When my sister Sue first looked into our family history some 25 years ago, her biggest discovery was probably the divorce of Mum's maternal grandparents, Nicholas and Margaret Lawless. For years Mum and her siblings had believed that their grandfather had died in an electrical accident. However this was not so: the reality was the marriage had ended in a divorce newsworthy enough to have made papers across the country! The year was 1905, so divorce was still seen as scandalous - being Roman Catholics wouldn't have helped - and making this case even more notable was that the petitioner was Margaret. In those days, divorces were harder to be won when instigated by the wife. Nicholas and Margaret Lawless, possibly on their wedding day Nicholas Lawless had been born in Gordon near Ballarat in 1868, but sometime around 1888 his family moved to Gippsland, as that area was opening up to farming. Similarly Margaret Catherine Kenny, who had been born in Warrnambool in 1875, had moved a...