ancestry.com paywalls aside, the internet is getting to be a pretty fantastic resource for looking up family history. tonight i nudged my own lineage back as far as the 1660s, via this guy - exactly the kind of scurvy english crook us australians love to swear we actually have nothing to do with. anyway, that guy came to the new world in 1788 on this boat:
![3eb7fb2a-1342-4efe-976b-7b02fb8e399a_zpsniilcc9j.jpg]()
i also sussed out a bit more about the direct paternal line, leading back to the early 1800s; apparently, at that time in sydney there was a desperate need for a classier sort of booze than beer and rum; so a bloke called wilhelm kirchner recruited a bunch of rhenish vinedressers on two-year contracts and brought them over on this boat:
![Peter_Godeffroy4_zpskyu4w6ew.jpg]()
that's how our german surname got to australia, from a small town called rudesheim.
since then there have been embezzlers and orphans, newspaper empires and touring bicycles - and this is all just on my dad's side of the family. that's not even going into the mysterious end-of-the-line in rural NSW, where an untraceable teenage maid was knocked up by a ring-in horse-trainer in the pub of a racing town.
i had heard stories myself, and i wouldn't have gotten anywhere without getting specific names from my parents and grandparents. but almost all of this i dug up myself - using tools like rootsweb and, especially, the national library of australia's digitised newspaper archives. i want to hear your family's stories - and if you feel like you don't have any, look closer!
i also sussed out a bit more about the direct paternal line, leading back to the early 1800s; apparently, at that time in sydney there was a desperate need for a classier sort of booze than beer and rum; so a bloke called wilhelm kirchner recruited a bunch of rhenish vinedressers on two-year contracts and brought them over on this boat:
that's how our german surname got to australia, from a small town called rudesheim.
since then there have been embezzlers and orphans, newspaper empires and touring bicycles - and this is all just on my dad's side of the family. that's not even going into the mysterious end-of-the-line in rural NSW, where an untraceable teenage maid was knocked up by a ring-in horse-trainer in the pub of a racing town.
i had heard stories myself, and i wouldn't have gotten anywhere without getting specific names from my parents and grandparents. but almost all of this i dug up myself - using tools like rootsweb and, especially, the national library of australia's digitised newspaper archives. i want to hear your family's stories - and if you feel like you don't have any, look closer!