Further information about my genealogy interests.
After only a few weeks research into my family tree in 1985 I found out that the 1st Hore ancestor I could get back to was a female and my male line is really Killalea and not Hore which is the surname I grew up with. In fact, I have to go back 4 generations to find a genuine Hoare/Hore ancestor. I still have vivid memories of meeting the first Killalea after I found out the truth and couldn't get over how much like my father he was in both looks and nature and imagine it would be like somebody who was adopted meeting up with biological relations for the first time.
My genealogy interest originally started with my mother’s side of the family but I soon gave up as I was trying to trace "Smith" before the days of the Internet. When I showed an interest in swapping to dad’s side of the family, I kept getting suggestions that I shouldn’t really look into that side which I now know contains at least 5 convicts and there are still "skeletons jumping out of the closets". I grew up as an only child but I also have reasons now to suspect that isn't correct.
May 2001 I made a trip to Norfolk Island for a holiday which started me back into researching my mother’s "Smith" side of the family. I saw a sketch of John Adams (Alexander Smith) of the famous "Mutiny on Bounty" crew and I couldn’t get over the resemblance between him and my g-g-grandfather John Davison Smith. I knew there was a connection with the Adams’s on an old piece of paper in my grandfather’s box of goodies and couldn’t get home quickly enough to check it out.
Once I started on the Smith’s again I contacted some of my mother's elderly cousins, most of whom I had never met before. They have now given me all the old documents they were holding and I also have photos of old portraits going back to at least 1761. Some of the documents were obviously written in the 1700’s and brought out to Australia when the family arrived in the early 1850’s and I gather this Smith family were very well off in England.
There are several letters written from England and India to the Smith’s at Lindenow Station, which was one of the pioneering properties before Victoria was declared a State of Australia. A lot of the names mentioned in the letters and documents don’t mean a thing to me at this stage. I feel I should try and decipher as much as I can of these letters and place the relative paragraphs of them on the Web in case they are of interest to others. Should anybody have connection to the people mentioned, please don’t hesitate to contact me as I may be holding further information as well. Once I have obtained as much information as possible from the old documents I intend passing them onto the East Gippsland Historical Society Incorporated, Macarthur St, Bairnsdale, where anybody will be able to have access to them.
It has been over 5 yrs since this web-site was first created and it is amazing how many people from all over the World have made contact with me and assisted in solving mysteries in various trees. The trees just keep growing and I now hold a database of over 20,000 people, the majority being descendants of pioneers of the Illawarra, Albury & Gippsland areas.
I have found genealogy a great way to meet up with people and have found a lot of family and life long friends from this web-site. Although I should never have had the surname Hore I am a Hore descendant and have especially enjoyed meeting up with distant relations in that branch. Interesting, we found a missing branch of the family from a statement on the Net about "The Mayor's Little Hore" and I often get funny looks when I say "I'm off to the visit the Hore House at Albury".
Other people I have met through my genealogy interests include a movie star now in London I chat with occasionally on "Skype" and an Irish Consul I met up with whilst he was in Perth in 2008 and went out for dinner with to celebrate our 60th birthdays as we are the same age. It is also interesting when you find out you are actually related to people you went to school with and don't know where they are now to let them know.
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