Monthly Archives: February 2019

#52ancestors Week 7 – Love

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So, the theme for week 7 of #52ancestors is Love. It was suggested on the weekly post that this doesn’t have to mean romantic love it could mean an ancestor you love to research or someone with a ‘love’ name. So, for me I’ve chosen to focus on two ancestors this week (who were a couple) that I love researching.

My fourth great grandfather David Hartley (aka Harknett) is one of my favourite ancestors and I love researching his life. David was one of the very first ancestors I ever researched, and I had heard a lot about him for most of my life. My mum’s uncle had done a great deal of research on his family which started in Australia with David. After the death of my grandmother, my mum decided she would like to find out some more about David and his origins. So, we scraped together the information that we had, which wasn’t all that much.

We knew from my great-uncle’s research the general time that he came to Australia and it was suggested that he may have been a convict but my mum had always been told by her grandmother that he was a ship’s captain. Well, with this scant information we actually found something after hours of searching: David was in fact a convict who was sentenced to 14 years transportation. So then, where did the story of the ship’s captain come in?

Obviously, David’s convict past was meant to be covered up. At the time, we kind of shrugged it off as some story that had been made up by the story as a way of hiding the fact that David arrived here as a convict. However, after a bit more digging we found where the story actually came from. To understand where this story came from and how we found out where it came from, I first need to discuss a bit about David’s life in Australia.

So, after being in the colony of New South Wales for a few years David was married. He was still serving his 14 year sentence at the time of his marriage, which in itself isn’t unusual as many serving convicts were married and it was encouraged as a way of creating a civilised society. However, what was unusual was the woman he married. His wife was one Elizabeth Grono who was a free woman, who had been born in England and came to Australia as a free person. Many individuals came to the colony free, either associated with the army/navy or to be with convict parents or relatives.

Elizabeth’s father was a Captain John Grono, who was a reasonably prominent man in the colony. He was an early settler of the Hawkesbury region and was a founding member of Ebenezer Church in the Pitt Town area (this was the first Presbyterian Church outside of Sydney and is currently the oldest surviving church in Australia). On his property, which fronted the Hawkesbury Rover, John Grono ran his shipbuilding business. this bought him into close contact with important members of the early colony such as Governor Bligh.

So, this is where I and the rest of my family believe the story of David Hartley being a ship’s captain came from. David has always fascinated me and continues to do so which makes him an ancestor I love to research. I also like to believe that David and Elizabeth were a true love match, as it would have been a big step down from visiting the Governor’s residence as a guest to marrying a convict who worked on the governor’s property. At the same time, there is a sadness to the story as it appears that Elizabeth was completely cut off by her family. Her sisters all married free men who were bought into their father’s business and made wealthy men. They are all also buried in the family vault at Ebenezer Church.

In sharp contrast, Elizabeth is buried in an unmarked grave at Pitt Town along with her husband David. David was also obviously not brought into the shipbuilding business as the copious amount of writing on John Grono and his shipbuilding business don’t mention him at all. In fact, in the majority of the writings on John Grono Elizabeth and her convict husband are not mentioned.

 

#52ancestors Week 6 – Surprise

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Doing ones family history is an exercise which constantly presents you with surprises and you come to expect the unexpected. This week I’ve decided to write about a pleasant surprise fairly early in my family history journey, and one that was close to home in a very real sense.

In the early days of my family history research I was so enthusiastic about my findings and shared them far and wide with my family. I was especially proud of my research on my paternal line, the Starr’s, as we knew only very basic information about my grandfather as he died when my father was still a teenager. In those days, everyone else was excited about my findings as well and my father had been in conversation with a friend of his at our church who was intrigued. The next time I saw the friend, he expressed interest in my family history research and mentioned that his grandmother had the surname Starr and he was pretty sure she was from Molong, NSW which was the same place my Starr family was from.

Well, after that little tidbit I just had to investigate this possible Starr connection. Luckily, I had in my possession a book on the history of our church and I knew his family had been going there for at least two generations and I found his parents names in it. From there I found a record of the marriage of his parents and looking on the Australian Cemeteries Index I found the headstone of his father at Molong cemetery. This was exciting as this was where my ancestor were as well. One thing led to another and I confirmed that the friend’s grandmother was indeed a Starr.

The surprise part was not just that someone I had known for years was in fact related to me, but that it was a fairly close relationship: he and my father were in fact 3rd cousins. We all found this rather hilarious as both men share the same slapstick sense of humour, and we joked that they must have gotten it from the Starr family!! Now, this friend had an older brother who had two sons one of whom was dating my sister at the time. Turned out, they were fourth cousins. Now this was a surprise, because in our church (The Salvation Army) it’s a bit of a standing joke when two young people start dating that you’d better check how closely you’re related to the other person!!

Now, we had always said we were sure we weren’t related to anyone because we were only relative newcomers to the Salvation Army as opposed to being a part of the church for generations unending. So this was a bit of a surprise to us!! I thought it was absolutely hilarious at the time and took great glee in telling my sister that she was related to her boyfriend. Of course, she was mortified and forbade me to tell him. I never did tell him, but perhaps he found out as his uncle and his father both knew.

#52ancestors Week 5: At the Library

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The prompt for Week 5 of #52ancestors is at the library. There are so many ways this can be interpreted, and as a lifelong lover of books and reading there have been so many libraries in my life especially as I have a habit of visiting a library whenever I go somewhere just to see what it’s like.

But, I decided that I would write about the library that first took me as a young person seriously when it came to family history research. I started dabbling in family history research when I was bout 17, when my mother and I set out to find out more about her fist ancestor to arrive in Australia and whether the stories she had been told by her grandmother were true or not. Well, we found out plenty and managed to prove that my great grandmothers stories were fiction in order to cover up the convict in the family. That first little piece of research was enough to have me hooked and I wanted to find out more about the rest of my family, which nobody had any clue about.

But my research really took off after I started my first job as a Junior Shelver at the local library. Not long after I started, a new Local History and Reference Librarian started working there and she soon discovered that I knew a great deal about the local history of the area having grown up there and having an interest in history. She frequently picked my brain on things to do with local history and when she discovered that I also had an interest in family history she was a great sounding board as I shared my findings with her. She and I, along with two other ladies both old enough to be my mother, soon formed a companionable group of family history enthusiasts at work.

For me as a young person, it was great to be not just included in discussions and decisions about the family and local history section of the library but to be taken seriously. Many fellow employees closer to my own age didn’t take me seriously and scoffed at my findings or didn’t understand why I found researching my family so fascinating. So for me, that library in which I worked became a place where I was encouraged in my family history research and felt free to share my discoveries with others. It also gave me the opportunity to develop skills in not just researching my own family history but helping others with their research. These skills have stood me in good stead recently as I have returned to libraries after a 5 year break, and enabling me to assist people coming into the library to do family history research.

#52ancestors Week 4 – Like to Meet

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I didn’t have to think too hard about this one or go too far back in my family tree. The person I would most like to meet would be my maternal aunt Jayne Nichols. Jayne has always been openly talked about by my mother, who was close to her sister. As they were just 12 months apart from each other, they were each others frequent playmates as young children. As a child, I was particularly curious as one of my middle names is Jayne in memory of my aunt.

Jayne as a baby in the 1960s

Luckily for me, my mother was very forthcoming in telling stories of her childhood which featured her sister and i delighted in hearing them. My grandmother, on the other hand, didn’t like to talk about it. I don’t remember if I was warned not to ask her about Jayne as it would make her sad but I also don’t remember ever having a conversation with her about Jayne. never met Jayne because she died some years before I was even though of, let alone born.

As a child I knew that she had been very sick for some time before she died and remember feeling sad for her, an aunt that I never knew. As I got older, I learnt more details about her illness. As a young girl, aged about 12-13, Jayne suffered from acute Nephritis which is essentially the inflammation of the part of the kidneys that fosters the blood. The local newspapers ran articles on her, relating how sick she was and the many weeks she spent in hospital. Presumably, she got somewhat better as she was sent home and life went on as normal for a few more years.

However, as she got older she got sicker again and she was finally diagnosed with kidney failure. She was on dialysis for some years, whilst being on a transplant list. However, all the sickness and time in hospitals obviously got to her eventually as she refused any further treatment which eventually led to her death. For me as an adult now, it is sad to think about all the pain she went through not just from her illness itself but also from the constant treatment. In recent years, I myself suffered from ill health and was in and out of hospital with tubes hanging out of my arm and my hard won independence was gone for a brief moment. It gave me a new appreciation of what my aunt would have gone through, but for a much longer period.

Jayne and Wendy Nichols

In my grandmother’s later years, Jayne was talked about more and more. Particularly once dementia took hold and she was less and less aware of her surroundings. I was a teenager at the time, and we visited my grandmother every day wherever possible. I had always been told I looked like Jayne but I could never see it. However, my grandmother obviously did see it enough to mistake me for her. I vividly remember visiting her and her instantly being cheered by the sight of me, calling me “Jayne” and thinking her lost daughter had come back to her.

My mother has told me what she can remember about her sister and her illness, but as she was also a child/teenager at the time she doesn’t remember a lot and wasn’t involved in many conversations for visiting the hospital. If I could meet Jayne, I would like to hear her experience and how she felt as a young woman becoming so ill and having any independence or hope of a future taken away from her. I know from my mother that she had dreams of being a nurse,

and so she was allowed to complete Year 12 at High School but that was not to be. It’s my opinion that the long illness she suffered and the constant trips to hospital for treatment made Jayne depressed, so depressed that she felt she could go on no longer.

Jayne aged 20 years.