The Sinclair croft at Dunrossness, Shetland When Thomas, Laurence and John Sinclair left Shetland for Western Australia, they left their parents, George and Margaret Sinclair, at Hillock in the parish of Dunrossness. Their sister Ann remained in Shetland with her husband, James Mainland. As George…
Hi everyone and thanks for coming to celebrate the life of Lesley Carroll. We have just been through a tender weekend as it was Susan’s birthday on Saturday and Suse and Vito’s wedding anniversary on Sunday. Les did not want a funeral and asked that…
Old passports are valuable family history records because they preserve much more than a person’s identity. They record where a person was living when the passport was issued, how they described themselves, and often where they travelled afterwards. My mother’s passport is important for another…
George Thomas Sinclair (1867–1917?) The seventh and last of Thomas and Mary Sinclair’s children, George Thomas was born on 17 March 1867 at Greenmount, in the wooded foothills above the Swan River east of Perth. He was the second of the children to be born…
The history of ordinary families in the West Riding of Yorkshire is closely tied to the fortunes of local industry. For the Robinson family of Dodworth and Ardsley—ancestors of the present author—the domestic linen trade formed the central framework of economic life in the late…
In the early twentieth century, British commercial expansion into Burma created new opportunities for men seeking employment beyond India. Among them was my grandfather, Cecil James Chadwick, who in 1906 established a rubber plantation on King Island in the Mergui Archipelago, off the southern coast…
He looks directly and confidently into the camera. He does not smile and neither does the woman by his side. She is short in stature, wearing a patterned white dress and leaning slightly into his shoulder. He is dressed in the winter uniform of an…
For many Shetlanders who left in the nineteenth century, the story ends at the shoreline: a departure, a voyage, an arrival in a distant colony. But for the Sinclair brothers of Dunrossness, the story did not end there. It continued far inland, into a dry…
When Thomas Sinclair brought his family to Western Australia on the Tartar in 1863 he kept a diary of the voyage. The original is in the Esperance Museum, Western Australia. It is a fascinating document because it vividly describes what it must have been like for a…
My grandfather vanished. He walked out of his house in Madras one day and was never seen again. Someone said he was seen getting into a carriage with a young woman. Others thought he might have been mugged and murdered. My mother thought he had…