Monthly Archives: January 2019

#52ancestors Week 3 – Unusual Name

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*****DISCLAIMER: This post makes reference to suicide and may upset some readers.**************

 

The Week 3 prompt for #52ancestors is ‘unusual name’. Now, most of the people in my tree have frustratingly common names which they then reuse over the generations. Last year for this challenge, I wrote about a group of siblings with names that stood out but I searched and searched to try and find someone different to write about this year. Finally I settled on one Thomas Collimore, my 3x great grandfather. Whilst his first name is fairly common, the surname is a relatively unusual one both in Australia and in England where it originated.

Thomas Collimore was born in Australia in 1847 to two convict parents: Robert Collimore (aka Cullimore) and Margaret Hartigan. But what makes Thomas so special? When I first started researching this family line, Thomas was simply a name on a piece of paper. But as I investigated further, I all of a sudden found a treasure trove of information about him. Having ordered his death certificate, I was sad and surprised to learn that his cause of death was suffocation by hanging at his own hand. Knowing that at this time (he died in 1912) suicide was very much frowned upon and seen as a sin i wondered what could have driven him to such an act.

So, I typed his name into Trove to see if there were any newspaper articles around the time of his death. All up, there was a total of 8 articles recounting his suicide and the subsequent finding of the body by his son. Apparently, Thomas (aged 65 at the time) had been despondent for some days and could go in no longer. Some articles mention that he left a note at his residence, whilst others state that he left the house early on a ‘sunday morning and a search ensued when he didn’t return at nightfall. Whatever the case, he was not found until it was too late: the papers all detail how he was found by his son hanging from a tree in a paddock of one of the family’s properties.

How must his son have felt, coming across a sigh such as that? I shudder to even think, but in my opinion it would be something that scarred him mentally for the rest of his life. No mention is made of why Thomas was so despondent, but his wife had died just three years earlier after suffering with tuberculosis for two years. His eldest daughter had also died suddenly three years before the death of his wife. Perhaps these contributed to his despondency?

Unfortunately, this is something we will probably never know as the reasons for his despondence are not discussed in the newspaper articles or the coronial inquest. One thing I did find interesting is that despite the fact that Thomas committed suicide he was buried in the local Church of England Cemetery with a full Anglican funeral. Perhaps this brought some comfort to the family that he left behind.

#52ancestors Week 2 – Challenge

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The prompt for this week is “challenge”. Well, how to pick just one challenge is a bit of a challenge. To me, genealogy is an ongoing challenge in which we use our detective skills to ferret out as much information as possible about our ancestors and families. Considering it’s the start of the year, I thought I would share one of my earlier challenges.

When I first got serious about doing my family history, I wrote down what I knew about my immediate family. I knew without asking the names of my grandmother’s but needed some help form my parents on the names of my grandfathers, as they had both passed before I was able to know them. I always knew that my mum had essentially grown up without a father, and so she didn’t know a lot at all about him. She knew his name and we had managed to find a few photos after my grandmother’s death but that was it. So the challenge was to find out ore about him.

My grandfather George as a young child

I went to the courthouse and asked how I would go about applying for the birth certificates of my parents, and was promptly told that I would be better off ordering marriage certificates as they were free access after 50 years whereas broths had a 100 year limit on them. So I left the courthouse with the necessary forms to order the marriage certificate of my grandparents and I promptly went home and started searching online for the necessary information. This was when I hit my first snag: my search for a George Nichols marrying a Jean Thompson returned no results.

Perplexed, I approached my mum and said I couldn’t find her parents marriage certificate. We both scratched our heads over it for a while, until we remembered that my grandmother had been married before so would have been married under her first husband’s surname. So off I went again armed with the correct surname this time and after a bit of fiddling with spelling, I hit gold. Once I received the certificate I had an approximate birth date for him and a mother’s name. But no father’s name, which is an ongoing challenge of mine to find out who his father was.

 

Being new to family history, I was so excited to have found the information and I distinctly recall being asked a few years later about my family history and excitedly sharing the news that I was now able to order my grandfather’s birth certificate as the 100 year time limit had passed (it being 2010 at the time). To my disappointment, the person scoffed at me stating it was “impossible” that my grandfather had been born in 1910 considering my mother was born in 1961. However, I know the truth of my findings.

So that’s my challenge post, but the challenge of finding out my grandfathers father is ongoing as is challenging people’s perceptions about family history in general and on a more personal level. But I admit to enjoying a challenge and will continue forward with my passion.

 

#52ancestors 2019 – First

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Starting the year off as I mean to go on with my first post this year. The prompt for the first week of #52ancestors is ‘First’ so I’ve decided to focus this week on the very first ancestor of mine who came to Australia.

My very first ancestor to come to Australia was my 5x great grandfather Samuel Pickett/Piggot, who arrived in Australia on 26 January 1788 on board the ship Charlotte which was a part of the First Fleet. Based on convict records, Samuel was born around 1761 but no place of origin or information about his life before conviction has been found to date. What is known is that on 20 March 1786 Samuel Piggot was tried at the Devon Assizes in Exeter, along with a Samuel Barsby for “feloniously cutting and stealing two pieces of woollen serge, called druggett containing 50 yards, value 40 shillings. The goods of George Hayman in the racks at night” on the 19 December of the previous year (Pickett Lines, p. 4-5). According to wikipedia, drugget was a very cheap thin woollen fabric and was used to protect carpets as a kind of rug.

As the goods were worth such a grand sum, the crime would have been considered as Grand Larceny which held the mandatory death sentence and the pair were initially sentenced to hang. However, they were reprieved by Royal Mercy in 13 April 1786 on the condition of 7 years transportation, and were transferred tp the hulk ‘Dunkirk’ to await transportation to New South Wales. I can’t imagine the relief Samuel would have felt at being spared from death by hanging but at the same time being told that he was being sent to New South Wales for seven year must have been a life changing idea. Seven years was a long time and New South Wales was such a distance away and an unimaginable place to Samuel.

When the First Fleet finally landed in New South Wales and the convicts were disembarked, the sight of the land that would become Sydney Town would have been utterly foreign to Samuel. Not only were there none of the so-called ‘signs of civilisation’ that Samuel would have been accustomed to seeing back in England, the whole landscape would have been completely foreign with new and strange plants and animals. Those early years in New South Wales were harsh, with food supplies soon running out and crops failing resulting in many deaths. Samuel was one of the ones who not only managed to survive, but to thrive in the new colony.

Samuel wasted no time in starting a family with fellow convict Mary Thompson (who arrived on the Second Fleet) and moving to take up land in the Hawkesbury region, where he became a pioneer of the region. After receiving his land grant, Samuel disappears from colonial records until his death in 1817. This leads me to believe that Samuel had put his past offence behind him and managed to become an upstanding citizen of the new colony. I would love to know more about Samuel’s life both in England and in Australia, perhaps that will happen this year.

 

Pickett Lines: descendants of Samuel Piggot/Pickett and Mary Thompson (2005), by Penny Ferguson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code