DIGBY FAMILY STORIES
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  • FROM IRELAND TO AUSTRALIA
    • Introduction
    • Life at the Big House
    • Life of the workers
    • Landlords and tenants
    • Leaving Ireland
    • Finding love
    • War
    • The Digby Album
  • EDIE'S WAR
    • A dreadful time for mothers
    • 1915
    • 1916
    • 1917
    • 1918
    • 1919
  • LIBRARY
    • Correspondence
    • Documents
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DIGBY STORIES - FROM IRELAND TO AUSTRALIA


                            INTRODUCTION : THE IMPORTANCE OF STORIES.

'INDEX

THE BIG HOUSE
        The Digby Family
         Recollections of Lizzie Smyth
         Education, work, play & death
         Sale of the Digby lands

      
LIFE OF THE WORKERS
         Staff & work
         Shearing & sheep
         Mythology and superstition
         The life of children
         Lizzie's life after Drumdaff


LANDLORDS & TENANTS
         The plight of the poor
         Hardship & rent


LEAVING IRELAND
        The decision to leave
        Life on the high seas
        Life in Sydney


FINDING LOVE
      Edie
      Joy and sorrow
      The trip "home"
      The written word


WAR
      A family at war
      Four lives divided
      Life and death at the Front
      Coming home

​The Digby Album

 
EDIE'S WAR
​'A dreadful time for mothers'

      1915
      1916
       1917
       1918
​       1919
       














For many years I have been collecting and collating  information and stories from my family's past. It has been like creating a huge jigsaw, gathering the pieces and finding a place for them between and connected to others. Little pieces of a story that seem to have no relevance can unexpectedly become a gem that links seemingly unconnected parts of a story, or to another person out there who also shares your story.  

I come from a long line of hoarders. Handed down through the generations are documents going back to Ireland that are over 300 years old, all sorts of written history of my mother's family. But the things that interest me most are the stories, the personal and human side of the lives of people whose procreations have led to me and my wide and wonderful family, or whose lives have been intertwined with those ascendants of mine, through choice or circumstance.

All of these stories come from primary sources, memories saved in the form of letters, poems, diaries, postcards and photographs. There are also the official documents - wills, rent records, marriage agreements, hand drawn maps and many more that provide verification of stories told.  Many of them travelled from Ireland to Neutral Bay, a northern Sydney suburb, where they lived in the cottage seen above in its early days, Suramma, in the care of my great grandparents, Everard and Edith Digby. Consequently they passed through two generations and lived for some time inside a tin trunk at the back of a farm shed in northern New South Wales, before travelling to rural Victoria and the care of Edith and Everard's oldest great-grand-daughter, me.

The stories that emerge are much more than a personal journey, for they reflect the experiences of many others from generations past. In amongst the more formal evidence of lives lived, are letters from the outside looking in, letters from a woman who lived on the Digby estate as a child, recalling the life of workers like her parents and of the gentry, the Digby family who lived in the Big House in County Roscommon. 


This is only the beginning of what I hope will become a fuller story in the future, a jigsaw of thousands of pieces that connect a King of France to landholders in Canada, sons and a husband to their wife and mother for the duration of the first world war and workers to their landlords . 

As I write I am at the beginning, embarking on a project I have long dreamed of, so I can share these stories not only with family, but to others whose stories bear some resemblance to any of these, to those who have their own unique stories to tell and to anyone interested in social history.

I hope you enjoy reading about the lives of these people, and that it may encourage you to write down your stories.


Penny Bristol-Jones July 2015


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