Family Stories: Doing Research

We are planning to do some writing about our families as part of learning about who we are and where we come from, leading up to Matariki.  We will be asking everybody to do some research about an ancestor, perhaps a grandparent or somebody further back, who would be good to write about.  Somebody who has an interesting story; about how they arrived in New Zealand perhaps or somebody who lived and worked on a farm, the day the storm happened; it could be anything.

We are interested in the idea of doing some research, collecting facts about that person but then doing what writers do, telling their story through our own lens.  It will be interesting to see how stories might evolve.

The example I am going to use is a relative who won the Victoria Cross in the First World War.

His name was Stanley McDougall.