Welcome

Welcome to our collection of local and family history for Lost Manly and the Northern Beaches collated from history sites and personal family albums from myself and our facebook group members making it unique in every way.  Lost Manly and the Northern Beaches, began in July 2013, as a place to share my family history research with family and friends and invite others to share theirs also; to gather local history and precious memories before they are lost. 

I've always had a passion for history, excelling in History in Year 9, with achieving the highest grades in the entire year, much to my own surprise; an accidental winner you might say.  I've just always had a natural curiosity with the way people lived in the past.  I think those seeds were planted in childhood, in mother's kitchen, watching her recount her childhood with great animation, that started the same year as WW2. It was always the family joke that her birth started the war! Mum's childhood home, was up the hill from our house, towards Allambie, on the corner of Lyly Road, 1.2km from my childhood home.

As a child, mum pointed to the 4 towering oak trees that traced the horizon, seen from our front yard. The other item was her mother's 'dripping can' used to store the used cooking fats, to be reused, time and time again, til they putrified. With that came the stories of mum's childhood during and after the war, when butter was scarce, and rations allowed them to survive, and spreading dripping, instead of butter, on their bread was common. Mum's shepherd's Pie was another, that conjures up many childhood memories, baked in our old post-WW2 avocado, and beige enamel oven.

Mum's grandparents lived 1.2km in the opposite direction, towards Freshwater Beach.  We walked past their old house in Soldiers Avenue on the way to the beach. I first started researching my family history in the mid 80s. There was no internet back then and all history tracings had to be done at the Archives at the Rocks, using the old microfilm machines, which was fine because I'd learnt how to use them when I worked at the Bank after leaving school.  That too has changed, from the Bank of New South Wales, to Westpac...nothing stays the same, except our history!

The journey took me back hundreds of years to England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Germany and even New Caledonia, but it wasn't until living far from home in Norway that I started searching closer to home that brought me back to Manly, and in doing so, found out that four and five generations of my ancestors were either born n bred in Manly or moved there to be closer to family; some even left for work for decades then came back. Talk about history repeating itself. This was the foundation stone of starting Lost Manly and the Northern Beaches, as the name means so much to me in more ways than I can express.

Ever wondered where "Seven miles from Sydney a Thousand miles from care", came from? This enduring slogan greeted generations of Manly Ferry passengers as they arrived at Manly Wharf. Well, the Port Jackson and Manly Steamship Company (PJ&MSSCo) who used to own the Manly Ferry service, held a newspaper competition in the late 1930s, to promote the daily ferry excursions from Circular Quay to Manly, and the winner was a local Manly housewife.  Her granddaughter told us this story in the Lost Manly Facebook group.

These are just some of the wonderful local history you'll hear about as we bring to life our history with personal stories from the memories and family photo albums of our 26,500 members.The slogan was encased around Fred Elliott's painting of the SS-Barrenjoey, gliding through the Heads in April 1927, and we’ve embraced that as our own, as it captures everything Lost Manly is about. https://www.lostmanly.com.au