On this day in 1920.....
Francis James Woodlands, my Dad, was born in a small private hospital in Victoria Avenue, Chatswood on 31 December 1920. Dad celebrated his birthday on New Year's Eve for 89 years prior to his death on 18 August 2010 at Royal North Shore Hospital. Family history didn't become my passion until after Dad's death but he was a great story teller and is often with me on this journey. While there were many stories of his parents' families, the lingering question of what happened to his father's sister was one I tried to solve for Dad and his cousin Gail in 2008. I now realise what a novice I was back then! Gail and I now have the answer but, along the way, we discovered that Myra was Dad's half aunt and Gail's full aunt...so there's much more to the story than any of us had imagined. I often wonder if Dad knew that his Dad's father wasn't James Woodland Snr, the grandfather that he knew, and that his father's birth name was Oswald Cahill and