I found this photo on this fascinating page.
I showed them to a friend and asked her to guess which one was my great great grandfather.
“Easy,” she said. “The one hanging out with the dog.”
She was quite right. That’s great great grandpa Joseph Henry Trezise in the 1906 Bischoff football team.
It seems he was in the town for a few years, as he appears here in the same team in 1908, now displaying another trait of mine as he’s the one failing to look at the camera.
Newspaper articles from the time point out that he was a key player for the team, and also that he sang at community gatherings. So not all traits have come down through the years…
The Bischoff football team was one of many in the North-West mining town of Waratah that competed in the Waratah Football Association’s League for the Mt Bischoff football trophy. While Joe seemed to be living there permanently enough between July 1908 and August 1909 to take part in sport, I don’t know where his wife, Jane nee Stonehouse, and their six children, were – they don’t show up in Trove as being mentioned in either Waratah or Beaconsfield.
Update: In 2020 TMAG displayed the trophy itself (on loan from QVMAG).
The First Ball I Took Your Mother To 
[…] Joseph may have been able to find work closer to home again. However, when the youngest son was 3, Joseph was living in Waratah. As an adult, eldest daughter Eva, certainly considered herself to be “from Beaconsfield” and […]
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