The gentleman in the photo below is my great grandfather Charles Hazell who was a first generation Australian of an English father and an Irish mother. The lady is also a first generation Australian but both of her parents came from central Europe in locations are part of the modern state of Germany.
I first found out that I 
had German ancestors when someone (I wish I knew who) gave my father (Bert Hazell) a copy of a book entitled “In the Shadow of Mount Dangar” by Geoffrey Meyer. Of course I quickly scanned the book to find any references to my Hazell ancestors and what I found was that my great grandmother was an Aussie-born child of two “German” immigrants.
Prior to this discovery, I didn’t realize that my family could trace its history beyond the British Isles, and that, in order to fully understand ourselves, I needed to broaden my knowledge of the geography and historical events that go back many centuries in Europe and, as I later discovered, even to Scandinavia.
Of course, the modern state of Germany did not exist at the time our ancestors came to Australia. While they all spoke the German language (perhaps with regional dialects), they came from different independent states of what was once called the Holy Roman Empire. That Empire was dissolved by Napoleon I in 1806 and the various Germanic states entered a volatile transition period until their unification under the Chancellor Bismarck in 1871.
This unstable state of nationhood in central Europe, and the incredible poverty imposed on rural areas in Germany due to the industrial revolution, formed the backdrop for an extensive migration of German-speaking people to the USA and, to a much lesser extent, to Australia in the 1850s and afterwards.
The connection to German ancestors begins on Wednesday 5th December 1877, when the couple shown above, Charles Hazell (then aged 29 years) and Rose Annie Stair (everyone called her “Annie”) were married at St. Bernard of Clairvaux Catholic Church in Denman. The couple met each other when both their families took up farming along the banks of Giants Creek which runs west to east roughly between Gulgong and Sandy Hollow in the Upper Hunter Valley.
Annie was born in Maitland to “German” immigrants: Charles Stoehr (later the surname was changed to “Stair”) and Anna Rosina Nebauer (pronounced as “neighbour”).
The family tree below shows Annie’s German parents and grandparents whose stories are told in a little more detail in following posts.