52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – Family Lore

Over the last few years, my blog has been dormant because sometimes life just happens. But this year, I am going to get back into my blogging and have decided to join this years 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. The prompt for Week 1 is “Family Lore”.

Mary Ann during her time as a Salvation Army member

Many of us family historians start out journey with family stories that have been passed on by family members. In my own family, I had a Great Uncle who had traced his family tree (which is my maternal line) during the 1980s and handed me a lot of his research when I became interested in doing family history. One ancestor which intrigued me was a woman called Mary Ann Green who was  my 3x great grandmother. She was also one of the few ancestors that I had seen a picture of when I first started family history.

The family lore was that she had been born on the Hawkesbury River in 1830 to unknown parents who had ‘come free’ from England. The story was that her parents were unknown as when Mary Ann was 3 years old, both her parents had drowned in the Hawkesbury River Floods of 1833. Perhaps the thought of Mary Ann losing her parents at such a young age also piqued my interest, so I did some digging to find out more about Mary Ann.

Firstly, I searched for information about the 1833 flood of the Hawkesbury River. If people had drowned, surely there would have been a mention somewhere? Lo and behold, after many hours of internet searching and consulting with the Hawkesbury Library Service I found that there was no flood of the Hawkesbury recorded that year. I puzzled over this, but thought perhaps the date had been remembered wrong. However, when looking at Mary Ann’s marriage and death records I found no clues as to who her parents were.

Looking on NSW births, deaths and marriages I found a number of Mary Ann Green’s born either in 1830 or the few years before and after. I diligently ordered transcripts of likely looking records, only to find none of the Mary Ann’s were born anywhere near the right area. I was confident that she had indeed been born in the Hawkesbury area as every other certificate I had that related to Mary Ann confirmed that she had been born in the Hawkesbury area.

After many years of on and off research, I connected with a distant family member on Ancestry who was related to Mary Ann via her second marriage. I had noticed that this person had a birth date and parents for Mary Ann, so I reached out to them to see where they had got their information from. Well, that proved to be an excellent decision as it turned out she had got this information from a mix of family lore and a very well researched family history book.

Mary Ann’s Baptism Record

It turns out the elusive father of Mary Ann that I had been searching for any evidence of was not in fact her father and her surname was not Green. Rather, Mary Ann had been born to Dorothy Pickett and William Parsons. Not much is know about William Parson but Dorothy was the daughter of two convicts, with her father arriving on the First Fleet and her mother on the Second Fleet. After that, finding a record of her Baptism was a piece of cake. So, in that case the family lore was proved incorrect. Perhaps it started as a way of covering up the ‘convict stain’ as I have found in other areas of my family.

However, all was not lost with Mary Ann. Another piece of lore passed on about Mary Ann’s funeral was proved correct. Mary Ann died in 1914, and my Great Uncle wrote that Mary Ann’s funeral cortege proceeded down the main street of Penrith, NSW (where she had been living with her daughter) and was accompanied by the local Salvation Army band on its journey to the cemetery. This was proved to be accurate through Mary Ann’s obituary, which was published in the local  newspaper. A notice about the funeral was also published in the Salvation Army publication The War Cry, which described how her funeral cortege was accompanied up the main street of Penrith by the band and a contingent of the local Corps Soldiers (church members).

 

Account of Mary Ann’s funeral in The War Cry

#52ancestors 2019 – First

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