The Maternal Line
I sat down with Emma’s mum on the weekend (Dane & Theo’s Grandma Jenny) and had a look through some her family tree research.
One side of her family line goes back through the Kingsmills of Basingstoke (just up the road from the Lansburys in Romsey) and includes a long line of landed gentry and knights back to the 1200’s. The 4000 acre family estate at Sydmonton Court is now home to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Another family line is the Tanges, who came to Australia from Odense in Denmark in 1853. Emma’s great great grandfather, Anton Tange, became quite a wealthy tea merchant in Sydney, and in 1878 built a stately home for his 11 children in the southern highlands. Emma remembers visiting the derelict house when she was a child, but it has since been restored to its former glory, and was snapped up recently by Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban for $6.5m.
The Tange’s fell on hard times after a mistimed agricultural foray, but Emma’s great uncle Arthur Tange made his mark by being an influential public servant through the second half of the 20th century, working in the establishment of the Department of Foreign Affairs and then as Secretary of Defence in the 1970s. Arthur Tange’s biography has a great first chapter on the Tange family history in Australia.
More stories from this side of the family to come…