Questions remain.

In June 2015 I turned 60. I was able to celebrate this milestone event with my family and friends. My husband, my three sons, three of my siblings and four much loved ‘in-laws’ were with me. I was hugged by smiling nieces and nephews, who are now all young adults, and my two small grand-daughters cuddled up to me in front of the birthday treats.

Amidst the joy of having so many of my family gathered together there was also strong twinges of grief, as my younger brother Grant and my mother had passed away in 2011 and 2014 respectively and we rawly missed them.

“The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our own lives and unprepared to help others cope with losses in theirs.” - Dr Colin Murray Parkes.

My 60 birthday was definitely a very happy day and I will always treasure the memory of it.

In the months that followed I reflected on the fact that I had been actively seeking answers to my childhood questions about my family story for over fifty years. I had discovered a great deal of information, and I had tried to preserve it a variety of formats. I now very much wanted to find ways of making the stories of my Australian ancestors easily accessible to the next generations of my family. I began to make some notes and to plan out possible chapter headings for a story collection that I could share.

At the same time as I began this project I was aware that there were questions that still remained for me. These were not questions about subjects yet to be explored, - in that sense there always seems to be limitless potential subjects for further research! The questions that remained seemed more personal. There was an energy to them, and they seemed like ‘unfinished business’ for me.

Why did they leave?

I had found out where my Frazer ancestors had come from. I knew that “somewhere down South” was in fact a reference to the Binda area of New South Wales. I also knew what part of Scotland the Frasers had emigrated from, and the likely reasons for their journey. What I still burned to know was why, after living in Binda for decades, did that elderly couple and their family pack up their bullock wagons and begin a long trek to Queensland.

Was Holt his name?

The other question that provoked me was not so much the result of missing facts as it was the product of disbelief. The expression “I couldn’t believe my eyes” best describes how I felt whenever I went over my research material on the ancestors of Thomas Henry Grant. 

Was my great-grandfather actually Thomas Henry Holt/Grant? 

Did he know that his father had changed his surname to Grant when he married? 

Did any of the Grant family that I had known as a child know anything of this story? 

Could there really be a family story that was played out in Tasmania in the earliest years of the European settlement of  Van Diemen’s Land?

Was it true that the ancestral roots of our ‘Grant’ family line, (that we all had assumed were to be in Scotland), were really to be found in England?

A sense of place.

I have travelled very little in my life. From childhood I have always been very prone to severe travel sickness so journeying on boats and planes have had no appeal. In recent decades my car travel has been limited by some of the effects of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. However I very much wanted to go to visit the places in the Goulburn region that both the Frasers and the ‘Grant’s had lived in. I wanted to get a sense of what the area was like.

By Christmas time I had made my decision, and my husband and I began to plan what was to be a ‘manageable’ trip for April 2016.