A Tribute to Teddy

31 Aug 2014. Teddy WINTERS Co.Cork, Ireland. Author’s private collection. Teddy Winters died in Ireland on Tuesday 12 March 2019. He was 92. Teddy and I were members of the WINTER clan, my mother’s paternal line. We met in Ireland for the first time in 2014 and I caught up with him again, just a READ MORE

Edward WINTER witnesses the hanging of three bushrangers

In my last blog post, Edward WINTER, Mary REIBEY and the $20 note , I spoke of the wonderful legacy Isaac BATEY left in the form of ‘Notes, 1840-1850‘—recollections of European colonial pioneers in Sunbury, Victoria and surrounds—available to be viewed in the State Library of Victoria (SLV). This post deals with another reference BATEY READ MORE

Edward WINTER, Mary REIBEY and the $20 note

Isaac BATEY (1839-1928) left an invaluable memoir of recollections of life in the pioneering days of Sunbury, Victoria, and its surrounds. Several of his stories relate to Edward WINTER (1812-1869)—his father in law and my great great grandfather. The stories are surprising, exhilarating and previously unknown—to my present day clan anyway. They’re what every family READ MORE

‘Duty nobly done’: two WINTER brothers KIA in France.

In ‘travels with my forebears’ I came across the deaths of two WINTER brothers, killed in action, in the First World War: Private Herbert William WINTER (c.1888-1917) Private Bertram John WINTER (c.1891-1917) They were the sons of John WINTER (1850-1902) and Margaret FOX (1859-1930) of Lake Rowan, a small town in northern Victoria between Benalla READ MORE

How I ‘met’ my great grandfather, William WINTER. Part 1

I didn’t ‘physically’ meet my great-grandfather, William WINTER (1845-1883), and neither did any of my mum’s generation; he died well before any of us were born. There are no photos of him and there’s no memorabilia—that I know of.  And it seems that any stories about him have been lost in time. William became my READ MORE

Sights and Sounds of Ireland Part 2

RTE Lyric FM and Waiting for Cows After a short stop in Dublin in August 2014, I picked up a hire car and headed  ‘for the hills’. As I crisscrossed central Ireland over the next two weeks, I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to stop for the cows. The READ MORE

What’s in a name?

Early place names in Victoria can bamboozle you. In the 1840s, my maternal great great grandfather Edward WINTER, or Eddie, as I like to call him, lived in a couple of places that required a bit of lateral thinking to find out where they were today. The place names were Lucerne and The Springs. Eddie’s READ MORE