For today’s Movember picture we hit the jackpot with three of four Randell brothers having impressive moustaches.

Anyone who had followed my blog for any length of time will know that I have written oodles of posts that relate to the Randell family from Berry Pomeroy in Devon and Gumeracha, South Australia. However I have tended to focus on my direct line, my great grandpa John Beavis “JB” Randell, and his father William Beavis Randell rather than branch off onto many of William’s other children – those from his first marriage (he had nine).

Francis Henry “Frank” Randell was one of William Beavis’ sons, and these handsome boys are his sons. From left we have: Gerald, Allan, Horace, and Francis “Frank Jnr”. This photo isn’t dated, but Gerald was born in 1881, so I would say that this photo was taken early 1900s.

The four sons of Frank Randell and Sarah Nickels.
From left we have Gerald, Allan, Horace, and Francis “Frank Jnr” Randell.

Have you ever been to a cemetery and transcribed headstones?

Who am I kidding … of course you have!

Well I had too, but just to local cemeteries around my own state of South Australia. But on my trip to England earlier this year I got to not only visit so many ancestral towns, but also find and transcribe a bunch of ancestors headstones too.

In this post I want to share with you the photos that I took at the little town of Berry Pomeroy in Devon, but first here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the town …

It was sometime last year that I discovered an amazing family heirloom and have been wanting to share it all with you for ages, and have decided that now is the time.

There’s no doubt that family historians get excited over old family photos, but can you imagine the excitement of finding a whole photo album of family photos? Well that’s what I found in my dad’s stash of family heirlooms. And trust me I was happy dancing!! Page after page of beautiful old photos – probably from around the 1850s-1860s. But one question. Who are they? I did recognise a few of them – but that’s all. The rest remain unnamed. So that’s partly why I’m writing this, in the hope that others might be able to add some names to these photo.

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.