O’er the seas they came

Miss W. #52ancestors , , ,

 

RosZie / Pixabay

Living in Australia means, if you are not of Aboriginal descent, then your family must have migrated to this country. Some of them arrived recently, others over the past two hundred and fifty years.

I decided to look at my direct ancestors to work out how many came of their own free will and how many had no choice, also where they came from originally. I’ve also added a link to a post or records relating to the ancestor.

My most recent arrival was my paternal grandfather, William Allen, who arrived as a crew member from London, England in about 1922. It was DNA that helped me solve this mystery that I had been researching for over twenty years.

I then go back to my 2x great grandparents:

  • John England – convict from Yorkshire, England – arrived 1847
  • William Chandler – free settler from Middlesex, England – arrived 1855
  • Caroline Bryant – free settler from Middlesex, England – arrived 1856
  • John Davey – free settler from Devon, England – arrived 1855
  • Rebecca Jackson – convict from Donegal, Ireland – arrived 1847

Then my 3x great grandparents:

  • William Dawson – convict from Northumberland, England – arrived 1850
  • Catherine McKay – convict from Edinburgh, Scotland – arrived 1849
  • Matthew Sutton – convict from Middlesex, England – arrived 1840
  • Mary McCreery – convict from Newry, Northern Ireland – arrived 1848
  • Charlotte Bryant – free settler from Sussex, England – arrived with her daughter
  • David Dixon – free settler from Yorkshire, England – arrived 1841
  • Mary Dixon nee Pickering – free settler from Yorkshire, England – arrived with husband
  • Francis Colgrave – convict from Bedfordshire, England – arrived 1833
  • Isabella Watkins – convict from Yorkshire, England – arrived 1841
  • John Holliday Boyd – convict from Cornwall, England – arrived 1836
  • Martha Hearn – convict from Middlesex, England – arrived 1839

So from a total of seventeen immigrants, seven came free and ten were sent out by the British Government.

Readers: Who were the immigrants in your family? Who was the most recent?

Diaries and letters

Miss W. #52ancestors, Davey, Smith, Wyatt , , , , , , ,
OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay

In my family, my mother’s side were the letter writers, while dad must have got his love of diaries from his birth mother.

The earliest letter I’ve found is a postcard with a photo of my maternal grandmother on the front and on the back she sent a short message to her future husband. This would have been in the early 1920’s as they married in 1922.

My mother and her sister always kept in touch with their cousins via letters. They lived in Hobart in southern Tasmania, but many of the relatives lived around Evandale and Longford in northern Tasmania.

Dad’s birth mother, Irene, wrote a diary about her trip on horseback along the track to Adamsfield to visit Ernie Bond in his home in the Rasselas Valley. It was while working at Heathorns Hotel that Irene met Ernie. Dad kept the diary and it is now in my possession.

Whenever mum and dad went off on a holiday together they would keep a diary. Then when they got home, dad would put together a folder of their holiday for them to remember what they did and where.

In 1965, our family and my mum’s sister’s family (8 of us) went on holiday together around Australia for three months. Dad kept a diary of this trip and whenever I have visited places mentioned in the diary, he would send me a photo of that page so I could compare what we saw 60 years ago on that long trip.

When mum passed away in September 2021, dad used his diary to write about what happened each day. There were always special mentions on mum’s birthday but also on their wedding anniversary date of 8 September.

On 8 September 2024, dad wrote the following:

Phyl and Bob’s Wedding 70

Today will be a day of wonderful memories

of our life time together.  A perfect marriage and

two children, two grandchildren and one great grandchild.

Hymn: O Perfect Love

On 9 September, dad mentioned he was having trouble breathing, worse than normal, but decided he would go to bed early rather than get some medical help. He was 91 years old. The next day I found dad had passed away after he didn’t reply to any of my messages that morning.

Today we scattered mum and dad’s ashes down in the Hartz Mountains area as per their wishes in their wills, their final letter to us.

Readers: Who were the letter or diary writers in your family?

What a challenge!

Miss W. #52ancestors, Allen, Dawson, Smith, Wyatt , ,
Mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

My parents and I had often spoken about our family history. Three of my grandparents were alive when I was born but none of my great grandparents. In fact four of my grandparents were alive but I didn’t know that until my parents, my brother and I did DNA tests.

Mum’s DNA matches were lots of her cousins that she knew or who we knew of from family reunions I had helped run back in the 1980’s and were on my database. But there were a few unknown names in Dad’s DNA matches.

Now came the challenge – how were they related to my dad?

Dad’s paternal line should have been the surname WYATT and his maternal line should have been SMITH.

From what I knew of dad’s paternal side, his father had deserted him and his mother when dad was two and there were no other children from the marriage. But his father had been married before and had two children from that marriage. I could find no matches relating to them. Another person with the surname Wyatt but living in New South Wales had been in contact with me and thought her grandfather and my grandfather were the same person. So we had her dad test DNA as well – another half brother for dad. But all my research on the Wyatt name from the paper work we had was getting us nowhere for 20 years until suddenly another DNA match with the surname ALLEN came up as a close match. We worked out he was a half nephew to my dad. His father had the surname Allen and he was older than my dad.  Over 20 years research to work out dad’s father was actually William Elvis Allen and not William Allen Wyatt.

Now Dad’s other challenge was the surname Smith. I had done a lot of research on dad’s supposed grandfather and his father who was a half Samoan whaling captain. But dad’s DNA had no Samoan ethnicity.  So I asked a few of the Smith relatives to test. They all had Samoan and they all matched each other. But Dorothy, who I had met on a bus tour and while chatting worked out we were related through Captain Smith, did not match my dad at all. She matched the other Smith cousins. From this we worked out dad’s grandfather was not the son of the whaling captain but someone else.

The close unknown matches on dad’s DNA came back to the surname DAWSON. After more researching, I worked out dad’s grandfather had been a miner on the west coast of Tasmania at the same time as the Smiths were there woodcutting and whaling.

Below are links to posts I’ve already written about these families.

William Elvis Allen

Alexander Dawson

Captain William Smith

Readers: Have you had both a bigamist and a NPE (non parental event) in your family tree?