The Week 6 prompt for #52Ancestors is Earning a Living. Like many people, most of my ancestors had very predictable and ordinary professions. However, one individual stands out with a bit of a different occupation. Daniel Child was my 4x … Continue reading
The prompt for Week 5 was ‘Influencer’ and for this prompt I’ve decided to write about my Great-Uncle Ted who was a strong influence on my family history journey. As my mother grew up without a Father, Uncles were very important to her and she was very close with her mother’s family. Although Ted lived in Adelaide, South Australia and my mum grew up in Western Sydney the strong connection was still there and he was the person who gave my mum away at her wedding.
The photo of Ted and Jean (my grandmother) that sparked my interest)
I can remember visiting Ted for the first time as a young teenager, and I was fascinated by all his knowledge of the family. I had seen photos of my grandmother as a young child aged around 3 years old in Penrith, New South Wales (which in the 1920s was still a very country area) as well as a photo of my great grandparents wedding day and they had sparked my interest enough to ask my grandmother about them. So you can imagine I was even more fascinated to see the many other photos that Ted had in his possession, including one of himself and my grandmother, when he was a small boy and she a toddler. This visit was to be the start of years of back and forth correspondence about the family history.
Ted (standing) and Jean
Ted had started doing family history research during the 1980s, when Australia experienced a surge of popularity in family history research in line with the Bicentenary of the landing of the First Fleet in 1788. Unlike the rest of his family, who worked in more traditional ‘working class’ professions, Ted had trained as a journalist and ended up working in Sports Journalism. As a boy, Ted had suffered from polio and as a result spent much more time on academic pursuits. Through the charity organisation The House With No Steps Ted was taught typing which was a great help to him eventually getting a cadetship in journalism and eventually working as a sports journalist. During his career, Ted had opportunities to travel overseas and I have not doubt that the research skills he learnt in his journalism career came in handy for tracing his family history. Once retired, Ted continued to travel with his wife Ruth and he visited many of the areas out ancestors came form including Norway.
Many of the family photos that I have copies of came from Ted’s family album which he was happy to share with me. And not only did he have photos of ancestors, they were all meticulously labelled. Ted had also painstakingly typed up on his typewriter everything he knew about the family from what he had been told by his mother and other relatives as well as what he had gleaned form his research. I remember quite well a conversation about our Norwegian ancestor Charles John Thompson who had come from the Norwegian city of Bergen out to Australia. I can remember him telling me about when he visited Norway and attempted to find some information about Charles to no avail. Everyone they spoke to said that there would be no Norwegian with that kind of name! Ted was very interested years later once I had started my family history journey in earnest to hear that I had found Charles in Norway!! Turns out, he had Anglicized his name to Charles John Thompson from Karl Johan Thomassen.
Ted during his time at Canonbury hospital
And just like that, it’s time for Week 3 of the 52 Ancestors challenge. The prompt for this week is ‘Favourite Photo’. I am very fortunate to have quite a few photos of various ancestors, so it was hard to nail down just one to blog about for this week.
After much thought and examining of my photo files, I came across this photo and knew it was the one. It’s one I haven’t done a blog pot on before, but it’s also a really great photo that shows a moment in time. It also shows three generations of the one family.
Jean, Edith and Baby John
The photo depicts the proud, smiling faces of my grandmother Jean Levy (nee Thompson) with her mother Edith Thompson who is holding Jean’s first child John. Baby John was also the first grandchild for Edith, which I can imagine was a very happy moment for her. Given that John is still a very young baby in the photo I believe it was taken in 1945, perhaps to commemorate this happy moment for the family. It is obviously a studio photo, given the formal poses of the women, but my copy of the photo bears no clues to who the photographer was.
For me, it’s interesting to see my grandmother as a young 22 year old mother. Unfortunately, the happiness was not to last. After a few years of marriage, Jean’s husband fell into alcoholism. After the birth of her second son in 1951, Jean left her husband and filed for divorce. The divorce was successful, and I was able to obtain a copy of the records a several years ago. They tell a sad story of a mother being left with no means to buy food or clothing for her children.
Some years after her divorce, Jean remarried and had three more children (including my mother) with her second husband. Unfortunately, Jean ended up separating from her second husband after she discovered that he too was an alcoholic.
Week 2 of 52 Ancestors comes with the prompt of ‘Origins’. I thought long and hard about what I would focus on for this prompt, as it encompasses such a broad topic. Ultimately, I decided to focus on something I haven’t examined before: the English origins of the Starr surname.
The Parish Church, Whatlington, East Sussex
The most ancient Starr ancestor that has been verified is one Comfort Starr, born circa 1550-1560 in East Sussex. Researchers have been unable to narrow down when he might have been born, as his first appearance is at the baptism of his son James in 1580 at Whatlington, East Sussex. We don’t know how old Comfort was at the time of his son’s birth, or whether James was his first and only child. So Comfort may well have been born earlier than the 1550-1560 timeframe. Perhaps one day through the answers to these questions can be verified.
Easier to answer are questions about the County of East Sussex. East Sussex is located in the south east of England, and it’s souther border faces the English Channel. Unsurprisingly, East Sussex has historically been an important entry point for those wishing to invade the English continent. Indeed, it was through this area of England that William the Conqueror commenced his invasion. Looking at maps of the ares, you can see how close France and the European Continent is to Sussex and you can see why it would have been a favoured entry point. East Sussex also features the historically significant town of Hastings, where the famous 1066 Battle of Hastings took place.
Location of East Sussex
Given these facts about Sussex, it would be interesting to know the origin of the Starr family in Sussex. They could have been in the area prior to the arrival of William the Conqueror or they could just as easily have come with William’s armies from the European continent. Perhaps one day we will know more about the origins of the Starr family in England.
NB: I would like to acknowledge
Min Tamsitt who dedicated many years to researching the Starr family and made her information available to fellow researchers of the family. She also published the first volume of “A Galaxy of Starrs: A Starr Family History”.
So Week 8 of #52ancestors was ‘Family photo’. Well, I have decided to share one of my favourite family photos of my great grandmother Jean and some of her siblings.
Left to Right: Adeline, Jean, Eddie, Neville, Trevor (seated front)
I was lucky enough to have my great grandmother around when I was growing up, and she lived to the grand old age of 93. I was always interested to hear about her stories of growing up as her life was so different than the one I knew. She was born Jean Thompson on 20 March 1917 in Lismore, NSW to parents Thomas William Thompson and Hannah Maria Darch Mallett. Jean was the fourth child in the family and another five children were to join the family in the years to come.
I remember hearing when I was a child that Jean had grown up in a poor family where there wasn’t much of anything, which was something I could relate to as my own family wasn’t at all well off when I was growing up. But as a twelve year old, I felt sad at the fact that when Jean was twelve years old, she had the unimaginable loss of her mother and as the eldest girl at home was forced to grow up quickly and take care of the family.
Knowing that Jean and her siblings had grown up poor, I never thought anything of the fact that I didn’t see any photos of her as a child. When I started doing family history, however, I began to be more interested in her growing up and I began to search out photos. I plucked up my courage and got in contact with my great uncle, Jean’s son. Well, lo and behold he volunteered to scan and email me whatever he had as he had all of Jean’s collection of photos at his house.
At first it was candid photos of her as a young woman before she was married and as young mother. And don’t get me wrong, these photos were great and as a family historian I appreciate any and all photos of my ancestors. But then the most exciting photograph appeared in my inbox. Not only was it a photo of Jean as a young girl along with some of her siblings but it was a professional photo in which they all had their best clothes on and were posed so cutely. I was completely amazed. To this day it is one of my favourite photos, perhaps because I was fairly close to Jean and maybe also because I felt sorry for the children in the photo knowing that it was only a few years after the photo was taken that they would lose their mother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*****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.
