Last week, The Courier wondered if any family could surpass the Daveys in Miners Rest, where five year-old Oliver will be the fifth generation of the same family to go to the same primary school.
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It turns out they can – and by quite some margin. The Blackmore family can trace six generations at Warrenheip Primary School and their record at the same school stretches back even further in time. Their family educational history in the area goes back to the early 1870s – the decade before the Daveys.
Ten year-old Zachary Blackmore is set to start Grade Five in Warrenheip this week and is carrying on a remarkable family tradition that started in 1871 when Emily Vincent, his great, great, great grandmother began her studies at the school.
To put that into perspective, this was a time when the railway from Ballarat to Melbourne was not even a decade old, the outback town of Alice Springs was yet to be founded, and the explorer Dr David Livingstone was considered lost in the remote interior of Africa.
Following in Emily Vincent’s footsteps, her son George Shearer attended the school in the early years of the 20th century, and was eventually followed by his daughter – Zachary’s great grandmother Doreen Taylor – in the 1930s.
Zachary’s grandmother Jenny Blackmore then attended the school in the 1950s while his father Jamie Blackmore studied there during the 1970s.
Zachary has been at the school since Prep, while his elder brother and sister, Ethan, 16, and Jessica, 14, also studied at the school.
The school currently has 29 pupils and Zachary’s mother, Julie Blackmore, works on the school council.
Warrenheip Primary School has been on its current site since 1875, replacing a goldfields school building rented from the Wesleyan authorities that opened in 1860 but eventually became inadequate as the population expanded in the area.
Mr Blackmore, 48, who owns a concreting business, will see his family’s direct association with the school end when Zachary goes to secondary school in two years.
“It will probably be a little sad but life goes on I suppose.
“The school was a great school when I went there and has done pretty well for my kids. Maybe down the track, if the school can stay open that long, they [Mr Blackmore’s children] might stay in the area and their kids might go there as well.”