Jacqueline Grant loves story-telling — not the mighty battles of empires and kings — but the wonderful human tales of everyday lives.

She remembers the very moment that this incredibly rich strand of personal memoir first presented itself.

“It was the time of my father’s funeral; and I went back home, and I was sitting with my mother and her sisters and cousins; I was there, and they started to talk about the early days as single girls, and I thought, ‘these are amazing stories’,” Jacqueline recalls.

“That was a definitive moment when I realised what amazing lives these people have lived,” she added.

Growing up in Wagga Wagga, she was originally encouraged to study pharmacy to continue the family business (her father owned one of the southern city’s longest-established pharmacies), before gravitating towards her first love, literature.

“I trained as a high-school teacher — after three years of pharmacy at the University of Sydney — doing a double major in English, and taught at James Sheahan for a number of years.”

But it was as she approached retirement that Jacqueline started getting involved in the family history that has seen her publish nine separate titles.

Completing a postgraduate degree in local and applied history, Jacqueline got to it; chronicling the events and memories that simply don’t get recorded in school textbooks, but which tell the tale of how a nation was formed.

From a largely Irish background with a family name McDonough, she said the work has proven an infinite delight tracing the “rogues, quiet heroes, and convicts” of her family tree going back to the start of white settlement in Australia.

“The bloke I’ve had three editions of a book on, is John Grant, it is titled ‘Providence’, the ship he was transported on,” Jacqueline said.

She said that her love of family history, like many Australians, has only grown over the years. 

“I think it’s partly an age thing, how many of our younger people are really interested in that sort of thing? But as you get older, it seems more important,” she explained.

“Ultimately, it is about identity that was the most important thing to me, I believe that very strongly,” she added.

Other works in her catalogue include four social treatises including the self-explanatory “300 faces of Orange” as well as seven other biographies through her “People, Places, Publications,” website.

“I think probably I’m a storyteller, I love getting the story together and getting it published,” she said.

“One of the stories that I did was on a trip to Sydney where I ended up at Whale Beach. I was invited to write the history of ‘Jonah’s’ (restaurant and hotel); it was a terrific experience.”

A recent Orange City Life article on the sometimes-shameful treatment handed-out by sections of the Australian community to Vietnam veterans recalled the experience of one of her cousins, Brian ‘Blackie’ Blackwood who served in the RAAF for 30 years from 1955.

After service in Australia then Malaysia as part of the RAAF requested by Thailand and

then in Borneo with the 77th Squadron, he began his service in Vietnam in 1967.

“He later joined the Vietnam Veterans Association, and it was this group that in 1986

decided to stage a belated Welcome Home Parade for Vietnam Veterans because the

Vietnam War was the only war where our returned servicemen hadn’t been welcomed home,” she said.

“Brian Blackwood played a central part in the Australian ‘Welcome Home Parade’; although I didn’t know any of this until much later,” Jacqueline said.

She says that, what started as a bit of a hobby, has now taken much more of her life than she at first realised.

“I enjoy it, not as a vocation, but as a sideline that has ended up taking much more of my time,” she said.

Jacqueline has expanded her digital interests to include her own videos on her YouTube channel popular for their themes of family history, nature, and travel.

The one truth that all this history has taught her, she believes, is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“It becomes so much clearer the older I get — there’s nothing new under the sun, despite what technology tells us,” Jacqueline concluded.