Yarnapalooza Winner #18

Three cheers for New Zealand Kim, our Yarnapalooza Winner #18! (It's winter in New Zealand and I'm deeply envious.)

The photo is actually a postcard ("Real" postcards were popular in the first decade or so of the 20th century--the "real" refers to the fact that the postcard is an actual photograph.) You're looking at my paternal great grandparents, my grandmother El, her brother Cass, and somebody named Ben. There was another daughter but my Great Grandfather Charles "sold" her to a childless relative for the money to escape from Litherland Park (Liverpool) to New Zealand. He had run a successful family butcher shop then apparently run afoul of someone for some reason (I've been told he had [how shall I say this??] a wandering eye . . . ) and needed to get out of Dodge. So to speak.

I believe they lived in that house on Ponsonby Road in Auckland from approximately 1904 until 1918 or thereabouts when they sailed back to England and then from England to the United States. One of the many incredible stories my grandmother told me about New Zealand (a place she loved with her entire heart) was the one about the earthquake that rattled their house on the hill while they were clearing dinner dishes from the table. My grandmother went sailing across the room and suffered a major gash in her forearm.

Not much knitting content, I'm afraid, but when I saw the Kim was from New Zealand my mind started to wander . . .