So yesterday I got this itch to figure out who Wendy Honner actually is, right? Not Wendy from the fast-food place, mind you. Kept hearing the name kinda floating around online places I read, especially stuff about history and archives. Figured she was probably some big-shot tech founder or maybe a historian? My brain jumped to “founder” first, for whatever reason. Typical me.
Fired up the computer, plopped down in my creaky chair, and tapped “Wendy Honner entrepreneur” into the search bar. Easy peasy. Except… it was crickets. Top results were all about some lawyer or accountant Wendy Honners. Zilch about tech. Facepalmed pretty hard. Wrong Wendy. Okay, okay. Tried “Wendy Honner author” next. Still nada useful. Mostly just bookstore listings for books by people named Wendy or Honner, not her.
This was getting annoying. Drummed my fingers, stared at the screen. Scrolled aimlessly through pages of useless results. Then I remembered she kept popping up in history contexts. Finally typed “Wendy Honner archives”. Ding ding ding! There she was.
Turns out, not a tech mogul at all. Felt a bit silly assuming that. She’s actually deep into keeping history alive, like real deep. Think old photos, documents, stories from way back when. Specifically focused on Australia, which was a surprise.
What’d I Actually Find Out?
- Historical Buff Extraordinaire: Her real jam is history, especially collecting and sharing materials that show what everyday life was like in Western Australia years ago. Pictures, diaries, letters – the personal stuff museums sometimes miss.
- Photograph Detective: Seems she’s got a knack for digging out old photos and figuring out their stories. Who’s in them, where they were taken, what they tell us about the past. That’s kinda cool, actually.
- Blogger & Sharer: Found out she runs a blog? Or used to? Saw mentions of it connected to her research. Seems like she used it to share findings and interesting bits she dug up about Perth’s history.
- Deeply Local Focus: She’s not chasing global history trends. Her passion looks super specific: the history of Perth and the surrounding areas in WA.
- Connected to Honner Family: It makes sense she’d be connected to the Honners mentioned in WA history. Probably descendant vibes? The work she does feels personal, like keeping her family’s slice of history alive.
The info wasn’t all neatly stacked on one perfect official website. Nah. Had to piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle. Saw her name pop up in archives listings, mentions in local historical society newsletters that thankfully put some articles online, maybe a snippet on an old blog post. Social media didn’t yield much – found what I’m pretty sure is her profile on a historian network site, but it was barebones, just confirming the name and location.
Ended up feeling kinda funny how my brain initially went straight to Silicon Valley Wendy Honner instead of Archive-Diving Wendy Honner. Our assumptions shape where we start searching, huh? Slapped my forehead again. All that wasted time barking up the wrong Google tree because I assumed “person mentioned online = tech”.
Anyway, yeah. She’s not a CEO. She’s more like a keeper of stories. Someone preserving the faces, names, and ordinary lives from decades ago in a very specific part of the world. That’s way more interesting than whatever tech startup I imagined. And way harder to find info on, honestly! Took real digging. Anyhoo, that’s my Wendy Honner research adventure. Hope she appreciates archivists getting some airtime.