Here is a brief overview of my #familyhistory interest/obsession/hobby.
When the Coomans family migrated to Australia in 1967, I was the eldest son at 19 and therefore in a lucky (rare?) position to have clear memories of growing up in the Netherlands and “maturing” into an Australian citizen. I was lucky to run into a visitor from New Zealand in 1969, we married in 1971 and she’s still here…
So while I matured into a “Dinky-di (real) Australian”, my memories of 75 years and family history cover Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Along the way I assumed a responsibility for myself to record and document some of that history.
Anyway, the reason for this post is to give a brief overview of some of my online activities as shown in my profile at coomans.com.
Picstory.net is a home built, family history website. It was initially a repository of “artefacts” left by my father who lived by the principle of never throwing anything away if you had the room to keep it. It has grown into a family history site with detail of over 300 people and almost 1000 letters, photos, artwork etc.
Te Moana is an archive of a blog we kept about our sailing adventures between 2002 and 2010
Willem Kooij is an site which provides an archive of blog posts, photos and music selections by a cousin and his wife, who both died prematurely.
While my main interest is in collecting documents and artifacts rather than telling a story, the posts on this blog give some background about the family and picstory.net.
