Month: December 2015

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to my personal blog which I’m using to track sporadic investigations of parts of my family history. At first it may be simply a place to jot down useful links to sites of relevance, whether it’s specific or more general. At least I will have a record to work on when more will be known.