Ripping Yarns & Tragic Tales – 26th September 2021

I hope that you have had a good week and thank you to everyone who responded with your comments from last week. If I haven’t yet replied to you, I promise that I will do so. You will see this week we have another excerpt from Chris Clark’s research into the ‘Lasseters Lost Gold’ saga. […]

Death by Despair – Leonora Snapshots

In the last edition of the ‘Leonora Cemetery Snapshots’ we looked at ‘all the little children’. This edition looks at suicide which was a sad but common cause of death in the early days of the Goldfields. Sometimes it was a release from certain and horrific death by thirst or heat. Other times it was […]

James Alfred Cock(s) – grave tales

James Alfred Cock was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire in Wales on the 17th December 1850. He was the eldest son of Joseph Cock and Ann nee Wherry. In 1870, at aged 19yrs, he embarked from Plymouth Devon England on the ship the Colonial Empire to Victoria, arriving in Melbourne in October of 1870. He gave […]

A Mothers Despair – grave tales

While recently researching the lives of those buried in the Peak Hill Cemetery, I came across this very sad and tragic story. Catherine and George Howard had married in 1895 and, up to the time of her death in 1908, Catherine and George had six children. Children: George Charles born 1896, George James born 1898, […]

Cemetery Snapshot Leonora – all the little children

Back in August 2017, I had just finished transcribing the first section of the Leonora Cemetery records. I had finished the first decade when I published the first ‘Snapshot’ focusing on the number of deaths of children under the age of 5 years. As you may know, the first five years of a child’s life […]