Sepia Saturday at Wiseman's Ferry Cemetery

for those who dont usually stop by here, i'm telling the story of a wee trip i took with the young 'uns last week, which included a little exploration in family history.



we spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering the cemetery at wiseman's ferry. the sun shone, the river glistened and birds sung.....

despite dad's best efforts to educate me, the early history of the jurd family in australia is a jumble of names in my mind so when we found the grave of william douglass i knew it meant something but what, exactly?


well, william douglass was the papa of elizabeth, who married the first jurd in australia, daniel.

"The Jurd Dynasty in Australia began with the marriage of Daniel Jurd and
Elizabeth Douglas at St Matthews Church of England, Windsor on 28 September
1812. Daniel was born in England around 1778, was a chimney sweep in London and
was convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing 20lbs of bacon. His accomplice was
Samuel French. They were transported for 7 years. Daniel arrived on 4 August
1802 aboard the Perseus. Elizabeth was the daughter of William Douglas and Mary
Groves, two First Fleet Convicts.
Daniel & Elizabeth settled in Pitt Town. They had 9 children, 6 boys and 3 girls. Daniel received a land grant in the Macdonald Valley and this was first worked by his eldest son, and first child John, who married Mary Ann Fleming. Daniel died in August 1833, just 7 months after the birth of his youngest child, Joseph."

Hawkesbury Family History Group

this week, as i have started to picture these people they have started to become shadowy figures rather than just names. william was transported at just 16, he outlived his son-in-law by many years, elizabeth raised a new baby as a widow.......

i wonder how they felt about their place in history?

did they see themselves as pioneers or just as convicts? as people fortunate to be out of the grime and poverty of their english lives or as outcasts in a wild land ?

sepia saturday participants are listed at the sepia saturday blog, pay them a visit!

sepia saturday

this is my mum at her twenty first in the early sixties.
when i looked at this photo i was struck with the contrast to today's coming of age birthdays. eighteen is of course the legal age of majority and twenty one still has a cultural significance. for both of them the gift of choice seems to be alcohol and it seems such a shame. alcohol is a consumable, drunk and forgotten. even worse, it is an intoxicating consumable so in celebration of their own or their friends' adulthood kids have some drinks, behave badly, put themselves in danger of accident or assault and vomit.
by contrast, mum's gifts had a place in our lives for years to come. i remember the lamp being used as a bedside light, the wire magazine rack on the right was eventually painted black and used for a pot plant, the rug at the back is still in service, the books would have been enjoyed and might still be around, towels used to establish my parents' household, eventually to be the family home,then there are the porcelain vases, not greatly admired by mum, they were icons of beauty and glamour to a little girl growing up in the seventies.
gifts like the ones mum received might these days be regarded as overly domestic, maybe even as symbolising the domestic servitude of women but in giving these things mum's friends and family were wishing for her a life rich in small pleasures, a good book, a picnic with family, bedtime stories by a soft light, even the smallish vases compared to today's grander versions might have encouraged an appreciation of the beauty in a single stem or small posy of flowers. i like to think that the gifts given to my mum were representative of a life made rich through gratitude, experience and love.

sepia saturday

i got mum to bring over her album of old pictures this afternoon and as it turns out, not all the pictures are so old. that androgynous little kid wearing turquoise in the front is me! i had not long turned three, thats my brother behind me in the red shoes and mum holding him. dad is the skeletal geezer in the back, mum's parents are on your left of mum and dad and the rest are my aunts, uncles and cousins on mum's side.

in my very first memory of myself i was wearing this suit. it's a strange memory of wearing the clothes, falling and hurting my mouth and then of lights that i would recognise now as a dentist's light.

on checking, i found that mum doesn't remember what i wore on the day i hurt my mouth but she could tell me that it happened before my brother was born and that i did have the suit in the days when i was still an only child. she also tells me that they rushed away from the friend's house where i fell because it was late in the day and all the dentists would soon be closed.

of course i forgot to ask whether i suffered any real damage that day but i'm guessing not because i don't have any recollection of stories relating to a significant injury.

Roslyn Elizabeth

Last Saturday, as I thought about the Sepia Saturday idea, I was wishing that Aunty Ros was still about and though the photo is far from sepia I doubt I can continue with the theme without reference to Ruby's daughter. Look at those eyes.
I don't know a whole lot of Dad's family stories but I know that Aunty Ros liked to tell them. Rozzy, as she liked to call herself, and I got along well and she would have loved to tell me lots of stories but instead we talked of work and children and current family stuff. I didn't ask much about the things she remembered.
I have an idea this photo might have been a 21st birthday souvenir, which would place it at 1965. I don't remember Rozzy looking anything like this, my Ros was ravaged by asthma and in turn steroid drugs, heart disease, diabetes and leg amputations.
Rozzy was a bit eccentric and we shared a crazy almost compulsive love of cookbooks.
A Women's Weekly recipe for a ginger and carrot loaf was Aunty Ros' signature dish and even when she was very ill she would pour love into making them for her Uncle (my great uncle) Harold. He would delightedly scoff the whole thing in a sitting or two and she would complain of his outrageous behaviour. I will never forget being at her place once and finding greased and papered loaf tins waiting in the fridge for the time when she had energy to actually make the loaves. It took true determination for her to persist with the project when she was so terribly compromised but she did it with grace and that was how she lived most of the time: one foot slowly, painfully, determinedly in front of the other.
I took Rozzy home after my brother's wedding and she gave me a couple of pieces of jewellery. When she got to the third I told her enough was enough, she said she would leave a note in the box bequeathing it to me. I laughed and told her that I would see her again. Only weeks later one final asthma attack took her away and I can't even remember what it was she had planned to give me.

Ruby Grace

When I went looking for pictures for Sepia Saturday I found this one. It looked like my Dad's Mum, Grandma, but I didn't expect it to be her. A quick call to Dad and I found that it is, indeed, Ruby Grace Randall. I remember Grandpa calling her Grace or Gracie, though the Grandma I remember had suffered a massive stroke and was not necessarily gracious. I never knew that she played violin and Dad never heard her play but play she apparently did. We have no explanation for the academic robes except to say that it must have been a prop in those days of very formal photgraphs because Grandma finished school at about age twelve.
Grandma's arrestingly dark eyes are immediately recognisable in my brother and sister and in my brothers children. My ability to call a spade a shovel is similar to Grandma's though not exclusively hers...................