A Walk Through the Brighton Family's 1880s Photograph AlbumThree small albums survive in our family archive, and the most worn of them holds the portraits we will tour in the pages ahead. Its velvet cover has faded…When a Family Clock Falls SilentAllen’s essay, The Clock That Stopped on the Day a Relative Died, begins with a familiar family story: a household clock apparently ceased at the moment a…Tracing the Tidwell Family’s Religious ConversionsThe religious history of the Tidwell family is best understood as a sequence of choices made across changing places, generations, and social circumstances. A…Using DNA matches to verify South family connectionsAustralian family historians have spent decades leaning on parish registers, shipping manifests, and the digitised newspapers on Trove to follow ancestors…Loni's Blog: The day we found a Civil War discharge paperOn a warm Melbourne morning in late January, with cicadas droning in the eucalyptus outside, I sorted the mail at the kitchen table. A catalogue from a Bendigo…Home exchange in Norway: a red cabin by a fjordFor Australians drawn to the cinematic landscapes of Scandinavia, the price tag often becomes a stumbling block. A week in a Norwegian hotel can stretch past…Thomas Brighton Telford: a life across the centuryThe life of Thomas Brighton Telford stretches across nearly ninety years of Australian and world history, from the year of federation to the eve of…How the McCarthy Family Adapted to Life in PennsylvaniaFamily history often becomes clearest when migration is treated as a process rather than a single event. A McCarthy arrival in Pennsylvania may have involved…The morning my father told me about the TidwellsSome family histories begin with a document carefully stored in a folder. Others begin at the kitchen table, in the unplanned space between breakfast and the…The Smell of Lye Soap in Grandmother’s KitchenSome memories arrive as pictures, while others enter through the nose. The smell of lye soap can bring back a kitchen before its doorway appears: a wood stove…