Sepia Saturday 563 - Large families

 

Back to my family photos again because I seem to have quite a few large family groups - big families. Several I have shown before in previous posts, but they bear repeating because I like them.

First we have one you may remember. My husband's maternal grandmother and her siblings. She - Rosa Boord - was one of a large family, mainly girls. Her father was referred to as "the pilot with many daughters". Here we have the good Captain Alexander Frederick Boord with his 11 surviving children,  one having died at birth. Captain Boord's wife died in 1894 two months after the birth of her 12th child. Captain Boord died in 1925, aged 81.

This photo is of the 9 eldest children and their family dog.

Here we have the whole family.

This photo shows the family gathering at the wedding of Nellie Boord, the youngest of the Boord family. Nellie is front row 3rd from the right. Rosa, Don's grandmother ids centre back row wearing a white hat with dark rim.

To continue the family theme, we have Rosa (centre) with her some of her children and grandchildren.

Can you spot those twins in the front row. My Don is top row on the right.

And then the next generation, Rosa's great grandchildren   -  well, a few of them - the Needle ones..

I cannot leave my family out of this. We too had large families. This one  shows my maternal great grandmother, Laura Heyne (nee Hanckel) with her 4 children and their offspring. My mother, also Laura Heyne, is the baby and standing directly behind her and her mother is yet another Laura Heyne - my great aunt.

Skipping a couple of generations and here we have a couple of large families of my cousins. I only had one brother and i was always so envious of these cousins. They were such fun to visit and seemed so close and loving.

Another Heyne family and believe it or not, yet another Laura heyne amongst them.

 My uncle fought in WW2 and was a prisoner of war in Changi prison for a number of years. My aunt was left to raise eight children on her own.

And yet more cousins, but no Laura here. The boys were all servicemen - Airforce, Navy and Army.

I had 34 cousins from my mother's side of the family and like many families we have the occasional family get togethers - sadly these days it is often for funerals. The first photo below goes back to 1941 and it is very poor quality as in those days the cameras were pretty basic.

This is the earliest photo I have seen of me. I am the blonde baby being held on the right.

And a later get together with the children of the young adults from above plus a few others.

Enough of my family. I can't promise you won't see more of them - it really depends on what numbers are thrown at us over the next weeks and months.

Liz Needle  -  linking with  "SEPIA SATURDAY".

Sepia Saturday 562 - Football

 

The Sepia Saturday this week shows a crowd at some sort of event - maybe a football game, a band competition (I know someone who is sure to jump on this one.)

I have decided to go with the football theme a and where it all started.It is the major football code in Australia, followed by Soccer, Rugby League and Rugby Union. AFL is in fact the oldest official football code in the world, having its origins in the 1850's.

Football in some form or other was played in Australia from the very early days, but it was very informal and not documented. It is said that some of the local indigenous tribes played a form of football well before the white settlers. It is on record that the first documented game was played in June 1858 between Melbourne Grammar and St Kilda Grammar. There were no written rules, no definite team numbers and the game followed the tradition of the football games played at the English Public Schools. In August of that year, Melbourne Grammar played against Scotch College in a game of 40 a-side which lasted 3 Saturdays.

About that time Tom Wills who was then a keen cricketer and had played a form of football at Rugby returned to Australia and mooted the idea of setting up a football game that would keep the cricketers fit during the winter. He and a small group of like minded sportsman met at Bryants Hotel in Melbourne and hammered out t set of 10 rules that became the basis for Australian Rules Football. 

The Melbourne and Geelong Football Clubs were formed in 1858 and 1859 and are among the oldest sporting clubs in the world. The game took off and was played in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales. This etching shows a game played in 1866.

Below is an inter-colonial game from 1879

A visiting team from England

Here we see a gasme in Yarra Park, Melbourne. Kicking, high marking and fierce tackling are among the chief elements of the game.

An early game under lights.

Melbourne Football Club in the 1920's

Of course like all games, football has evolved over the years and has developed into a fast, skilful and exciting game, played in all Australian states and overseas as well. In Australia at the highest level it attracts crowds each week of up to 50 000 and up to 100 000 for the Grand Final, but it is played at all levels, throughout the country by men, women and children each saturday in winter. It is arguably our national game, though I would probably get a fight from Soccer and Rugby fans.

Liz Needle  -  linking with Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday 561 - NUMBER THREE

 Another week gone and I'm back to regale you with some threesomes from my family album - thankfully no triplets in the family!!

Let's start with the Needle family. First my beautiful mother-in-law Mavis and the two eldest boys - Fred and Don. Mavis was born in 1913 at Solomontown - one of two girls born to Ezra and Edith Cosh. She married Ronald  Needle in 1937 and had 6 sons in the next 10 years. They purchased a small farm at Williamstown and Mavis  raised the boys largely on her own at first as Ron was away at war and then working as a large transport contractor, often away from home for extended periods. She was a beautiful lady in the true sense and I loved her from the start. Sadly she died suddenly at 50, shortly after her first grandchild was born. We bought the baby - then 3 months old - down from Darwin to meet the family and Mavis had the joy of caring for her first granddaughter for a few weeks.

Here is my husband Don with his twin brothers whom you met last week. I'm afraid Don usually opted out of family photos if he could.

I love these multi generation family photos. This is the only one I could find featuring three generations. Hear we have Don's great grandmother Pauline Batis, his grandmother Edith (Cosh nee Batis) and her eldest daughter Jean.

Grandma Batis was another amazing pioneer woman. She was born Pauline Thoman in 1860 and married John Batis in 1877. They lived on a pastoral property at Nackera in the far north of south Australia where Pauline had at least 8 children as well as running the property while her husband was off droving, often for months at a time. A lot of mystery surrounds the life of the Batis family - stories and rumours abounded, secrets kept and as the children have long since gone and little was handed on to the next generation, we will probably never find out  about it now. Pauline died in 1959, just short of 100 years.

On to my family. First we have Edouard Hanckel, his wife Johanna (nee  Brunot) and their daughter Laura who became my great grandmother. The Hanckels arrived in Australia in 1850 on the ship "Lavinia". This photo was taken several  years before they arrived in Adelaide. Johanna looks to be pregnant here and she did have a son, Emil in 1848.

Skipping a couple of generations here is my mother, Laura, with my young brother and me, taken in 1944. My mother was the granddaughter of the little girl in the picture above. Like so many of the women in her family she was a well known and much loved teacher. She married my father - Austin St George Hornblower (has to be an Englishman) in 1939. I will write more about my father another time. His is an interesting story.

This threesome shows two of my great aunts - Tante Ida and Tante Laura - and my cousin Janet. Ida and Laura were the daughters of the little girl in the earlier trio. They were both very well known teachers in Adelaide and with their sister Agnes taught many of the professional people in Adelaide.  Laura(right) became the first female to be head of Science, Maths and Latin at Adelaide Boys High School - she also coached her great nieces and nephews (me included) through their public exams. Ida, while profoundly deaf from the age of around 17, was a much loved teacher of German at Girton school for girls. Like many of the women in the family, Janet also became a teacher.

I haven't as many triplet photos as I thought in my old albums - people tended to have larger families, so here are a few later ones. This one is me at about 18, my cousin Jan and my best friend Kate. We were all rather proud of our 'lovely legs' in those days.

Another from the family album. It is titled Olga Ernst. I have no idea which one is Olga, but I do know that Olga Dorothea Agnes Ernst (note the family names)was a very well known writer of Australian fairy tales, publishing her first book "Fairytales from the Land of the Wattle" in 1904 when she was just 16. Olga's mother Johanna Straubel(nee Heyne) was my great great aunt, sister of my great grandfather Ernst Bernhard Heyne. Incidentally Olga also became a teacher.

 

Finally to finish in the modern(ish) era - two times three. The full six of those little boys you have been seeing over the last few weeks

Liz Needle  -  linking with  "Sepia Saturday"

Sepia Saturday 560 - Numbers 2

 This week the Sepia Saturday prompt is TWO which pleased me enormously as Twins seem to run in my husband's family and I have some lovely old photos to share. But, I decided not to stop at Twins as there are so many other twosomes in my albums which I would also like to share with you.

My father-in-law Ronald Arthur Needle was born in 1912 and was the second of twin boys, his elder brother Frederick Alexander having preceded him by some minutes. I have no record of how much older Frederick was and he was rarely mentioned in the family as he died of pneumonia when he was 14 - or thereabouts.

 Interestingly, I can find no official record of the year of his death. My brother in-law had it down as 1/6/1926 in his family tree, he is not even mentioned in another family tree and the only other reference I can find says somewhere between 1926 and 1930. I only just discovered this a few minutes ago when I was looking for information for this post, so I will have to try to find an official record. My husband cannot remember his father (the other twin) ever mentioning his brother.

I love this photo of Frederick and Ronald - I have no idea which is which, but they are obviously identical. I would think this was taken early 1913.  There appear to be very few photos of the twins, but the one below shows them at about 6 months old with their mother Rosa and older sister Phillis.

Skip to the next generation and we have the twins who appeared in last week's post. These are my husband's younger brothers, Peter and Paul at about 8 months old.

And my favourite photo of them at about 3-4 years old. You will see more of these little cuties next week for THREE. 

And the last of the twins. We skip yet another generation and here are Don's great nieces - the granddaughters of his eldest brother Fred.

That's it with the twins, but I had to share a few of my favourite family twosome  photos. The first one shows two of my great-aunts, Agnes and Ida, taken around 1880

And the other two in the family - my great aunt Laura and grandfather Carl.

This next one I am not sure about. I think it is my of my great aunts Agnes and Laura. If you look at the photos above, they would appear to be the two older girls at a younger age.

My maternal great great grand parents, Martin and Dorathea Weber who came to Australia from Germany in 1850.

And here is their beautiful daughter Anna Margaretha (my great grand mother) on the occasion of her marriage to Christian Lehmann.  She looks a lot like her mother. Sadly she died less than 10 years later, leaving 6 children, the youngest only 5 months old. A couple of years later Christian remarried his sister-in-law Dorathea Weber and had another 4 children.

Anna Margaretha Weber(Lehmann) and her sister Dorathea Weber (Lehmann)

Back to my husband's family and here we have his mother Mavis and her sister Jean. I love these lace dresses. Mavis (right) was born in 1913, so I would place this shot about 1918.

And finally one of my favourite photos of my youngest brother-in-law, Mark. He'll probably kill me if he sees this, but this is payback for all the cheek he gave me when I started going out with his favourite big brother!! Junior Deb Balls were all the thing in country South Australia back in the early fifties and he was very cute.

Oh dear. I have got a little carried away with my TWOSOMES. I hope I have not put you off.

Liz Needle linking with  Sepia Saturday.