General News
1 November, 2024
A creative take on family history
CAMPERDOWN resident Karen Redlich has transformed a series of research documents on her family history into a special book for her mother and is calling on others to look into their ancestry.
Ms Redlich, who studied Genealogy and Palaeography – decoding old written texts – at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland in 2023, had spent much of her working life close to history.
She said the journey to trace her mother’s family history started on a rainy day at a Sydney history centre while working as a librarian.
“I hopped onto Ancestry, had a bit of a look, and then I started finding really interesting things about my family,” she said.
“That’s where it started.
“I worked at Melbourne General Cemetery in their records vault, and while I was looking through records from the 1890s I found family members of mine – found out how they died, where they lived, how much their funeral was - really interesting details about them, and I was able to find the graves.
“It felt so good and fulfilling finding out all of this stuff that I never heard about, that I then got really obsessed with it.
“We had these two massive family portraits that we inherited – they’re hanging at my mum and dad’s place – but we didn’t have much information about them.”
What started as finding small facts and seeking more information on the people in the portraits evolved in to doing thorough research along Ms Redlich’s family tree, cumulating in a special gift for her mother – a book titled ‘The Golden Age – Discovering the Ancestors’.
Ms Redlich said she had spent the last seven years “obsessively” tracing her ancestry, particularly seeking the names of the subjects of the two family portraits.
“We just have first names, and I wanted to find out who they are,” she said.
“Every single woman was Mary-Anne or Sarah, and those were the names I had, so it took ages.
“It just fueled the fire, and I went over to the United Kingdom to see where these people lived, have a look around their local area.
“It was really cool – I stayed in an old inn called The Bear in Havant, Somerset, and in that inn my ancestors had auctioned off their old house 130 years before, and I was staying there.
“It gives you that great feeling. It was years in the making.”
Ms Redlich said she wanted to make a keepsake for her mother, since no-one else in her family had researched her mother’s side of the family.
“I had hundreds of pages of family tree diagrams, and it just looked so unappealing,” she said.
“I thought it’s not an enriching thing to give her, so I wanted to use my graphic design skills to give her something really presentable and something really rich that was a treasure of family history.
“She really loved it.
“She was happy because every family has its old legends about things that had happened, and she was really happy to see a lot of them were true.
“Her great-auntie, who rambled on about them, was actually right.”
Ms Redlich moved to Camperdown in 2021, drawn in by the town’s heritage buildings and deep ties to history.
She said she wanted to encourage others to explore their own family history through the historical society, which she found was a “fun and interesting” experience.
“For people that are interested in ancestry,
it can take you to new places,” Ms Redlich said.
“The research that I’ve done for this book, which is a gift for my mum, turned into an interest in writing historical fiction.
“Recently, I entered a competition that is really niche – it’s a genealogical family history-themed creative writing competition.
“I got shortlisted, and a story I wrote about my ancestors is going to be published later this year.
“The journey doesn’t really stop there – interest in your family history and the stories can keep going if you want it to.”
It is this interest and enjoyment which has led to Ms Redlich offering to connect with residents who may wish to create a book showing their research.
“A lot of people have done lots of family history research and, like I did, probably got all of it in a big folder – lots of writing and bits and pieces,” she said.
“This is a great way of putting it all together and I’d like to be able to help people to take all the research they’ve done and present it really nicely, so they’ve got the finished product in front of them.
“Get into it, because it’s such a fun and interesting thing to do.
“I’d like to help people get as much out of it as I have.”
Residents interested in creating a book from their ancestry research can reach out to Ms Redlich on Facebook on her page, Karen Redlich.
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