{"id":538,"date":"2014-11-22T18:26:27","date_gmt":"2014-11-22T18:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patsytrench.com\/\/?page_id=538"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:05:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:05:31","slug":"writing-family-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/patsytrench.com\/writing-family-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Researching your family history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning: this can become an addiction.<\/em><\/p>\n

I only began taking interest in my Australian family history in my later years. On my semi-regular visits to Australia \u2013 where I once migrated to and where half my family still lives \u2013 I visited my one surviving aunt, who lived in a retirement home in North Sydney. By way of making conversation I asked her about our family history, which she had spent her retirement years researching, and how our family came to be in Australia in the first place.<\/p>\n

The story she told me was remarkable. Our earliest Australian pioneer was a widow in her fifties called Mary Matcham Pitt, who migrated with her five children to what was then known as New South Wales in 1801, just 13 years after the country had been purloined by the British as a penal colony and at a time when it was considered by its earliest colonial inhabitants as unfit for human habitation.<\/p>\n

So to cut a very long story short, I spent the next seven years travelling back and forth between my home in London and Australia researching Mary and her family\u2019s background both here in England and in New South Wales, in order to produce my first book, which I named, appropriately:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The research included investigating the earliest history of colonial New South Wales, a fascinating and unlikely story in itself and posed several obvious questions, viz:<\/p>\n