Record family history now before it is too late

YOU never know when someone lobs in to talk family history.

Despite a dry period, it does flood as shown in this photo at Dalrymple Creek, Allora, in January 2017. Picture: Gerard Walsh

DRY AS A BONE column as printed in Bush Telegraph each week

FOR the first time in my life, a cousin from the Cartan side of my family has made contact about family history.

Luckily I had written down a history on both sides of my family.

Sometime in the 1980s before I learnt to type, I wrote 11 pages of words from my mother as I asked her everything I could think of about our family.

Mum died in 2004 but I had done the history two decades earlier.

My message to all readers is to get history from parents and grandparents now.

Better still, write your own history and give it to family members. My wife Margaret found four pages of history in the past month written by her mother Fay Jones who passed away in November.

In 1972, my father had a stroke and died three weeks later and I hadn't even thought of family history. I asked my mother what she knew about my father's family but never did get around to asking my aunt to fill in the missing bits.

My grandfather was born at Stawell in Victoria on January 29, 1865, and returned to Ireland three times with his parents before they sold Coolesha House and then settled at Coolesha, Greymare, in 1891.

They had 48 hectares(120 acres) in Ireland and the Greymare property is 840 hectares. Suspect the land in Ireland would be much more productive per hectare than the granite and traprock west of Warwick.

When Kim from Mackay, the cousin I met last week, made contact as she traces the Cartan family tree, she was excited that my mother keep a lot of family history.

Some of what I wrote in the 1980s I had forgotten about, especially the bit about my mother writing to a correspondence school in Brisbane to do a journalism course. She never did start the course and I ended up as the journalist.

Washed away

ONE of my history entries relates to my grandfather George Cartan almost being washed away in a flood at Greymare in the 1920s.

"George was crossing Lagoon Creek near the windmill/well when the creek was in flood," Mum said.

"His mare Mona fell crossing the creek and he (George) was washed down and caught on to a fence wire at the boundary crossing with Leonards."

I went on to write that my mother said her father wasn't a foolish man but things happened.

"He could not swim well," she said.

An example of why everyone should learn to swim.