Kathleen Cudmore: a Memoir

Remembering my grandmother whose birthday it is today

Anne's Family History

Kathleen Cudmore: a Memoir

by Rafe de Crespigny

Kathleen CavenaghnéeCudmore was born on 27 June 1908, the second daughter and second child of Arthur Murray Cudmore (1870-1951) and his wife Kathleen Mary née Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1874-1951). Her sister Rosemary had been born in 1904.

Kathleen with her older sister Rosemary about 1910

Arthur Cudmore, second son of James Francis Cudmore (1837-1912) and his wife Margaret née Budge (1845-1912), was born on 11 June 1870 at Paringa Station on the Murray near Renmark in South Australia. Arthur’s grandfather, Daniel Michael Paul Cudmore (1811-1891), had emigrated from Ireland in 1835 and after a period in Tasmania arrived in South Australia early in 1837, a few weeks after its proclamation on 28 December 1836. His wife Mary née Nihill came from Hobart to join him later that year, and James Francis was born at sea on the ship Siren off Kangaroo…

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20 June 1756 Black Hole of Calcutta

Remembering Patrick Johnstone, who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta on 20 June 1756. He was only eighteen years old.

Anne's Family History

On 20 June 1756 Patrick Johnston(e) (1737-1756), my 7th great uncle, died in the prison of the Nawab Siraj-ud-daulah, later known as the “Black Hole of Calcutta” in India.

Three years previously, at the age of sixteen, Patrick had joined the East India Company as an accountant. He was eighteen when he died.

Memorial to the victims, St John’s Church Calcutta Photograph in 2011 by Pdr123 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Patrick’s name is listed on a memorial to victims.

One of the prisoners, J. Z. Holwell, wrote an account of the incident. He reported that 146 were imprisoned and in a room only 4.30m. x 5.50 m (14 feet x 18 feet) 123 died overnight from overcrowding. It is suggested that Howell exaggerated these numbers and that probably only 69 men were imprisoned. Howell listed P. [Patrick] Johnston in his account.

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Georgiana Caroline Barbara Mainwaring

The wife of my first cousin 5 times removed. A fascinating story retold by the Friends of Teignmouth Cemetery.

Teignmouth Old Cemetery

What an incredible story we have unearthed today!

On 6 January 1842, 16,000 members of the British Kabul force, the `Army of the Indus’, fled from Kabul under a “shameful capitulation and the illusion of safe-conduct” promised by the eastern Afghan tribes. One week later, on 13 January, Surgeon William Brydon rode alone into Jellalabad, apparently the only British survivor. It has been described as the worst British military disaster until the fall of Singapore a century later and upto that time the greatest defeat ever inflicted on the British by an Asian enemy.

Grave of Georgiana Caroline Barbara Mainwaring

On 15^th August 2017 Geoff Wood, a member of the Friends of Teignmouth Cemetery, discovered the overgrown grave of Georgiana Caroline Barbara Mainwaring. She was the wife of Major-General Edward Rowland Mainwaring of the Bengal Army. On her headstone she is decribed as “the last of the lady…

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D is for drama in Dunolly

Remembering my 3rd great grandfather Philip Chauncy on the anniversary of his death 9 April 1880 (with thanks to the Dunolly and District Historical Society for the reminder)

Anne's Family History

Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy (1816-1880), a surveyor who came to Australia in 1839, was my great great great grandfather. He lived for fourteen years in South Australia and Western Australia before coming to Victoria in 1853.

Chauncy kept diaries and in 1873, based on these, he published the Memoirs of Mrs Chauncy, a brief life of his second wife, Susan Augusta née Mitchell (1828-1867). Chauncy’s account of his time in Dunolly (below) is taken from his Memoirs.

In 1853 Chauncy was appointed as Surveyor-in-Chief for the McIvor district. He and his family moved to Heathcote. While there he surveyed the town of Heathcote and selected and surveyed Echuca.

In 1860 he was put in charge of the Dunolly Survey District and moved to Dunolly.In 1861 Chauncy

… bought a substantial stone house, unfinished, which had been built for an inn, and was in a municipal street. [Chauncy’s emphasis]

My…

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Colonial Auxiliary Forces Officers’ Decoration (V.D.)

Thanks to a comment, I have corrected the listing of my great grandfather’s medals.

The link below for “a different meaning” is broken. Here is the correct link.

I need to find and correct all broken links

Anne's Family History

In the index of the the second volume of the official history of the Australian Army Medical Service in the war of 1914-18, which I referred to in my recent post on No. 1 Australian General Hospital at Rouen, I noticed that my great grandfather was referred to as DE CRESPIGNY, Col. C. T. Champion (D.S.O., V.D., A.A.M.C.). I knew about the D.S.O. awarded in 1917 for distinguished service in the field and I knew that A.A.M.C. stood for Australian Army Medical Corps but I had not come across an award of V.D. To me the initials had a different meaning.

The Volunteer Officers’ Decoration (V.D.) was instituted in 1892 to reward the “long and meritorious services of Officers of proved capacity in Our Volunteer Force” in Great Britain. In 1894 the decoration was extended to include commissioned officers of all Volunteer Forces throughout the British…

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Citizenship Day 17 September

Australian Citizenship Day is celebrated on 17 September.
Remembering my grandparents who were very pleased to become Australian citizens.

Anne's Family History

Every 17 September, Australia celebrates Citizenship Day. The commemoration was instituted in 2001, with this date because it is the anniversary of the renaming of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 to the Australian Citizenship Act 1948.

In January 1955 my grandfather, Hans Boltz, on behalf of the Good Neighbour Council, attended the sixth Australian Citizenship Convention. The Good Neighbour Movement was established by the Australian government in 1949 to help migrants settle into the Australian way of life. Volunteers welcomed migrants into the local community, introduced them to schools, health centres, banks and shops, and gave advice on learning English.

CANBERRA DELEGATES TO CONVENTION. (1955, January 28). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995), p. 2. Retrieved September 15, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article91202771. Hans Boltz is in the front row at the right.

The sixth Australian Citizenship Convention was held in Canberra at the Albert…

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Fathers’ Day: first Sunday in September in Australia

Happy Father’s Day to all the past and present fathers in my family tree

On 10 December 1913, the ‘Adelaide Advertiser’, reporting the creation of the special day in the United States, took a rather scornful tone, joking that having lost their status as head of the household fathers would resent the new attention and decline to wear a rose. They would be very adequately identified as fathers anyway by being obliged to pay family income tax.

Anne's Family History

The first mention of Father’s Day in the Australian press seems to be nearly a hundred years ago in  a mention in the Adelaide Register of 10 December 1913 based on a search of the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database using the keywords “Fathers day” and “first Sunday”.

It is a very bah humbug approach buried on page 12 and referencing the new creation of the United States and quoting the New York Post:

FATHER’S DAY. (1913, December 10). The Register (Adelaide, SA : 1901 – 1929), p. 12. Retrieved August 31, 2013, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article57131432

There is a slightly earlier article along the same lines in the Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 – 1930) Sunday 7 December 1913 on page 8.

The next article coming up on my search of Trove is from The Daily News of Perth in November 1922:

CONGREGATIONAL. (1922, November…

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Moving to WordPress

In December 2014 I had a company called Blog2Print create a bound-book version of my blog archive of 116 posts from April 2012 to November 2014.

pages from the first volume of my bound-book version of my blog archive

It came to 363 pages. I’ve now arranged for a second volume to be printed – 143 posts, 424 pages – to cover the period from January 2015 to July 2017.

I like having a paper record of what I have written. For some reason, electronic files seem impermanent. Paper is meant to last.

Having printed off the blog, I felt it was time to think about its future. Blogger, which I’ve been using until now, is OK, but I have decided to transfer to a better system, WordPress.com.

I looked at WordPress.org, the community-support, open-source, version, but with the commercial product, WordPress.com, I don’t have to think about the cost and effort of setting up a domain name and installing and maintaining the blogging software. That’s part of the WordPress.com package. I do need to pay a small amount to keep the site free of advertising.

I was able to export all the content of my old blog to my new WordPress site. I won’t be editing previous posts but I am creating indexes, arranged into family categories. I think this will help to make more sense of what I have written so far. It will also help me to see gaps in my family history I might be able to fill in future blog posts.

I am looking forward to doing more research and writing about our family history. The Blogger site will remain where it is indefinitely, but from today new posts will be published at ayfamilyhistory.com.

Just starting out

A blog to share the stories I discover while researching my family history.  I store my family history on an online tree at ancestry.com but will write about the stories I discover during my researches pulling together relationships and events.