Page 4 – CAFHOV

by Irene Poon

On Saturday 4 December 2021, CAFHOV held an event at the Chinese Museum to celebrate 20 years since the founding of our group. For attendees it was also an occasion to meet face-to-face, the first time since February 2021 due to COVID lockdowns, and to meet two new members. In addition, it was an opportunity to thank the CEDT Indexing Project Team again for their key role in CAFHOV being awarded the Victorian Community Local History Project Award 2021.

Our new CAFHOV President, Anna Wolf, welcomed everyone warmly before one of the original founding members, Robyn Ansell, gave a short talk about some of the founders and past activities of CAFHOV to an audience mainly of members who joined in the last five years. This was then followed by Sophie Couchman presenting Life Membership Certificates to both Robyn and Jim Twycross and thanking them for their years of contributing time as office bearers and helping other CAFHOV members with family history research. Jim also proudly showed off his recently published book, Footprints in History: A Comprehensive History of the life and times of the Ah Shin Family, achieved after many years of research. Robyn and Jim now join Maurice and Eunice Leong in CAFHOV’s Life Members Club.

*Robyn holding up her Life Membership Certificate* – *Photo copyright Anna Wolf*

*Jim holding his Life Membership Certificate and Mark displaying Jim’s book* *– Photo copyright Anna Wolf*

One of the clever functions in the Vic CEDT Search tool is the ability to search for applicants by Nationality. A search for Japanese nationals will return these eight results.

https://www.cafhov.com/vic-cedt-index/?type=advanced&search=Japanese&criteria-terms=all&criteria-field=nationality&sort-field=&sort-direction=&criteria-year=any

Untitled Showa by Mayu Kanamori is an arts project that explores the relationship between found photographs and the process of reconnecting to the people in the photographs. The project includes fascinating articles published online by descendants of George Taro Furuya. He is listed in the CEDT search results and was a laundryman based in Geelong in 1937.

“Ada May was the eldest stepdaughter of George Taro Furuya who was the son of an American seaman and Japanese woman. He was adopted and brought up by the Furuyas in Japan and later still quite young was employed by the Mitsui Company as a shipping clerk. He left Japan at the age of 17 and eventually made his way to the USA where he worked for some years. He arrived in Australia in 1901 and married Ada May’s mother and settled down in Geelong. He ran a laundry shop as well as a ship supply business.”

After The Article in The Sunday Herald Sun by Iwane Shibuya – Untitled Showa

Dianne in Geelong ジーロングでダイアンと – by Andrew Hasegawa- Untitled Showa

The Vic CEDT Index can potentially help researchers discover more information about descendants by identifying other applicants. In this case Henry Tuckathima Nitobe was another laundryman living in Geelong around a similar time as George.