A few years ago (4 apparently according to this blog), I started the 52 ancestors writing project. As you can see if you have read previous posts, I didn’t get far! I’ve decided to have another go. This time there are monthly as well as weekly themes. I’m aiming to get the monthly topics done and if I get any of the weekly ones then that’s a bonus!!
The foundation of my family history research has been my mothers maternal line. Fragments of stories were being remembered by my mum and her sisters but the full stories had been lost in time.
The main fragmented story was of a baby being burnt to death. No one now knew the exact details, was it my great grandmothers sister? Was my great grandmother the one responsible for the accident? Was this incident the reason for her mental decline?
Unlike many families, we didn’t have the full story of many things that happened prior to my grandmothers generation. Joan Margaret Tucker (nee Loudon), was the youngest of 6 children born to Robert and Wilhelmina Loudon. When Joan was young, Wilhelmina was placed in a mental asylum, where she remained until her death in 1953. Family ties to that side of the family were lost, leaving only fragments of the story, and Joan to be raised by her older siblings.
During conversations with my mum & her sisters, I took up the task of seeing if a basic Google search brought anything to light. After all one of my main mottos is Keep Calm and Google it! Wilhelmina’s maiden name was Mäthenius. This initial search brought up an online record showing a baby’s grave in Grafton. Was this the burnt baby remembered in the family story? As it turned out, no it wasn’t, but it seems the family endured more than one child’s death. Henry Peter & Eliza Mäthenius lived in Grafton for a while with Henry most likely working in the bakery his father Ludwig had there. This baby’s grave was a stillborn son born in 1886 and was reported in the local newspaper at the time.
After a lot of research, most importantly finding out how often Mäthenius is misspelled I found the baby’s death certificate. This shows that Eliza Wilhemina Mäthenius died on the 14th July 1881. There are no further details, the death certificate just lists her cause of death as burns. This was before Wilhelmina was born in October 1881 so she was not responsible for the baby’s death.
Questions were also raised about where the family originally came from – what were their foundations in Germany? It would take me significantly longer to get the correct answer to this. Ludwig and Katherina had arrived from Germany in 1857. According to Ludwig’s death certificate, he was born in ‘Frankfort’, but I wasn’t 100% sure that it was correct. More recently, thanks to a distant relative contacting me through my website I’ve found that they were actually from Frankenburg. It looks like they were the only family with this surname to emigrate to Australia.
So from a few fragments of disjointed information, a passion for discovering our family history and origins was born. There are still, and probably will always be large gaps in the story, but at least there is a story to tell.
The foundation of my family history research has been my mothers maternal line. Fragments of stories were being remembered by my mum and her sisters but the full stories had been lost in time.
The main fragmented story was of a baby being burnt to death. No one now knew the exact details, was it my great grandmothers sister? Was my great grandmother the one responsible for the accident? Was this incident the reason for her mental decline?
Unlike many families, we didn’t have the full story of many things that happened prior to my grandmothers generation. Joan Margaret Tucker (nee Loudon), was the youngest of 6 children born to Robert and Wilhelmina Loudon. When Joan was young, Wilhelmina was placed in a mental asylum, where she remained until her death in 1953. Family ties to that side of the family were lost, leaving only fragments of the story, and Joan to be raised by her older siblings.
During conversations with my mum & her sisters, I took up the task of seeing if a basic Google search brought anything to light. After all one of my main mottos is Keep Calm and Google it! Wilhelmina’s maiden name was Mäthenius. This initial search brought up an online record showing a baby’s grave in Grafton. Was this the burnt baby remembered in the family story? As it turned out, no it wasn’t, but it seems the family endured more than one child’s death. Henry Peter & Eliza Mäthenius lived in Grafton for a while with Henry most likely working in the bakery his father Ludwig had there. This baby’s grave was a stillborn son born in 1886 and was reported in the local newspaper at the time.
After a lot of research, most importantly finding out how often Mäthenius is misspelled I found the baby’s death certificate. This shows that Eliza Wilhemina Mäthenius died on the 14th July 1881. There are no further details, the death certificate just lists her cause of death as burns. This was before Wilhelmina was born in October 1881 so she was not responsible for the baby’s death.
Questions were also raised about where the family originally came from – what were their foundations in Germany? It would take me significantly longer to get the correct answer to this. Ludwig and Katherina had arrived from Germany in 1857. According to Ludwig’s death certificate, he was born in ‘Frankfort’, but I wasn’t 100% sure that it was correct. More recently, thanks to a distant relative contacting me through my website I’ve found that they were actually from Frankenburg. It looks like they were the only family with this surname to emigrate to Australia.
So from a few fragments of disjointed information, a passion for discovering our family history and origins was born. There are still, and probably will always be large gaps in the story, but at least there is a story to tell.