Every day of her life so far, Leanne Diessel has been a witness to history.
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The Wagga woman has traced her family line back seven generations to convict Thomas Stockton, who was transported to Australia in 1833.
Now, she has pages and pages filling binders full of her family's history. It all started with a few pages of hand-written notes and a childhood full of stories from her grandmother.
"I've been gathering bits since I was a young kid. My grandmother gave me most of it, but we seem to be a family of hoarders," Ms Diessel said.
"It's not uncommon for us to keep things for years and years and then we find it and it's the piece we needed.
"It's like putting a jigsaw together."
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Her history in the Riverina dates back to the arrival of her grandmother's grandfather, James Maurice Slade, who settled in Coolamon in 1881.
"He was a seafarer and he came to Coolamon to start a bakery there," Ms Diessel said.
"Maybe he was a cook on board the ships, I don't know, but he ended up there at the bakery."
Along with the Coolamon establishment, he also came to own another bakery in Wyalong.
One of the only photos Ms Diessel has of James Slade and his wife Lucy Margaret was taken in 1909 upon the couple's return to England to witness King George the Fifth's coronation two years later.
"They were quite the royalists, that must be where I got it from," she said.
Having now completed her own history, for the past 18 years, Ms Diessel has researched other family's history as the chief research officer at the Wagga and District Family History Society.
She gets about 100 requests a year from all over the world.
"One story was of two little girls who were murdered in the 1950s, I don't remember much of it, but it's stayed with me," Ms Diessel said.
Strangely enough, at times, she finds connections between her own family and that of her clients.
"I'm doing about three at the moment that have turned out to be related to me, including one in England," she said.
"A man's wife died a couple of years back, and he's trying to find out more about her family. I put her name into Trove [online newspaper archives], and found she was a dancer and that she'd moved to Sydney and happened to come back to Wagga for a funeral.
"Through that funeral, I found out she was related to my three-times great grandfather Thomas Stockton. He was her two-times great grandfather. The husband was very excited to hear that."
Paging through her family's notes on the life of Thomas Stockton, Ms Diessel uncovered a hand-written letter from 1966 in the St John's church records. It was from the woman's own parents requesting a baptism.
"I had the letter in the book, just sitting there. It was very odd," she said.
"You find things all over the place."
In recent years, the research process has changed dramatically. One of the largest changes has come through the arrival of DNA testing in ancestry tracking.
"It's worth doing, I think, because the more that do it, the more connections can be found," Ms Diessel said.
"Back when I started all of this, I'd have to go to the university to see old newspapers and go through the microfilm. It took forever, but now it's all online. It's much easier."
DNA testing even helped Ms Diessel unlock a long-standing family mystery involving her cousin and, unexpectedly, her husband.
"I have a cousin who is adopted. We knew her mother but her father was never spoken about," she said.
"Recently, we found out with DNA testing that she's actually related to my husband through a distant connection. So even though she's my cousin, she's more related to my husband than to me."