The Alcock-Johanson Story

The book’s front cover photo shows my mother as a baby with her parents and brothers.

I had a frugal childhood without realising that it was frugal. My parents, Stan Alcock and Ellen Johanson, married in 1925 and bought a dairy farm a few years later. Then the Depression hit, and the price of butter crashed. Ellen and Stan survived by  using their skills at making do with little. Their thrifty habits continued after the depression but to me, their farm was a paradise.

Stan’s ancestors included settlers, dairy farmers and a strong woman who took her family  across the world to join her brother, a sheep thief turned landholder. Ellen’s parents were people of Swedish heritage but Russian citizenship who had migrated to Australia from the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea. Her Ancestors were mainly crofters or, like her father, sailors on the wheat run between England and Australia.

These migrants and their descendants were remarkable people, and The Alcock-Johanson Story chronicles their lives. The book includes Johanson Family Tree, by Gaylene Johanson, a report of Gaylene’s painstaking research into Johanson genealogy.

My aim in writing this book was to focus on story more than on information. Thanks to those who had previously researched branches of my family tree,  I  was able to include many stories, some true and some tall.

A few copies are available for purchase by libraries and family historians. Contact bryce@brycealcock.net for details.