Why did I create the website?
As I started to put material up on the website, I asked my sister Kate and my partner Leslie to help test and proofread, and one of the first questions Kate asked was why I decided to create the site.
It’s a good question and it got me thinking. I think there’s at least three main reasons.
To bring our ancestors to life
When Mum died in 2020, there were 28 boxes of her memorabilia. Kate and I sorted through it all. We cried a lot over many days.
We found out things we hadn’t known. We rediscovered some things we hadn’t seen for years.
When a parent dies, most of us go through their things in a bit of a piecemeal way over some days, or maybe weeks. We look at an item by itself and decide if we should keep it or not. We don’t connect an item we find today with something we saw 2 weeks ago. And of course, that disconnect is even greater when there’s more than one person sorting stuff and deciding what to keep. Inevitably a lot gets thrown away. It’s just not viable to keep everything from every generation.
But when Kate and I did this together, we kept all that was personal and important, and I scanned, catalogued, and collated it all. Hundreds of documents, thousands of photos. And then I dated each item so I could look at them in order. And when I looked at it like that, it literally rebuilt my Mum right in front of me. From her birth to her death.
Being the artist of the family, Kate put it like this. It’s like you sculpted Mum out of all the things that had made up her life. And I thought, if I can do that for my Mum, then maybe others can do that for their family.
To value the path that leads to each of us
I also really believe the Chinese proverb I quoted on the Home screen: “To forget your ancestors is to be a tree without roots”. I believe that the fact that I’m here at all is the result of a very long series of relatively random events. If just one of those hadn’t happened, then whooshka! There’s no me. So, I don’t want to lose sight of those events. I love my life, and I want to know what my ancestors did so that I can understand the path that led to each of us.
Look at it this way. One of my great great grandfathers was John Casey. He was transported to Sydney as a convict for his small part in an Irish uprising in 1823. You can read about John here.
John and his wife Caroline had eight kids, one of whom was Thomas Casey who had eleven kids, one of whom was my Grandmother Irene Casey. Irene and Bill had twelve of their own kids. And beyond that, let’s assume each of their kids and the next generation had an average of three kids, and the two generations beyond had an average of two kids.
Kate and Rob working through Gwen’s memorabilia
Gwen Landsberry (nee O'Brien)
John Casey
So, what if back in 1823 John had been vacillating about whether to be part of the uprising? Sure, he believed in the cause, but he wasn’t sure that his small contribution would make that much difference. And then there was his father – he really needed John’s help for the harvest that day. The family just couldn’t afford to pay someone to help. So, John wakes up on the morning of the insurrection and decides not to go. The risk is too high, and he needs to help is family. So he never gets convicted, nor does he ever come to Australia.
And suddenly almost 40,000 people who now exist would never have existed (it’s true - do the maths from the numbers above). That includes Irene, all of the O’Briens below Irene and Bill, and most importantly, me!!
And that’s just one of literally tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of tiny things, all of which had to come together exactly as they have for any of us to be here.
I wanted to find out about that path. And again, I thought others in the O’Brien family would likely feel the same.
To honour and remember
The last reason for putting the website together is a two‑parter.
Firstly, to gather as much information about our past in one place, verify it, and modify it to make it more accurate and complete as more facts surface.
And secondly, to collect and collate current stories and photos for the ever-growing group of Irene and Bill’s descendants. Maybe for the first time ever in one place we can build a profile for every member of that tree and add to it as more are born.
That way, we’ll have the most complete archive possible for this amazing O’Brien Clan. For now and on into the future.
Of course, that depends on all of you contributing material, reporting errors, suggesting possible new sections, and more. This is not just my project. It belongs to all of us.
Please use the contact details here to get in touch about contributing material.
Written by Rob Landsberry, last modified 2 June 2023