Welcome to my very first blog.

I retired from teaching at the end of 2013 after 45 years. What do you do with yourself after such a length of time where everything becomes routine?

I had been interested in my family heritage but only dibbled. One day I was talking to my partner and asked her what she knew about her ancestors beyond her father. Very little because her father had been estranged from his Queensland based family back in the 1950s and then moved to Perth on the other side of Australia. As a surprise for her I used Ancestry.com to find her relations. What I thought was going to be a simple search became an obsession resulting in a 5 week holiday tracing the bloodline from Bray’s Creek, Tyalgum and Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales to the Daintree River in Queensland.

Further I spent three days in Daylesford to trace the great great grandparents, the first danish ancestors who arrived in Australia in 1855.

All of this research resulted in my first book The Restless Danish Immigrants: The Johnson Family.