Feet Up; Time to Think

My initial thought when seeing the prompt "Lucky" was to write about me, but from a genealogical point of view, that didn't seem quite right. As the Irish are celebrated during March, and it's close to St. Patrick's Day, the subject of the "Lucky" blog will be my great great grandmother, Helen or sometimes Ellen Riley, who married Alexander McMinn, a prominent 19th Century New Zealand journalist. I always believed that Helen was the first European child born at Himitangi near Foxton as that is what my grandmother, Marcia, believed. In fact, Marcia was wrong. Helen was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1845 into a poor Catholic family. Those three facts were potentially a death sentence for Helen as from September that year, potato blight had mysteriously occurred initially around Dublin and before long Ireland was in famine. However, Helen's family had an escape route. In 1841, Helen's father Francis Farrell Riley had enlisted in the 65th Regiment o...

A photograph may well be the reason for my existence. In 1948, recently returned from post-war Germany, my dad was looking for a job. The opportunities in South West Scotland for a qualified mechanic who had serviced tanks up through Europe were limited, if non-existent. Around the same time, my mother had finally found her feet in Trentham, near Wellington, New Zealand after an unsettled couple of years. She had a stable job, but more importantly secure accommodation by joining the NZ Women's Royal Army Corps in 1946. Around this time, the New Zealand Government resolved to form a permanent, peacetime army. In the United Kingdom, there were thousands of suitable young men with the right qualifications and war experience who would be ideal instructors, looking for a new life away from rationing and unemployment. What was needed was a recruitment brochure. And as you know, what better way to attract young men, than a picture of a young woman! My mother just happened to be in...