Letter of the Week
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This was the tree that I initially didn’t think would go very far, the tree of my Pa, Lyle James Booth. But a lazy, unfocussed googling of Booths of Barraba (NSW) hit upon a blog of one of my Mum’s distant cousins, whom Mum had actually spoken to once upon a time. The claims on…
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This tree has the most Convict flavour of any of my trees. This is the tree of my Nanna, Bessie Grigor Cox. We have first and second fleet in this particular tree. I am particularly enamoured of the story of my 5th Nanna Hannah, who was sent to Australia for nicking and fencing a Bible.…
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This is my Poppa, William Charles Kellner’s tree. Before going into this I believed that this was the tree that was going to be the most interesting and the most well documented because I had heard this was the German side and Germans are efficient. Because paying attention to basic and really quite important information…
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This is the tree from my Nanna, Thelma Jean Ross. Of the 4 trees that I have worked on in a very rough, impatient, impulsive and completely unverified fashion, this is by far the biggest, with the wildest claims (I am looking at you 15th Great Nanna Elizabeth Seymour, sister of Jane Seymour, third wife…
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The results are in and I am disappointingly homogenous. It’s the people of bad food, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English. With bits of French, Belgian and a light dusting of German. I am 7% Dutch which will account for my love of hot chips. I have no idea what I am doing here but have some…
About the Archivist
This is a curated selection of letters that left a mark on the world, on someone’s life, or just in the margins of time.
Each is transcribed with care and respect for the medium that first carried it: the typewritten page.
Race to the bottom 