genealogy
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Rain, Flood and Fire
The O’Connor children, like the children of any farmer, were well aware of the weather and the effect it had upon the family farm at Valencia Creek. In their letters to the ‘Young Folks’ page of the Weekly Times, they wrote of rain and dry spells, floods and fires. The two most prolific letter writers … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Rain, Flood and Fire
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – School Days
With the passing of The Education Act 1872, the colony of Victoria established a system of education that was free, secular and compulsory.1 Children aged between six and fifteen years who lived within two miles by road of a school were required to attend school for at least four hours a day, sixty days in … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – School Days
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Life on the Farm
My grandmother Catherine O'Connor c.1905 Aged 16 My grandmother grew up on her father’s farm at Valencia Creek in Gippsland, situated beneath the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and Mount Wellington. Her father, William O’Connor, had been born at Thebarton in South Australia in 1847. His parents, Patrick Connor and Mary White had migrated … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Life on the Farm
Book Review: Ancestry by Simon Mawer
‘A past that only consists of the artefacts is like a skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig. Where is the flesh and blood? Who were the people? What did they feel? Where have they gone?‘ (Ancestry p.1) In Ancestry, Simon Mawer imagines the flesh and blood of two sets of his great-great-grandparents, ordinary people from … Continue reading Book Review: Ancestry by Simon Mawer
Cold Blows the Wind – Author Talk
In September 2022, I gave a talk at my local library about the research behind my novel Cold Blows the Wind and the reason I decided to tell Ellen Thompson and Harry Woods’s story as fiction rather than non-fiction. I am sharing the PowerPoint I used for the talk with narration added so those who … Continue reading Cold Blows the Wind – Author Talk
Book Review – The Marriage Certificate by Stephen Molyneux
The Marriage Certificate by Stephen Molyneux is definitely one for the genealogists. It opens with the discovery of a marriage certificate in an antiques centre by Peter Sefton, an amateur genealogist. Thinking that there is something vaguely inappropriate for such a personal memento to be on display, he buys it in the hope of perhaps … Continue reading Book Review – The Marriage Certificate by Stephen Molyneux
Catherine Meyrick 