Your Family History Journey

Your Family History Journey

Research, memory, and the preservation of lived lives

For nearly forty years, I have worked as a family genealogist — a quiet history detective — tracing lives through records, photographs, fragments of memory, and the spaces in between. What began as curiosity has become a lifelong practice: uncovering buried stories, resolving family mysteries, and restoring narrative to lives that might otherwise remain reduced to names and dates.

I hold a Master’s degree in Social Science, with formal study in Local and Family History and Psychology. This combination has shaped how I work. Archival records can tell us who, what, when, and where — but they rarely explain why. My role is to bridge that gap: to read documents alongside social context, to understand behaviour within its historical moment, and to interpret lives with empathy as well as evidence.

Family history is not simply about lineage. It is about understanding the forces that shaped people — migration, labour, war, injustice, resilience — and recognising how those experiences echo forward through generations. In that sense, genealogical work is also an act of preservation: safeguarding stories before they disappear.

Where it began

My passion for history began in childhood, at my mother’s kitchen table in Allambie and North Manly, listening to stories of her wartime upbringing. The objects were ordinary — a bread tin, a dripping tin, an old enamel stove, meals made from leftovers — but they carried meaning. They were tactile links to another time, relics of endurance and adaptation during years shaped by rationing, absence, and uncertainty.

Those early stories ignited a curiosity that has never left me. Every course I have studied since has, in some way, returned to the same question: how do people make sense of their lives under pressure, and how are those decisions carried forward?

Today, alongside my archival and genealogical work, I write historical creative non-fiction — transforming documented research into narrative while remaining anchored to fact. I am currently working toward the publication of my first book, planned for release on Valentine’s Day 2026. It is a multi-generational family history saga that converges in Manly during the Second World War, illuminating wartime life on the Northern Beaches through a deeply personal lens. At its heart is a love story shaped by loss, separation, hope, and resilience — a reminder that history is lived first, recorded later.

Why explore your family history?

Genealogy is more than a technical exercise. It is a process of recovery.

Exploring your family history allows you to reconnect with people whose lives shaped your own — often in ways you may not yet recognise. It can reveal patterns of strength, migration, injustice, adaptation, and survival. For many, it also provides context: an understanding of how families became who they are today.

The most meaningful research begins close to home.

How to begin

Start with what you already know.

Create a basic family tree
Begin with yourself, your parents, and your grandparents. Record full names, dates of birth, marriage and death, and places of residence. Accuracy matters, but so does context.

Talk to family members
Interview parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and relatives. Ask about memories, routines, traditions, and stories — not just milestones. With permission, record conversations or take careful notes. These recollections often provide insight no official document can offer.

Gather documents and photographs
Collect birth, marriage and death certificates, letters, diaries, family Bibles, photographs, and albums. These materials are the backbone of family history work. They also require care — many are fragile, irreplaceable, and already deteriorating. Preservation begins at home.

Once family knowledge has been exhausted — or where records have been lost — online archives and databases can extend the search. Used carefully and critically, they open access to records once impossible to reach.

A living example

The photograph accompanying this article shows my Stanton family, circa 1922. My grandmother Edna (born 1908) stands in the back row on the left, wearing a white dress and hair bow. At the centre of the back row is her mother, Stella (born 1887), flanked by her brothers. On the far right stands her Norwegian husband, Claus Clausen (born 1882 in Bergen). Seated in front is Stella’s father, William Stanton, born in Penrith in 1844 — the patriarch of the family.

William’s parents, Joseph Stanton (born 1805, Hereford) and Hannah Stanton (née Simmons, born 1815, Shropshire), were both convicts. Hannah’s life, in particular, is one that deserves careful telling. I undertook extensive research into her story as part of my formal family history studies. Her experiences reveal not only hardship, but extraordinary resilience — and a deep, inherited sense of justice shaped by early injustice that would be viewed very differently today.

These are not just ancestors. They are people whose lives continue to inform the present.

Guardians of the past

At Lost Manly, this work extends beyond individual families. The same principles apply to places, photographs, and visual history. Archiving, restoring, and sharing local history is an act of stewardship — one that respects the past while making it accessible to the present.

Whether preserving a family photograph, restoring a damaged postcard, or recording a story before it fades, we are all — in our own way — guardians of what came before.

And the time to begin is now.