- I'm definitely a Queenslander. Everyone in my family's past was born in Queensland, or came direct to Queensland when they immigrated and married someone with the same sort of background! And, very few of us ever seem to leave - I'm feeling like such a traitor living here in Canberra!
- I've got more German ancestry than I thought - on both sides of the family.
My mum's family basically came from Ireland (her dad's family - the Strains) and Germany (her mum's - the Weckers). There's a bit of confusion about the Strain family, there seems to have been some movement between Scotland and Ireland that I'm still trying to track down. As it happens, we won't be getting to Ireland or Germany on our trip next year. We will be getting to Scotland but we'll have to see if I can track down any actual family history there rather than just vague confusion about whether they were there or not :-)
My dad's family is a different story - both his mum and dad were born in London and the small amount I've found so far about their parents seems to be saying the same thing about them, although any further back on his mum's side will also take me to Germany. The houses at all of the London addresses I can find have clearly been rebuilt over more than once since then - one of the streets doesn't even exist any more. And to be blunt it seems fairly likely that if I found pictures of these places when my forbears lived there, they wouldn't exactly be the nice open streets and upmarket looking houses and units that Google Street View shows me today. One of the streets for example rates a mention on website about Jack the Ripper, and at about the time the family was there. I'll still go and look at some of them - as it happens they're mostly within walking distance of our London hotel - but the actual houses all seem to be long gone.
Once I started looking at my family history, we got interested in Paul's too. So far we've only started looking at his dad's family a little. Turns out they're all Queenslanders too, but originally were country people from the Peak District (a bit of a surprise since we thought they were from Wales!). The two main towns we've come across so far are Hayfield and Glossop. So, although it doesn't seem that there are many Brelsfords left there - they apparently all went to the USA or Australia long ago - we've decided to go to Manchester first and have a look at both places, and hopefully in the meantime we can track down some more information about the Brelsford past.
