Building on a legacy

A few years ago, I inherited my late mother’s family history research.

She amassed a rich family archive over thirty years. Letters, photographs, diaries found their way into her collection, spurring on her research and interest. She made fantastic discoveries and built up family trees and started to write family histories. Over the years I was drawn to the allure of research, history and family stories.  Soon I was following up loose ends and insisting that the collection was stored properly in archival folders and boxes. We’d go to the State Library together. She would research and I volunteered in the Picture Collection as I started to work towards a career in history and heritage. We’d meet for lunch at Druids café on Swanston Street and discuss the progress of the day. She wanted to give something tangible to the family. A family history in a book. Perhaps several books.

Since inheriting her work in progress, I have wondered about her motivations. Was she subconsciously trying to raise the dead? Is that what I am doing? Can history bring people back to life? What does it tell us about ourselves? What can we learn of the places our ancestors were from?

Her legacy is now my legacy. It was, and still is, a shared interest and a means to connect, despite the different worlds we now inhabit.

It was really important to my mother that ‘we do something’ with the research and material. Her intentions were liberally peppered throughout letters she wrote to various peers or researchers during the eighties and nineties. She said to me at my uncle’s funeral barely six months before her own death, ‘we must do something’, and this was reiterated to me in a vivid dream, less than twelve months after she died.

This blog, a collection of stories about people, places and travel, is my attempt to ‘do something’.

It will explore my family’s history. It will use tangible memories found in photos, diaries, letters and other artefacts to uncover family stories. It will tap into various methodologies historians use to build up histories when there are no records available about direct ancestors.

I’ll also travel to the places my ancestors came from, attempting to retrace their footsteps and to immerse myself in the lands and look for family they left behind.

I know I’ll love this journey, I hope you do too.