Sarah Pring, my great-great-great-grandmother is said to have liked travel. She must have if she was prepared to travel half-way across the world with a young family a number of times, making a home in several Tasmanian and Victorian towns.
This is a trait shared by her great-great-granddaughter, who I have been talking to in England and who is also said to be very like Sarah. She also recently travelled half-way around the world to Australia in order to farewell her father. They had always talked about travelling in Australia, visiting beaches and seeing all the different birds. She took a little bit of him with her on the trip. It is a very touching story and I can’t write about it and do it justice. What a shame we didn’t know about each other before she came – I live near one of the best surf beaches in Victoria, where Kookaburras will come and take food from your hand (or from your mouth if you’re not careful, cheeky sods).
Oliver Ridgway, Sarah’s son, seems to have travelled the most, mainly between England, Australia and New Zealand. However, this may turn out to be due to necessity rather than pleasure (more to come…)
Olwyn Ridgway, my grandmother, as I have written about previously, had a preoccupation with cruise ships. Her three passports are littered with visas and stamps. I’m sure that’s where I got my itchy feet from. My passport doesn’t have such a wide variety of stamps, but I’m working on it. It’s such a shame that travelling costs money.
What else defines us? At the moment I can only speak for my immediate family, but I’m sure there will be some correlations with our long-lost relatives:
- We are creative and artistic. We enjoy music and art. Some of us are even talented in the creation of both.
- Humour is important to us. We will choose comedy before all other genres and use it in almost all situations
- We love the water. Our children are all water babies and gravitate towards the sea. You couldn’t sink us if you tried and we only grow out of it when it the water gets too cold for our old bones.
I realize that Sarah Pring, my gggggrandmother, is so far removed from me that finding a matching trait in us both would be quite rare. But I’d like to think that I can see a little bit of all my ancestors in me if I just look hard enough. Perhaps by having enough contact with the living descendants of my ancestors, I’ll be able to cobble together a picture of them – and find it reflected in me.
