Yulecart 3301

I hope your weekend was as funny as mine. I saw the Yulecart Agricultural Show. There were ponies of course and inside the Heritage listed bluestone hall there were roses and wool.

The hall was built by the community using bluestone recycled from Strathkellar Homestead. The names on the prizewinning exhibits were the same dozen as on the boards displaying those who served in the 1914 war and the 1939 war. There's a continuity out here in the country.

text of kin

This is the Paris grave of the magnificent Tartar dancer Rudolf Nureyev, designed as one of the Tartar a.k.a Azerbaijani carpets he collected.  It is in the Russian cemetery, surrounded by the tsarist nobility who got out of  St. Petersburg and MOCKBA c.1917 as the philistine hordes were trashing their treasures. I am buried deep into revolutionary Russia lately, tracing the family of my dear and cultured friend Ariadna*Vladimirovna - and patronymics now have meaning for me. Her second name tells us her father was Vladimir. Actually pre-1917 he was Woldemar Hesse, but Russia loves change. When a Russian maiden married, her surname became her husband's but with 'a' added. Vladimir Davydov's wife would be Natalya Davydova, meaning she is one of them, Davydova also meaning the entire family.
Added to the shifting sea of people's names, post-noble Russia changed all the place names as well, ie: St. Petersburg became Leningrad., and the Bolshie hordes trashed all the noble graves as well. As one website wailed 'the miracle of Russian genealogy, is that it can be done at all'.
My obsession with genealogy (anybody's) may be the result of never really being a part of my own family. I was a satellite of their orbit right from the start.
Just looking for a link to explain the dissociative disorder I definitely have, I found the founder, and do please just shriek at what he considered to be 'a trauma':
"By the late 19th century there was a general acceptance that emotionally traumatic experiences could cause long-term disorders which might display a variety of symptoms. These conversion disorders were found to occur in even the most resilient individuals, but with profound effect in someone with emotional instability like Louis Vivé (b.1863) who suffered a traumatic experience as a 13-year-old when he encountered a viper." 
A viper? Amateur hour Louis, pull yourself together. My viper was a rattlesnake in long grass doing the full rattle. Brushed that off without a sweat. My traumas have all been as 'pure Sandoz' was to any old LSD.

The person to whom I am the next of kin, just loved the open road - well Eastlink and the tollways anyhow.  Aged 90 years and with four speed fines and a collision in the past 2 years, that I know about, his licence to drive has been taken from him, and with it, his will to continue.
Today while wading through the admin of it all (and that will be another post, get your notebooks ready) I discovered this appropriate vehicle for travel to farthest horizons:

My fellow mourners of the smelly, randy legend that was Nureyev would understand.

My next of kin is blissfully and intensively medicated, receiving those who care for him, and I pray he lasts until tomorrow at least, because today is the 7th anniversary of the brutal murder of my sweet Puppy, a six kilo Shih Tzu ripped apart in our own driveway by a bikie's 120 kg English Mastiff, escaped from guarding the meth lab across the road. I know what grief is, and so does everybody who lived in that street that day.
Until I decided to include Puppy, my first thought for this post title was Good grief Charlie Brown.
Here is the Pupster guarding Kitty when she was only months old

wealth for toil

Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free; we've golden soil and wealth for toil; our home is girt by sea; Our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare; in history’s page, let every stage advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.
Twigs Of Yore blogger has a genealogy meme
(I found thanks to My Western District Families a Victorian blogger, with whom I share the fact of our ancestors both coming here from 'the Royal burgh' of Haddington SCT in 1854)

Twig's meme is based on how did your ancestors toil?  so I submit -


one of my G-G-grandfathers - George*Sedgwick (1830-1898) toiled in Portland, Victoria,  making furniture, and that is a c.1890 photograph of him in his workshop at 137 Percy Street.  He built the Rocket Shed on the Portland foreshore, as well as doing all the interior carpentry of the first Town Hall. He did amass wealth for it, although none trickled down to me.  I do wish I had known him.

I have been toiling on my genealogy database since 1997 when P0RN was the biggest thing on the www ... and now GENEALOGY is the biggest thing on the web, so  this 26th January I celebrate nothing but this small bit of positive evolution.

Majesty

Pre-Olympics Melbourne was so very different when Her Maj arrived in 1954 when small children were shepherded to the front of the crowds lining the streets, and sat cross-legged in safety, waiting for a glimpse of Her Maj. Those of us in school received a medallion, and I have been wearing mine this week, pointlessly in my remote seclusion.
This surreal illustration which appears to assume an 'inclusion' of various members of 'our society' is less real than if PIXAR had done it. embiggen, and then shreik.
The 'Pieta'-like glamour lubra and child defies opinion. I searched for artist name, they wisely 'anon'.
For those of you who have never trekked to the immediate proximity of Her Maj, trust me, the star thing applies. May she live long and prosper ...

my own Midsomer Murder

This is Cairn Cottage, on Market Square, in Hanslope Buckinghamshire.

Hanslope is in The Domesday Book.

My ancestor was the cottage tenant in 1779, leasing it from the Lord of the Manor Edward Watts, who owned everything in Hanslope, except the two houses opposite this one, owned by my ancestor's brother - the local butcher.

The Hanslope church of St. James The Great has a huge spire and my lot William Law and Frances were married there in 1728,

their son Richard was married there in 1777 to another Frances and those two were the cottage tenants.

They had a daughter named Frances and her wild sons Elijah and Eli were swinging machinery smashers in the Aylesbury Swing Riots of 1830.

So Eli, my grandfather's grandfather got a free cruise to Tasmania for that one (his brother got 2 months in the local slammer).

After his pardon he came to Victoria, where his daughter married in 1859 and had my great grandmother named ... Frances.

(Clearly my ancestor's had a names issue. My other side had this guy Robert Lyon Milne b.1854 Adelaide, who had used several variations of it and is well-documented. I must discuss this with Bwca Brownie and Marshall Stacks.)

The Lord Of Hanslope Manor's grandson fared a lot worse than our above tenants - his was a mid-summer murder in 1912, walking home from church with his wife when he was murdered in front of her. Maybe C.I. Barnaby's grandfather investigated it.

The victim had the same name as his father and grandfather. You could do that when one's circle was only the immediate village and they all knew who was who; and this was a snip in the days before credit cards connected Debt to ID and made it more meaningful.

Here's a photo of my great-grandmother Frances with her husband William Brown and his brother George Brown.

They were all born in far western Victoria in the 1860's. Frances never set foot in a pub, and nobody ever mentioned the ex-con.