April 25th, 2019 marks 104 years since the landing at Gallipoli (modern Gelibolu), a peninsula in Turkey. To the west of the peninsula lies the Aegean Sea. To the east is the Dardanelles strait, which connects the Aegean Mediterranean Seas with the sea of Marmara. The landing followed an earlier, unsuccessful naval assault on the…
Place of death: Died in the union workhouse, Bradford! Public Domain Image The words glared at me, and punched me in the gut. How could this happen to one of my ancestors? Wasn’t this one of the worst things that could happen? I went off and read about the concept of the workhouse, or the…
The continent of Australia sat virtually undiscovered, unnoticed, and unclaimed, by the European powers until the 1600s, with Willem Janszoon, a Dutch navigator and colonial governor, making the first recorded European landing on the western side of Cape York peninsular in February, 1606. Spanish explorer, Luis Váez de Torres, sailed through the same area just…
Time travel, sailing ships and dirty water have been on my mind a lot lately! I remember playing cowboys and Indians as a boy (terribly politically incorrect of me, I know) and wishing that I lived in the old west, but I’m pretty sure now that I would have found it hard to survive. No…
