Today is the 75th anniversary of my parents’ wedding in Eastwood, NSW. They had been evacuated from Hong Kong in the middle of the previous year, just months before Pearl Harbour and the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and the Christmas Day surrender. Dad was 21 and Mum still 19 when they left with her… Continue reading Double tenth
DNA
For the last few years, the technology has been available to have your own DNA analysed to reveal your ethnic makeup. I took the plunge and after a considerable wait was surprised by my own results via the Ancestry DNA offering. It’s a mixture of delightful (in that’s about you) and yet frustratingly vague as… Continue reading DNA
Robert Andrew Dermod Forrest
Until today I had made little progress gathering more detail about my mother’s step-father. This post is a pointer to the fuller story elsewhere on this site… Robert Andrew Dermod Forrest was born on 21 Feb 1893. In the family he was known as Robin. So far I have found very little information about him… Continue reading Robert Andrew Dermod Forrest
Macau sources
Via the Gwulo site I have been looking into two sites about Macanese culture. (I found links from the page about searching existing resources for information about people who lived in Hong Kong.) One is Macanese Families which requires registration before you can access it. This is a comprehensive site about Macau managed by Henry d’Assumpção and centred around… Continue reading Macau sources
Literature about Eurasians
So far in my limited reading, I’ve come across a number of works that are or include historical information about Eurasians in Macau and Hong Kong. It would be good to grow this into a critical bibliography of the topic. The books include Jean Gittins’ (daughter of Sir Robert Ho Tung) Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire which I believe has an… Continue reading Literature about Eurasians
Sephardic genealogy links
I’ve been reading Victor Perera’s “The Cross and the Pear Tree”, a riveting read about his long search tracing back the history of his family and their namesake’s expulsion from Portugal from the mid sixteenth century to the early nineteenth. Also stumbled on to a page of resources at SephardicGen, and a page archived on the Wayback… Continue reading Sephardic genealogy links
Sources of pre-war Hong Kong history
I have been enjoying exploring the deep range of sources to information about the pre-war history of Hong Kong opened up by the gwulo.com site, especially this page about where to find Hong Kong’s history. I’ve also been subscribed to the daily emails based on extracts of people’s diaries from the site detailing day by day the doomed defence of Hong… Continue reading Sources of pre-war Hong Kong history
The defence of Hong Kong
I spent the afternoon at the State Library of NSW browsing through two books. First I looked through the 61 page “A Record of the actions of the Hongkong Volunteer Defence Corps in the Battle for Hong Kong, December 1941.” It was published in 1953. You can actually browse a well scanned 1956 edition online via the National… Continue reading The defence of Hong Kong
A child’s view of Hong Kong under Japanese control
The Gwulo site publishes diary entries and through this I discovered the reminiscences of Sydney artist Paul Atroschenko who spent his first 15 years growing up in Hong Kong including through the Japanese occupation. His family were not sent to Stanley POW camp or interned but remained free to live in Hong Kong. The anecdotes as he… Continue reading A child’s view of Hong Kong under Japanese control
Paternal grandfather
I found a reference to my paternal grandfather online today. I was never sure whether his name was Lewis Stephen Rapley or Lewis Stephens Rapley or Stephen Lewis Rapley etc for that matter. I stumbled on to the page at http://gwulo.com/ about Old Hong Kong and entered my surname in the search field. It discovered a… Continue reading Paternal grandfather