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…
Recollections archive
Stories
Every currently imported Recollections story, including project-history posts, is now available to read.
June 2016
The Poor Little Thing
Marge and Alice, with great drama, tell the story of our great, great grandmother whose name they do not know, and her…
May 2016
Grace McCormack, our other grandmother.
Until last week we knew very little about our paternal Grandmother, Grace. We both had the feeling from our father that she…
April 2016
Alf and Alfreda: the Early Years
Alfreda, our maternal grandmother was living in St Kilda and attending the Melbourne Continuation School in the early 1900s. While she was…
March 2016
Alfreda Maria Holm, our maternal grandmother: the first seventeen years
We remember little of our maternal grandmother as a person. She was rather a remote figure, tall, elegant, well dressed but she…
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…
November 2015
Great Great Grandparents
Alice and Marge in 1990, as they sat with their cassette recorder, told as much as they knew about their grandparents and…
November 2015
Sue, Margaret, Rikki and Fred
Susan:The 1960s was rather a bleak period in my life. The break up of our parents’ marriage, and the aftermath, had a…
November 2015
First Year Teaching 1909
These children, photographed in 1910, are writing on slates with chalk, as did the children in our grandfather Alf's classroom in 1909.…
October 2015
First Year Teaching
Teaching was an obvious, perhaps the only, choice for us to study after Matriculation (Year12). The Commonwealth Government provided scholarships to cover…
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
Our Little Allie 1895-1906
Late July 2007, on a clear winters day in Chiltern, a small Northern Victorian town I found myself standing by my great…
September 2015
Lunchtimes at Primary School 1950s
Both Sue and Margaret remember school games as going in crazes or fads. It was suddenly, as if by magic, swap card…
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…
September 2015
Jim’s Schooling
Our father, Jim, who died quite young, did not tell us much about his early life. We remember some of his stories,…