Families are interesting, right?

Everyone's got one. Everyone's part of one. They may feel very much a part of it, or feel totally alienated from it, but they are still a member of a family. There's a mother and a father out there somewhere for each of us, maybe also a son and/or a daughter or two or five?

Everyone's there for each other and they all look out for the other's best interests, right? Hmm, maybe on shows like "The Waltons". It seems all the people that Shona and I have dealt with have dim and dark secrets in their closets.

The background picture here is actually a generation or three or five ago on Mike's side. (Now what can one tell from a long ago photo? That there's some highly strung women, a chap with a firm grip on his horn, and an organ that's too big to go inside? Or am I just thinking crudely?)

We'll add some stories and maybe other pictures of the strange things families have done in our pasts. The following may give an idea how fact can be even more unusual than some movie plots....

Charles (initially a trooper then a soldier and later a policeman) was married to Hannah who died from snake bite. The children were shuffled off to his brother's mother-in-law to be looked after. Hannah's brother had also passed away, leaving Emma a widow at 27. As you might expect, Charles (59) stepped in and married Emma and they set about having six children. It seems Charles was gored by a wild boar leaving a wound that never healed properly and was smelly enough to drive poor Emma away. Charles died of "senile decay / exhaustion".

Eva was one of Charles' children that was sent back to relatives in England to be raised there instead of by Charles' brother's mother-in-law. At some stage she stayed at a Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) church mission with a reverend and his wife. Later she was in the care of the reverend's brother and sister-in-law. Her nephew believes she married a wealthy banker from India, moved there and was never heard from again!

Such a sweet and lovely girl is Marilyn (or at least that's what the camera captures). She hung around with Robin and played at being boyfriend and girlfriend with him for a while. Later she migrated up to "pretty boy" Paul and things were going along quite fine UNTIL he asked her to marry him! They broke up and shortly afterward she met "bad boy" Sigi and had 4 children. After the 4th, they decided to get married. When the marriage fell apart, Marilyn took a liking to Keith (20 years her senior) whom she had been trying to set up to date her mother. Marilyn and Keith got married and were soon living 200 kilometres apart from each other in wedded bliss.

A man in charge of his domain! James is quietly contemplating the world and everything else that is beamed to him on the TV. Not too much longer after this photo he was cleaned up off his motorbike by someone who failed to stop at a stop sign. (Why does that sound familiar to me?)

Margaret's brother was off in the navy and her mother and father were overseas when she gave birth to her first daughter. As it wasn't the thing to do in those days, she adopted out Susan to a doctor and his wife. She kept the secret almost to her death (from cancer), but Susan had succeeded in tracking her down. Sadly for Susan, she was rejected by her birth mother for the second time in her life.

A party girl when she was younger, Margaret became a sad and lonely person who felt life had passed her by once she became married and moved to the outer suburbs.

Bill was a bit of a party boy (at least his friends at the pub thought so anyhow). He drank hard and smoked hard and died young. He was walking his girlfriend home (pictured) and dropped on the footpath never to recover.

Bill seemed to be a shy guy who needed alcohol to give him the courage he needed to get through each day. Most of his pay went on grog and shouting his "mates".

A couple of sweet looking girls. Jane and Jackie look like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. Perhaps after taking lessons from their father when he was drunk, they have since grown into equally abusive and manipulative people.