Family Tree Frog

U is for HMAS Una (oh allright and Uniforms too) There is a picture which sits on my bookshelf and as you can see there is a bit of story written underneath it.  Written by my father, it says: This is the former German steamship the Komet which was built in Hamburg in 1911 and captured by the Nusa of the R.A.N. on 9 October 1913 along the coast of Papua New Guinea.  (CPO Conner was part of the crew that captured this ship - the first German ship captured by the R.A.N. in the war) She was brought to Sydney and re-commissioned as the HMAS Una and saw further service in WWI in the Pacifice and SE Asian region.  After the war she was decommissioned and re-named the Akuna and became the pilot vessel for Port Philip Bay, Victoria where she served until 1953. The date is a bit wrong...it was actually 1914 not 1913 and I think probably the 11th October rather than the 9th.  You can read an account here   from Charles Bean's Official History ...

Alan from Sepia Saturday says:   Once again hats feature in our Sepia Saturday theme image, but this week let's take our hats off and see what else there is in the picture. Well there is a telescope and there is a mountain and there are three great composers (yes Mike Brubaker, your Christmas and Birthday have come all at once!). The picture, which was taken around 1900, shows Julius Röntgen, Frants Beyer & Edvard Grieg on Mount Løvstakken in Norway. If all that music and that weighty telescope is not enough for you, you might want to note that as well as composing music, Frants Beyer was also a tax inspector and therefore you might want to scan your grandad's tax returns and submit them to the Sepia Exchequer. However you decide to interpret this fine old photograph (which comes from the collection of Bergan Public Library on Flickr Commons), just post your post on or around Saturday 1 March 2014. I don't have terribly much to contribute this week but...

Alan from Sepia Saturday says: Ever since photography was knee high to a grasshopper, the suit has been the be-all and end-all of masculine fashion. And our theme image for Sepia Saturday 216 (post your posts on or around Saturday 22 February) celebrates the suit : or rather three suits, or rather three three-piece suits. And for good measure there are three wonderful hats as well (why is it that the drab suit has stood the test of time whilst the far more practical and visually expressive hat has not?). If you don't like suits and hats you can always focus on the group of three. Or you can hunt out any other potential prompt within this picture by that old Sepia Saturday favourite Sam Hood (1872-1953) which features in the Australian National Maritime Museum collection on Flickr Commons. I think I have just about drained my resources of photos from my family collection of men in suits but here are some more (I don't think I've used these before....forgive me i...

Alan at Sepia Saturday says: Hey, let's put on a show! The desire to dress up, lark around in public, utter words that you would not normally recognise, is as old as the hills - or at least as old as a string of Judy Garland films. Sepia Saturday 199 celebrates the theatre, be it professional or amateur, serious or comic, situated below a proscenium arch or behind a kitchen table. Dressing up, dressing down, acting daft or acting dreadfully - they all form part of the script for Sepia Saturday 199 (post your posts on or around Saturday 19th October 2013 and add a link to the linky list below). Our archive theme image was taken in 1914 in Waterford in Ireland and it has been suggested that it might be the cast of an amateur performance of the Pirates of Penzance. It's going to be a quick one this week and I'm afraid there's nothing from my own collection as I fear I have run out of material. Thankfully the State Library of Queensland collection at Pi...

Our theme prompt for Sepia Saturday 192 features a wonderful 1947 portrait of the jazz musician Stan Kenton by the noted photographer William P Gottlieb. The photograph forms part of the Flickr Commons collection of the Library of Congress - indeed if you are a lover of classic jazz photographs there is an entire Flickr stream dedicated to Gottlieb's work. That is Kenton in the middle of this trio, dressed in typical 1940s style with his striped trousers held high with the obligatory suspenders (or as we call them here in Europe, braces). So there is your first possible direction of travel, but you may also choose to go with neckties, jazz, men sat down or  ... anything you want to.  From Tom McLoughlin's collection Tom McLoughlin was my maternal grandfather. I think this is him in these photos.   From Tom McLoughlin's collection From Tom McLoughlin's collection From Tom McLoughlin's collection If it's not, it'...