“If tomorrow starts without me, don't think we're far apart,

for every time you think of me, please know I'm in your heart.”

David Romano

Margaret Cameron, my father’s cousin, was seven years older than I am. She was the only child of grandma Bernadine’s sister, Edna.  As children, when our family came in from Cunnamulla and visited grandma’s house at Coorparoo, we often had a visit from Margaret. Of all the members of the Grant branch of the family that I knew, she was by far the youngest. She was kind, and heaps of fun. I always loved seeing her.

As adults, Margaret and I often discussed the puzzling fact that even when we pooled our information, we had almost no knowledge of the history for the Grant family. We made a pact that I would “go on researching everybody else” until Margaret retired, then we would work together on the Grant family history.

Sadly, Margaret died in 2009, a few years before she was due for retirement. In one of my last conversations with her she said to me “You will have to go ahead and find out about the Grants on your own now. I wonder what you’ll turn up.”

By 2009 I had amassed a considerable amount of family tree information for all branches of my family except for the Grant line. My passion for ships had extended my activities to locating the vessels that my husband’s ancestors had journeyed on, as well as those linked to any of my own ancestors. I had notebooks, folders, charts, ring binders, maps, photos, magazines and books. I was a ‘queen of paper records’. I had also made a good start on the task of preserving my family history records digitally, but I had no digital or online family tree.

Within a month of Margaret’s death I took the step of purchasing family tree software for the first time, and I began my Ancestry membership. I didn’t go near starting to research the Grants, I couldn’t bring myself to. I knew however, that when I was ready for that task, it would be good to have already entered all my other data into a program, and to have become familiar with it. I was also going to need access to online genealogy records to try to find out about the Grant family.

My life was very full for the next couple of years. When I did take time out for my family tree work it was usually spent adding to the images and data attached to various existing records. Then I decided it was time to create an online tree or two! 

Finally, late in 2011, the day came when I sat on my bed and said to myself, “OK, it’s time either to forget about it, or to ‘go it alone’. Make a decision.”  I took out all of the photos that had been taken by members of grandma Grant’s family, and her own personal album, and I looked very carefully at them again. I made a list of dates, and the names of people and places as I went. When I was finished I felt ready to begin to research her family’s history. I started with her mother’s family, who are the Doyle branch of my ancestors. 

I found that our Doyle ancestors, Patrick and Maria, arrived from Ireland with five children and a baby in 1865. They settled at Walloon, just outside of Ipswich. They had a small farm and Patrick (Snr) worked as a ganger on the railway. Grandma Bernadine’s mother, Margaret Jane, was the first daughter born to them in Australia. Tracing the history of the Doyle family eased me gently into the work of researching the Grant branch of the family.

Information came slowly at first. In 2013 I was just starting to get comfortably immersed in searching electoral records for the Grants, when we decided to sell our home of 30 years. All 2014 was spent sorting, packing, moving, and settling in to a new house. It was 2015 before I returned to the task of tracing the family of Thomas Henry Grant who was my grandma Bernadine’s father, and Margaret’s grandfather.