Category: Rowley
-
Layers
Thirty-eight and fifteen Robert St, Glasgow. My great-grandparents Archie and Jane Rowley lived here and raised twelve children from 19111 until their deaths in 19322 and 19423. Today it is a car park in a light industrial area, a candle workshop and a retail outlet4.[4] I do not see the carpark. I see nineteenth-century tenements…
-
Sounds and Smells of Glasgow
Archibald Rowley1, was born in 1897 in the very small village of Forgandenny near Perth in Scotland. His father, the local policeman died a mere two and a half years after Archie’s birth2. Sometime after that, his mother moved her family to Perth, where she worked as a laundress3. The next place we find Archie…
-
Crisis of Faith
A fanciful account She genuflected, crossed herself, then followed the line to the priest. In a trance, her body seemed a second or two behind her, unattached and out of reach. Her mind, on the other hand was razor sharp. “Hell, hell,” she thought, “what would a bloody priest ken aboot hell? The hardest thing…
-
Granny’s Wedding Ring
An Object Biography Sarah Morgan, my paternal grandmother, married Archibald Rowley in Glasgow, Scotland in 1922, 1 she died in 1945. In 1981, after the death of her only surviving daughter, Sarah, I was given her wedding ring by my father. Wedding rings have been worn by women for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. In…
-
Finished Map
This was an assignment as part of the Diploma of Family History I am studying at the University of Tasmania. I chose my paternal great-grandparents, Archie and Jane Rowley, as the subjects for this map. Glasgow is the place of my childhood, and so I chose to draw with children’s crayons. Archie worked in the…
-
Annotated Map
I am constructing an annotated map for part of my Family History studies. The unit, Place, Image, and Object requires that I create a representation of a place of significance to myself or my family. All my ancestors are either Scots or Irish and the little I know about them all centres around Glasgow. That…
-
A rare insight
My parents rarely ever spoke about the past. Once, I was showing my dad an enormous rectangular basket with a lid that had I bought to use as a blanket box. His eyes lit up when he saw it. “We had baskets just like that when I was a child,” he told me I held…
-
Strangers in the Night
Archie ROWLEY (1897 – 1981) and Harry HARVEY (1893 – 1979) lived their lives twelve thousand miles apart, yet, before cars and planes were commonplace, their paths so very nearly crossed. Archie and Harry had the unfortunate luck to be born just in time to participate in a conflict we now call World War I. To them,…