As children we had always been told that a quick indicator of whether or not we were related to other Frazer families in the Cunnamulla and Charleville area was the spelling of the surname. We were told that our relations always spelt their name with a ‘Z’ not an ’S’. Oh what a red herring this information turned out to be!

My great aunt, Alma Dorothy Winter (nee Frazer) outlived her siblings. She was almost 87 when she passed away in 1983. In the following year we ordered several birth certificates based on the information contained in Alma’s. The birth and baptism certificates supplied us with some names we were not familiar with: Alma’s grandmother, Martha Frazer (nee Marks); both her great grandmothers, Margaret Frazer, and Ann Markes; and her great grandfather, William Markes.

The certificates also alerted us to the significance of the township of Binda, NSW.

In the late 1980’s a phone enquiry I made to a local history group in the Binda region resulted in my being mailed a photocopied page on The Frasers. [See below.] I later learnt that the page was from a booklet that was out of print at that time:The Binda Connection: Stories of Four Families by Douglas Branson Webster (1985).

I was excited with what I thought was a promising lead, and I shared that photocopied page with other family members.The presence of an ’S’ in the spelling of Fraser within the story raised strong doubts in their minds. - We had all been very well drilled by my father, and Alma and her siblings, that those we descended from always spelt their name with a ‘Z’.