Pack Your Baggs, my family history book

Pack your Baggs front cover

Finally, my family history book Pack your Baggs: a family's journey from Newfoundland to Australia has been published. All up the venture took me two and a half years, from the time I learned about creative non-fiction in February 2015 until September 2017. In fact it took longer if I include the time spent in research. Along the way I set up my own imprint, Pawlett Press, and also started this blog. The book is a family history saga, which covers four generations of the Baggs family who originated in Newfoundland.

Copies of my book have been sent to the State Library of Western Australia, National Library of Australia, Library and Archives Canada and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre.

Here are some lines from the Foreword

"In 1874 my great-great-grandfather, a cod fisherman named Joseph Baggs, boarded a ferry and sailed away from his home in Newfoundland, which was then a British colony off the north Atlantic coast of Canada. He was 54, which would have been considered quite old at that time. Joseph's wife and seven children accompanied him as immigrants to Toronto, Canada. What a courageous decision that would have been! Looking back from our vantage point in the 21st century, it is hard for us to conceive of how close knit life was in an isolated fishing village in rocky Newfoundland, and of the bravery entailed in leaving that life behind. To my eyes, Joseph's journey of emigration was nothing short of heroic.

My book tells the story of Joseph and the three generations that followed him from Newfoundland to Australia in the years 1819 to 2006. There is a chapter devoted to one ancestor in each generation: Joseph Baggs (1819 – 1898), Edward George Baggs (1848 – 1923), Herbert George Baggs (1885 – 1946), and Margaret (Marg) Anne Baggs (1915 – 2006)."