Photograph albums from great great aunt Rose

A few weeks ago I received an email from my father’s cousin, the son of my great aunt Nancy Movius nee Champion de Crespigny (1910-2003), offering me the custody of several collections of photographs:

“We have unearthed three Victorian photo albums that my mother seems to have brought from Adelaide with her.  They came to light when we moved out of our house by the seaside, and are filled with deC's and others among our forebears. We are no longer living in space sufficient to store them safely. You should have them for your archive. It would be a shame not to have them preserved and I am happy to ship them to you. Please say you want them and furnish an address.

The three albums have arrived, a most exciting event. They include more than 200 photographs, most of them cartes de visite, with some cabinet cards.

Pages of cartes de visite. Not all the photos are identified.

Cabinet cards of Rose and Frank Beggs

Cartes de visite, first produced in the 1850s, were small photographs. They were usually made of an albumen print, with the thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. Cabinet cards, of a larger format, date from the 1870s.

One the albums is inscribed “Rose from her brother Loo”. Loo or Loup was the pet name for my great great grandfather Philip Champion de Crespigny (1850-1927). Rose (1858-1937) was his youngest sister. She married Frank Beggs. This album has an index to people in the photos, and my great aunt Nancy has also annotated some of the photographs.

The second album has no inscriptions nor annotations.

The third album has been partly annotated by Nancy, who refers to the album as belonging to Charlotte Frances Champion de Crespigny nee Dana. Charlotte was my third great grandmother, the mother of Philip and Rose.

Rose Beggs nee CdeC on her wedding day

Charlotte CdeC nee Dana

Philip CdeC (Loo)

I think that Rose gave the albums to Nancy, her great niece.

Most of the photographs are new to me. It is marvellous to be able to see photographs of people I had previously only known as names. I look forward to sharing the photographs, and perhaps some of the stories that go with them, in forthcoming posts.

Related posts:

• Aunt Rose’s teapot
• St Marnocks
• Philip Champion de Crespigny, General Manager of the Bank of Victoria
• Trove Tuesday: Nancy de Crespigny at Salt Creek 1936

Wikitree:

• Charlotte Frances (Dana) Champion Crespigny (1820 – 1904)
• Helen Rosalie (Champion Crespigny) Beggs (1858 – 1937)
• Philip Champion de Crespigny (1850 – 1927)
• Nancy (Champion de Crespigny) Movius (1910 – 2003)

John Percival Young (1896 – 1918)

Remembering John Percival Young and all those who served and died in World War 1

Anne's Family History

John Percival Young (1896 – 1918), known as Jack, was the older brother of my husband’s grandfather Cecil (1898 – 1975).

I have previously written about Cecil’s early life.

Jack enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces on 6 October 1916. He gave his age as eighteen years, two months; but in fact he was twenty years and two months.  His trade was engineer (fitter).  He was unmarried; his father was next of kin.¹

Jack was assigned to the AIF signal school. He was there from 12 October to 30 November 1916. On 16 December 1916 he embarked at Melbourne on HMAT A7 Medic for Plymouth.

Departure of Medic on 16 December 19162

Departure of Medic on 16 December 19163

Departure of Medic on 16 December 19164

HMAT Medic (A7) departs Melbourne assisted by a tug, and watched by a crowd of well-wishers on the wharf.

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U is for unknown fate of Gerald Mainwaring

An aborted jury trial has been in the Australian news headlines this last week and it reminded me of another jury trial in my family history where the jury effectively voted on the fate of the accused. Found guilty of murder, Gerald Mainwaring was sentenced to hang. It transpired, however, that the jury, unable to agree, had drawn a ballot to decide Mainwaring’s fate. There was an appeal to the Home Secretary and his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

Anne's Family History

In 1879, Gerald Mainwaring, my first cousin four times removed, just 24 years old, was tried and found guilty of murder. The case, widely reported, caused a sensation.

From the mid-1870s Mainwaring had lived in Canada, farming in Manitoba. In April 1879 he returned to England to attend the wedding of his sister Julia.  A few months later, due to return to Canada, he went on a spree in Derby.  He got drunk, and driving a trap with a ‘female companion’ too fast through the town, was pulled over by the police. When they began a search of his lady friend, Mainwaring fired several shots from a revolver, wounding two policemen, one fatally.

Found guilty of murder, he was sentenced to hang. It transpired, however, that the jury, unable to agree, had drawn a ballot to decide Mainwaring’s fate. There was an appeal to the Home Secretary

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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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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.