Saturday 6 July 2013

On the Road Again


This month we are in the process of planning a family history trip to Kempsey to do some more digging around into the Hourigan family tree.

The Kempsey family history society is one of the places we will be visiting when we arrive. It is located on the main road of Kempsey and holds a good deal of local history and family information which has been collected over the years. Fortunately they also have the archives of the Macleay Argus which is the town’s local newspaper and has been in circulation since 1885.
We will also be taking more photos of family graves, in both the Toms Gulley Cemetery and the West and East Kempsey Cemeteries.

The Toms Gulley cemetery is rather a small and out of the way place. Unfortunately we were unable to locate our ancestor as his grave was unmarked but just standing among the ruins of old rusty fences and looking at the scattered old and damaged headstones; we felt that we had paid our respects to our ancestor Michael Hourigan who is buried there.


A lesson learnt from a previous experience of grave hunting is to have a very good idea of the layout of the grave yard and the sections that your ancestors are located. Unlike Toms Gulley, most cemeteries are a lot bigger than they look from the road and once you begin searching for names on headstones, you soon realize just what a mammoth task it is to locate a family member.
In our future posts we will be sharing what we found and the photos that we have taken so hope to see you all again soon.
 

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