Like all starting points to a journey, there is a catalyst.  Mine was the premature  death of my mother, and while going through her things, I discovered old letters,  photographs and special treasures – things that had been kept for a lifetime and held  such significance for her.  But who were the people in the faded pictures and the  pages of carefully handwritten letters?  Like most of us, I can’t recall many of the  old family stories when my mother or grandmother would occasionally reminisce.  That  was just “mouldy old stuff” and not really that interesting to a busy child.

But of course now that grown child wishes she listened a bit harder, because many of  those tales are gone now, and the slowly emerging story of the family would be  greatly enriched by their spirit.   But as this is indeed a work in progress, I one  day hope to bring it to life again...

The Aitken family, who form the heart of this project, were middle-class tenant  farmers in the county of Fife in Scotland.  By the mid-1800s, shortages in available  farming left many farmers’ sons looking to opportunities in the colonies.  My great- great grandfather and his brothers were in that position.    They left Fife  individually in the late 1850s and 1860s and journeyed by ship to Australia, becoming  pastoralists in the Western District of Victoria.