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.