by Dorothy Williams | Feb 15, 2019 | Abbotsford, Adoption, Memoir
When I joined the city office of the Methodist Babies’ Home in 1947 I was a very naive 16-year-old, attending to petty cash, basic typing and duplicating. As receptionist, it was my job to open a sliding window to greet unmarried girls arriving to hand over their...
by Dorothy Williams | Feb 15, 2019 | Adoption, Family History, Memoir, Uncategorized
My grandmother Annie Amelia was apprenticed to her foster mother as a household servant when she turned fourteen, without completing Grade 6. Those remaining in the Orphanage were often employed at thirteen as the demand for new admissions grew. Annie’s elder brother...
by Dorothy Williams | Feb 15, 2019 | Adoption, Memoir, Uncategorized
My grandmother’s experience of ‘adoption’ in the 1870s comes from my as-yet-unpublished account of working class life in early Melbourne – an account of her life and times, as seen through the many kitchen windows that framed her perspective. Orphaned at six, she and...
by Dorothy Williams | Feb 15, 2019 | Adoption, Memoir, Uncategorized
In 1841 three people who came into my little orphan Annie’s life were already here at work. It was grocer Germain Nicholson who arranged Annie’s ‘adoption’ by family friends.When he and his wife Eleanor arrived with the intention of setting up a wholesale grocery,...
by Dorothy Williams | Feb 15, 2019 | Abbotsford, Adoption, Depression, Economic Problems, Family History, Melbourne, Memoir
“In a strange land most persons are strangers to each other (and) wherever large assemblies of people settle, there will be orphans,” wrote John Pascoe Fawkner in his own Port Phillip Patriot 5/5/1846. The category of orphans also covered foundlings, neglected or...
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