Ross Shield Rugby Tournament 1965

Today's find that has been converted to a PDF for the world to download is the Ross Shield Programme from 1965. Played at the old Nelson Park, Hastings, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand between teams from around Hawkes Bay. The winners of the Ross Shield generally went on to represent Hawkes Bay back in the day. For those who don't know where Nelson Park was, it is where the Mega Mitre 10 is today

Here is the Hastings representatives of 1921 my grandfather (Stanely Keith Hingston) captained the team he is in the middle holding the rugby ball. Full document is available

Matamau School 75th Jubilee 1962

As I was working on my family tree I came across this booklet of the Matamau School Jubilee. The school closed due to a falling roll in 2003. Some of my relatives did attend the school circa 1910 but I thought I should preserve and upload if someone was looking for some history of this school

The book contains some great information and photographs here is a sample

Have a look here

Family Tree - Ivy Heather MacEwan nee Kerr

I recently had the honor of looking at my grandmother's (Nana) photo album and scrapbook. Growing up I thought she was a fierce woman. She was eccentric with her colourful clothing, pressed flowers and strange behaviours. Nana was of Scottish descent and I thought that explained her strength and toughness. I assumed she had come to New Zealand married and started her family just like most hard working Scottish families would have done. I was too young to understand what Popa and Nana had done or why, they were old and had retired their family was growing so their job was done.

Ivy Heather Kerr

Ivy Heather MacEwan wedding c 1930

  In her scrapbook she had kept momento's of her life, school reports, sports teams, drivers licenses, photos of her family all these things suddenly made me realize I never really gave Nana the respect she deserved and the time to understand her life. She hadn't just come to New Zealand and started a family, Nana had traveled the world going back and forth between Scotland and New Zealand. Spending enough time in Melbourne Australia to get her drivers license. The photos showed her traveling around New Zealand with her mother (Granny Kerr) Auckland, Timaru, Rotorua, Mt Cook and Wellington. Nana was obviously well traveled and she traveled in style. She had her pressed flowers and home made cards something I thought she had done in her later years to pass the time. Nana and Popa traveled the world on their honeymoon.

 I have spent a lot of hours around the elderly at the moment and there is so much useful insight that can be gathered from them if you just give them time and listen. They are not here forever and when they are gone they won't be able to answer the questions. Why did you do .... why did you move ...
Families are interesting and make great stories 

Updating the MacEwan Family Tree

I am currently updating the family tree both online and offline as a resource for the future generations. I am unsure why I am doing this as I will have no descendants but it does keep the brain occupied. I had heard stories growing up about J.B. MacEwan marrying Mary Fisher and her brother  (Frank) Francis Marion Bates Fisher being a Mayor of Wellington, . With a name like that there can't be many matches on Geni.com so when I found a match and added him to me tree job done? Oh no stories from mum (Florance Perress MacEwan) and the names of relatives of FMB Fisher just didn't match, so after much researching I found a match for other members of the family and even an old family tree written in my grandmothers handwriting (Ivy Heather MacEwan nee Kerr). I am leaving a lot of name bread crumbs so if some other sole is researching these names they might be able to find my link. I wish you luck.

Here is today's historical find Ian & Heather MacEwan's wedding. You can see my work on the family tree here have a look we may even be related. Updating the family tree was meant to be just add photos to the entries with no photo but as I searched and added. I gathered more and more photos of family members not on the tree not only descendants but ancestors as well. This then lead me to many stories about the family that will be lost if not recorded before my mothers generation depart this world. So I am gathering the stories as text, images, videos and audio to edit into a e-book

MacEwan - Hingston family tree

Over the Christmas period we here at Balewan had a lot of family visitors.

Balewan house Summer 2016/17

 Bal meaning home and Ewan being a family name so home of the Ewan's not unlike Mac meaning son of. So MacEwan is son of Ewan. Our first visitors were Uncle Nev and Aunty Jeannette who are always good for a story, either telling one or creating one. Then my Uncle Bill (86years old) visited and talked about family history on Geni.com and my sister discussed family history with him. I hadn't logged in to Geni for 10 years and noticed that it had not been updated and most family didn't have a picture. After all this family talk i thought it would be good to at least have an image for the person. Mum had mentioned tidying up the photo albums so of I went getting images for the 80 or so family members. Soon I had uploaded 120 images and added 40 members to our tree. It was all bringing back childhood memories of aunty this and uncle that but they weren't on the tree so even more people were added. It came clear after a while that the images meant very little without a story, obviously the family photos on the tree had their own story and the photos of weddings and funerals also had their own story but there were the other photos that had no meaning without a story. I had sporting, location, holiday and object related stories. My challenge is to record all this information I have gathered. As you can tell I am not a writer so it will not be a book to record these stories, but I would like the stories to be told by the people in the photos