A is for Agenor. Agenor Robert Nichols was my 3rd great grandfather, and has one of the most interesting names I have come across in my family history research.

When I first came across hime, I dint know that he had the name Agenor as all the certificates I had referred to hime as simply Robert Nichols. This included his death certificate, marriage certificate and the certificate of his children which I had purchased. How I came to find out his first name on his christening was Agenor is a bit of an interesting story.

So, as a good family historian I had got his and his wife’s name from the certificates of his child Robert George Nichols, who was my 2nd great grandfather. From these certificates, and those mentioned above, I knew that Agenor had been born at sea and from the ages given on various certificates I could make a guess at his age and that would also give me an idea of when he arrived in Australia with his family.

From his marriage certificate, I gained his parents names and started the search for the family on immigration list. Well, this was not exactly and easy task as there were quite a few Nichols families arriving in the time period I had guessed at and none of them seemed to contain a newborn who had been born on the voyage.

So I resorted to doing it the long way. I was determined to find the ship that they came on, so I embarked on a long project of manually going through every single John Nichols and family I could find listed in the results of shipping and immigration on Ancestry. Finally, I found a family on board the ship Agenoria in May 1849 that seemed to match up with my family. There was a John Nichols with his wife Anna Maria and their children. And when I scrolled down I could see that this family did have a child born on the voyage: named Agenor Robert Nichols. This child’s birth is simply recorded as 1849 and ‘born on voyage’. It also listed another child they had bought with them on the voyage.

I checked for a record if this child in both Australia and England and confirmed that he did indeed have the right parents. This was them: I had found Agenor and his family. Now, as he was born on the voyage I wasn’t sure if I would find any sort of birth or christening record for Agenor so I did some research on births at sea in that era. I found that most children were christened or registered when the family arrived at their destination. That was enough to have me scouring the NSW births, deaths and marriages to see if I could find any record.

Now, this was pre civil registration in NSW so I was unsure what I would find or if I would find anything at all. Doing a very broad search, I found a record dated 1850 in the parish of Bungonia, County of Argyle. Now, I had no idea where that meant so I had to look that up as well and I found that the County of Argyle included the Goulburn Plains. Now, I knew that Agenor had ended up in the farming village of Towrang close to Goulburn so this excited me and since the parents names seemed to match, I took a punt and ordered it; after all this was the only Agenor I had come across. After an anxious wait. the document finally arrived in my inbox and I learned that it was indeed my 3rd great grandfather’s christening record with the correct date of birth. I also discovered that the family had indeed lived in the Goulburn area, at Lake Bathurst.