my family tree
this year, i discovered that i have a TON of relatives in australia, including a photographer named geoff and a social services worker named rosetta. she’s my mother’s cousin (her father is my grand-uncle) and has been piecing together our family tree. they had never really met before so they recently got together and exchanged photographs and stories. here’s an excerpt from her latest discoveries:
Geoff told me that the eldest, Fanny was sold by his paternal grand father as a child to pay for gambling debts and she was married to a Seeto from New Guinea which apparently didn’t work out. Then he gave me a copy of the Journal article on his paternal grand father, Lung Ming where Lung Ming relayed his experience from Lung village to New Guinea. A short article and very interesting reading.
Geoff also relayed other information about his paternal grand father on how he came to be in New Guinea. I need to think about this to get it right and then describe it to you. What I recall right now is he was young and picked up by a German U Boat when the ship he was on was sunk and there was some possibility the Germans would kill him, so he jumped overboard and swam to shore and hid in a pineapple plantation where he survived on pineapples until he was able to get support and ended up staying there in New Guinea until he built up a business from then he returned home for a while and returned to New Guinea. When Geoff told me the story I then remembered the pineapple story from sitting in with my parents and visitors!
i come from a family of sailors and gamblers. awesome.
i am. i be.
