It goes without saying that the year is zipping by. It seems the older you get, the faster it goes. That’s just the way it is!! Anyway it seems like it wasn’t that long ago when I hopped on the big ship in Sydney for the 4th Unlock the Past cruise and travelled around the southern states of Australia. And I know I still haven’t even finished my reports on it. That’s really been a case of too many blogs I want to and need to write, and not enough time to write them all. So some get done, while those got put on hold. But they WILL get done, I promise, just very belatedly.

Anyway today is the 19th of April, which means in three months time on the 19th of July I shall be boarding another ship in London and setting sail for my first cruise around the UK with Unlock the Past’s 5th cruise. I’ll be arriving in

April is here, which apart from Easter, is the month to commemorate Anzac Day (at least for us here in Australia and New Zealand) and Auckland Libraries have issued the Anzac Day Blog Challenge again.

You know it was this time last year when they held the same Blog Challenge that it made me realise  just how little I knew about my military ancestors. Who of them actually went to war? Where did they go? What was their rank? … and so on. So I made it my mission over the past year to rectify that. And while I’m no expert on any of them yet, I did kept the folk at the National  Archives of Australia busy by ordering copies of a heap of my reli’s which I’ve been going through slowly.

Following on from yesterday’s post that I wrote about William Beavis Randell who founded Gumeracha, is his obituary that I found in the South Australian Register on Trove.

I actually found this article last week, but felt that I needed to introduce him before his giving details of his death, so I decided to make this a Trove Tuesday post.

William Beavis Randell is the man who MADE Gumeracha a town.

In 1837 while living in Kenton, Devon, England he and his wife together with their 7 children packed up their belongings and boarded the ‘Hartley‘. William was initially going to work in partnership with George Fife Angas, however this didn’t work out, and instead William Beavis Randell was offered a position of overseeing the agricultural pursuits of the South Australian Company, of which Angas was a founder and chairman. He was one of a number of men who travelled on the same voyage who had been employed by the South Australian Company.