Monthly Archives: January 2018

Week 3 – Longevity

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The prompt for this weeks #52ancestors challenge is Longevity, so I have decided to focus on my longest living direct ancestor. My great grandmother Jean ILES (nee THOMPSON) lived until the age of 93 years old. She by no means had an easy life, and overcame some obstacles to reach such a grand old age.

Jean THOMPSON (seated left) and siblings

Jean was born on 20th March 1917 to parents Thomas William THOMPSON and Hannah Maria Darch MALLET in Lismore, NSW and was the fourth of nine children to be born to the couple. Jean remembers that there was never a lot of money around when she was growing up due to the large size of the family and the unskilled work that her father did. However, she remembers a happy childhood until at the age of 12 her mother died from pneumonia. Jean’s life changed overnight: she had grown up doing her share of chores and helping her mother around the house as the second eldest girl, with her chores increased after her eldest sister left home but upon her mothers death she was suddenly responsible for running the entire household. Jean had to drop out of school so there was someone to run the household and look after the younger siblings, three of which were aged under five at the time.

For some months after her mother’s death, Jean shouldered the responsibility of looking after the house and all it’s inhabitants until one day it became all too much. In a video interview recorded on Jean’s 90th birthday, she recalls collapsing into tears one afternoon and her father arriving home to find her in a state. Her father considered the tears, and announced that tomorrow he would find a housekeeper to help with the house. Looking back, Jean can’t think how the family afforded it but before long this became a moot point when her father married the housekeeper a few years later.

Eric THOMPSON

Jean continued to love at home until she was about 14 or 15 years old at which point she became pregnant out of wedlock following an attack. Jean was sent away to the town of Casino which is a scarce 30km away where she stayed with the local Salvation Army officers (ministers) and helped look after their children. There is the suggestion in the family that this arrangement was helped by their then housekeeper who attended the Salvation Army church in Lismore. After 9 months, Jean gave birth to a son who was namedEric THOMPSON. Interestingly, Eric was not adopted out following his birth. He was absorbed into the family and raised as a sibling to Jean’s younger siblings.

Jean became more and more involved in The Salvation Army and became a Soldier (member) of the church, moving around with the officer from Casino when they moved on to their next location. It was through the Salvos that she met her husband, who spotted her at an open air meeting and declared to his mates “I’m gonna marry that girl right there” and marry her he did. They went on to have two children and time passed. Then in the 1990s when Jean was in when she was in her 70s she was diagnosed with breast cancer. But she managed to beat it through chemo and a radical double mastectomy and went on to live until the ripe old age of 93.

Jean ILES (nee THOMPSON) later in life with her eldest grandchild.

 

Week 2 – Favourite Photo

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The prompt for Week 2 of #52 ancestors is Favourite Photo. Since starting family history research I have gathered together quite a collection of photos from various family members, some of which have been unseen by other family members for generations. So, it is hard for to pinpoint just one photo as a favourite. I have decided that one of my ultimate favourites is the photo below of my mother Wendy Nichols and her sister Jayne, taken sometime in the 1960s. My mother is the one on the right with her sister Jayne on the left.

This is one of the first photos that became part of my collection, and I remember asking my mother about it and she can remember getting ready the night before the picture was taken. She can’t remember exactly how old she was, but she does remember the photo being taken and that it was before her parents marriage broke up. My mother was lucky enough that she had natural curls, so her preparation was pretty basic. However, she remembers her sister Jayne as having have her hair done up in rags so that she would have  beautiful curls for the photo. The two girls are dressed in identical dresses which were handmade by my grandmother, as nearly all of their clothes were.

I have always loved this photo not just because it allows me to see what my mother was like as a child but because I grew up hearing a lot about her sister Jayne. One of my middle names is Jayne so it was explained to me why my parents had chosen that name. Jayne was only a year older than my mother and so they were very close when growing up. Unfortunately, Jayne died at the age of 20 following kidney failure as a result of contracting Nephritis at the age of 14 and in her memory I was given her name as a middle name. As a relatively young child, I accepted that this was a sad event and promptly forgot about it except when people asked about my middle name. However, I can remember at the age of about 9-10 coming across a photo that I hadn’t seen before and upon asking who it was I was told that this was Jayne as a young woman before she died.

At the time, I didn’t think anything much of it beyond that it was a photo of someone I’d never met but in later years as a teenager I revisited the photo and realised that I resembled her. My mother had been telling me this for years and, being a teenager, I didn’t believe her but now I could see the resemblance. As an even older teenager, this realisation made me sad as my grandmother had gotten dementure which worsened as she aged and got sicker. I was just seventeen and a half years old when she died and in the last days and weeks before she died I can remember visiting her and not being recognised as Samantha, her granddaughter, but as her daughter Jayne.

 

 

Starting

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After much deliberating, I have decided to start a blog as a way of recording my family history journey and family stories. The #52ancestors challenge has finally given me the motivation to start the blog rather than still thinking about it. The topic for Week 1 was “Start” so here is my post about how I started my family history journey.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been interested in history and how people lived “in the olden days”. As a child I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother, who was born in 1922. I can vividly remember coming across a black and white photo of a young child playing outside in a rural setting. I can remember asking my grandmother who the child in the photos was and her replying that it was her as a little girl. to me, who was only young at the time (maybe 8 or 9 years old) this was amazing. Over the years, I can remember her telling stories about her growing up years and haring stories from my mother who had heard them from her grandmother. When my grandmother died, my mum and I decided to do some investigating into my grandmothers family and we found something quite quickly on the first ancestor of hers to come to Australia: a convict. And with that, my family history journey was started.