June 2026
Our Family in Wartime
We are Baby Boomers, the generation conceived and born, as normal life picked up again, after the end of the Second World…
Alice Bourke (née Coates)
The archive’s established first-name form.
October 2022
Women’s Work
Like women throughout history, most of the women in our family have had the primary job of parent and homemaker. Those homes…
July 2018
Fred’s films
My first boyfriend, later husband, Fred, has been out of our lives for a long time. Sue and I have written about…
June 2018
The Croydon Years
Our mother’s and aunt’s formative years were spent in Croydon. Alice was six and Marge nine when they moved. They remember the…
April 2018
Decade by Decade
Five hours of Alice and Marge’s family stories finishes with an overview. Strikingly, Alice did most of this by herself, without notes.…
November 2016
The Demon Drink
Alcoholic drinks hardly ever entered our world. We were aware that the communion “wine” used by our own Presbyterian church was actually…
July 2016
Twenty-Eight Moore Street
Alice describes the acquisition of the land in Box Hill South in 1946: Dad built the house over the following six years,…
June 2016
“Cut out of the Will”
Growing up we had heard many times how our father had been ‘cut out of the will’ by his father because he…
December 2015
How to Rescue the World
In our family it feels natural and right to hold, to debate and to act on political opinions: a thread that runs…
October 2015
Twelfth Birthday Letters to Alice
Letter writing is all but dead. When we were cleaning out our mother’s flat, after she had died, there was a collection…
September 2015
Wednesdays at Number Ten
In this post we are stepping back from our collection of FAMILY STORIES to write specifically about this site: its origins, our…