How it all started...

As a kid I was a bit of a snoop going through mum and dads things when they were out! I remember a treasure I found in dad's side of the wardrobe. He had this old, battered suitcase and in it was pretty much his whole life...old letters, postcards from people I didn't know along with some from family...old letters, some photographs and other odds and ends dad had picked up in his travels in his younger days. I loved going through it and read and re-read those postcards and letters so many times I could almost recite them from heart. I think I was about 8 years old then...old enough to know better but fascinated just the same.

I guess I was around 12 years old when I took a real interest in knowing about where I came from. Dad often spoke about his parents, my nanna and pop and all the trouble he used to get into because of his younger sisters. My pop passed away 3 years before I was born but Nanna was still alive and at one stage Nanna and dad's youngest sister Joan and her husband Alec came to visit. The stories they all told fascinated me and I knew then I wanted to know more. At that time however, researching the family tree was generally not something someone did. You basically only got the information you wanted from family members and as a child in the 70's, children were not supposed to ask nosey questions about family members and especially if some of those family members happened to have skeletons in the closet. I didn't know it then but our family had quite a few skeletons in the closet and even to this day some relatives refuse to believe the information I have since found and some have suggested I leave those things firmly in the closet preferably with the key thrown a long way away! But the investigator in me wants to keep on digging and because I love a good mystery and hate unsolved puzzles, I will continue to dig until I find the result I am after!

I got my first real taste of genealogy in 1988 when I was 22 years old. Australia was celebrating its Bicentennary and suddenly EVERYONE wanted to have convict ancestors and so the hunt was on and people everywhere began searching for evidence that they were of convict stock. Suddenly it was "in vogue" to have a great great great grandfather/grandmother that had arrived in Australia in less than noble conditions. The records for convicts are immense and even to this day, if you have ancestors who arrived in Australia in chains, you are blessed because the records show everything from transcipts of the original trials in England along with logs of the voyage over, where they ended up in Australia and even the food they ate and eventually when they were freed and where they ended up after that. It's a veritable gold mine.

There was at the time a wonderful woman named Janet Reakes who became the guru of the family tree researchers. She appeared many times on the "Mike Walsh Show" during the day as well as writing colums for magazines and newspapers as well as holding seminars and founding a Genealogy Society in Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia. To me she was the foremost expert in genealogy and her books helped me to get started. She was one of the lucky ones who had convict ancestry and her own research helped many others. Sadly she passed away some years ago and her wealth of knowledge is missed but of course people these days who are into genealogy generally have a real passion for it and I have learnt from them as well as I am still very much a novice at this game.

An off-the-cuff remark made by my dad to someone spurred me on to research. When I quizzed mum about it she told me that Williams wasn't our real name or at least it wasn't dad's real name. Dad confirmed that his birth certificate read completely different and he was also unaware of this until it came the time that he needed to order his birth certificate for something and the Births, Deaths and Marriages place said there was no record of him listed as even existing! Eventually after grilling his mother she admitted that they changed their name to Williams when they came back to Australia and Dad was actually listed on his birth certificate as Frederick Montara son of Frederick West Montara and Clara Dinah West Montara (nee Brighton). The West name was actually my Pop's Rodeo name. He performed in buck jumping on the rodeo circuit under the name of "Curly" West. There is a story attached to the name change but more on that later.

And so there you have it. The beginning of my lifelong search for my Montara ancestry is under way and even now I have hit a snag as the Montara family seems to stop at some point and I am now trying to discover the origins of the Montara family. I have however managed to find long lost Montara cousins and slowly but surely I am finding I am not alone in my search for the Patriach of the Montara family, Domingo Montara. I will fill you in on my research as I go along and hopefully will find some more family to complete the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Montara!