For this Movember Ancestor picture we head to Finland.

My great grandpa Otto Rafael Winter was a seaman who arrived in Australia in 1907, leaving behind his whole family in Finland.  So I am one eighth Finnish.

Otto was of six children. He had two older sisters and three younger brothers. Gustaf who was generally known as Gösta was one of his brothers.

Gustaf ‘Gosta’ Winter here with a lady who is possibly his wife Astrid Österlund, c.1926-1930

Gösta has a fairly standard “English” style moustache in this picture. It is very neat, and goes well with the smart, distinguished look he has here.

The inscription on the bottom of the photo says G.A. Winter, Helsingfors (which is another name for Helsinki in Finland) and is where the Winter family came from.

I have written from time to time about  my great grandpa Winter (see the links below), and was inspired to do so again after reading an article today.

Although the article was about convicts their tattoos, it reminded me of Otto Winter’s tattoos which I found out about from his military records.

The image below is  portion of a page from Otto Winter’s WW1 records which are held at the National Archives of Australia – which lists his tattoos in his distinguishing marks.

Do you have an ancestor or two that you are totally fascinated by? And by that I mean you spend ten times as much time on just that one person, than you do for whole other branches. Well I do. I have two of them in fact, and great grandpa Otto Rafael Winter is one of them.

I have written before about Otto Winter (see the links below), though not for a while as I’ve not done much research on him for quite some time, but I have recently come across a ‘new-to-me’ photo which I think may be him.

Anyway back to my fascination and a little intro: So why him? Well possibly because he’s from Finland for a start, as opposed the most of the rest of my ancestors who were largely from the UK, so researching him has been quite different. But also because there’s so few photos of him, and he wasn’t a diary-keeper, he’s always seemed a bit of a mystery. 

The end of the year is looming, and once the excitement and recovery from Christmas is over, many start think about goals or resolutions that they’d like to do (or at least aim for) in the coming year. Yeah, I’m not one of those people. Maybe it’s because everyone else did – and therefore I didn’t want to, and I wanted to be different. Who knows, but for whatever reason I have never particularly done the whole New Year’s resolution thing.

I do however set myself some genealogy goals. For these I don’t bother waiting till the end of one year or the beginning of the next.