R is for Robert

R is for Robert George Nichols, my 2nd great grandfather. Unlike some other ancestors of mine, Robert had a life in quite a few different places, moving around from place to place throughout his life.

Robert was born 13 December 1871 in Towrang, near Goulburn, to parents Agenor Robert Nichols and Adeline Milne. Robert was the first child born to the couple, and was born just one month after they married. Robert spent his early years in the Towrang area where four of his siblings were born but by the time he was 11 years old the family had moved to Cootamundra in NSW. I’m not sure what prompted the move from Towrang to Cootamundra, but the family only lived there a few years before moving on to the Berrima area. Specifically, they relocated to the Joadja Creek shale oil mining site. Now a ghost town, Joadja Creek township was set up in 1870 and had a large population of Scottish miners.

It was in Joadja that Robert met and married his wife May Henderson and their first three children were born there. The Joadja facility officially closed in 1911, but Robert and his family had moved on before then. Robert’s fourth child and first son was born in 1901, at Jumbunna in Victoria. Jumbunna was yet another mining town and this trend was to continue, with Robert’s next move being to Charlestown.

Robert (centre) with some fellow miners

 

 

Robert (front row, second from right)

 

 

 

Charlestown is located near Lake Macquarie and like Joadja and Jumbunna, Charlestown was a mining town. Robert and his family lived in Charlestown for nearly a decade before moving to the Temi Mountain Mine Site, near Murrurundi in northern NSW. Robert’s final move was to New Lambton, which is a suburb of Newcastle. New Lambton was also where Robert died in 1929, and he was laid to rest at Sandgate Cemetery in Newcastle.

Overall, in his travels Robert saw a whole chunk of Australia along the way as he travelled some pretty large distances to get from place to place and covered hundreds if not thousands of kilometres throughout his life.

N is for Nichols

A bit of a departure from the first names with this post, but for the letter N I have chosen to write about the surname Nichols.

Nichols is my mother’s maiden name and it wasn’t a name that we knew much about as she grew up with an absent father and had no idea about his family. As it turns out, Nichols was his mother’s surname as he was born illegitimate. so here’s a bit about the surname of Nichols.

Apparently Nichols is a patronymic name, that is a name derived from that of a father. So that means that Nichols is from the medieval first name Nicholas. As a surname, it first appeared in the 110s in the British Iles. This is probably right about the time that surnames first started to become necessary. Originally, the surname was first recorded as Nichole and then Nicholas. Another early example of the surname is Nickolls before it eventually evolved into Nichols.

In terms of where it comes from geographically, it first appears in England but spread to cover other areas of the British Isles including Scotland before moving across the seas to the USA; Canada and of course Australia. According to Ancestry’s Surname data, the surname Nichols was most common in the counties of London and Norfolk but my Nichols ancestors came from  Buckinghamshire which apparently has the lowest concentration of the surname.

Perhaps my Nichols ancestors did come from one of those counties originally, but what I do know is that from as early as 1788 my Nichols family lived in the area of Loughton, Buckinghamshire. 1788 is the approximate year of birth of the earliest Nichols ancestor I have been able to trace. As far as I have been able to trace forwards, the Nichols family remained living in this same area of Buckinghamshire until at least the 1900s. My own branch of the family left Buckinghamshire in 1849 to emigrate to Australia. However, they left parents and siblings behind who continued the Nichols surname in Buckinghamshire through the generations.

C is for . . .

C is for Charlotte. Charlotte Maude Nichols was my great grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandfather who I never knew.

I first came across Charlotte’s name on the marriage certificate of my grandparents and then on the death and birth certificates of my grandfather. From there, I was able to find out a bit about Charlotte beyond just a name on a piece of paper.

Charlotte was born 3 May 1894 in Katoomba, New South Wales to parents Robert George Nichols and May Henderson. She was the couple’s first child, and spent much of her childhood in the shale oil mining town of Joadja Creek in the Southern Highlands of NSW. Her parents marriage had also occurred at Joadja Creek in 1893. So how did she end up being born in Katoomba?

Well, after much research into the to town of Joadja Creek and the mining operation there I discovered a reference to a shale oil operation at Katoomba and thought ‘perhaps that’s it’. As they were both shale oil operations and they were also both located in mountainous terrain. So perhaps it was some sort of worker exchange? Whatever the reason, it was only a brief visit as Charlotte’s both was registered a month later on Joadja Creek.

But the most interesting event, at least from a family history point of view, was yet to come.  By the time Charlotte was ten years old, the family had relocated to the Newcastle area and certificates for Charlotte’s siblings indicate that they were still living there in 1910 when Charlotte was 16 years old.

But for a period in the year of 1910, Charlotte wasn’t living with her family. On 19 November 1910, at sixteen years old

My grandfather George as a young child

and unmarried, Charlotte gave birth to a baby boy at South Sydney’s Womens Hospital. This baby boy was to become my grandfather. Later in life, Charlotte went on to marry and have other children all of whom are listed on her death certificate. Sadly, her first child is not listed on her death certificate presumably due to the fact that he was illegitimate.

This is where one of my major brick walls comes into play: discovering just who was the biological father of my grandfather. To date, I have gone as far as I can with the Nichols family line and have scoured newspapers but to date have found no clues from this line fo research as to who my biological great-grandfather might be. I even had my DNA done a few years ago when it first started getting big but still have had no hints. Here’s hoping that one day I’ll smash through this brick wall.

 

A is for . . .

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.

 

 

#52ancestors Week 4 – Like to Meet

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.

 

#52ancestors Week 2 – Challenge

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.

 

Week 4 – Invite to Dinner

The week 4 prompt for the #52ancestors challenge is ‘Invite to dinner’ and I have thought long and hard about who I would invite to dinner and what I would ask them. I thought about all the people in my tree who I still don’t have answers about and thought about one of them: but which one? I finally settled on my 3rd great grandmother, Adeline MILNE. Adeline has been very elusive and a lot of questions about her life remain unanswered and to this day still largely remains a very mysterious ancestor.

Adeline first appeared in my tree when in the course of my research I ordered the marriage certificate of Adeline and my 3rd great grandfather Robert NICHOLS. The marriage certificate states that the couple were married 6 November 1871 at the Wesleyan Parsonage in Goulburn NSW. It was obviously a rushed marriage as their first child was born 13 December 1871, just over a month after their marriage! On the certificate, Adeline’s parents are stated as George Cole MILNE and Margaret BLAKENEY. Her birthplace is given as Sydney, NSW and her age as 17 which would put her birth date at around 1854.

So logically, my next step was to search for a birth certificate, and a marriage certificate for her parents. No birth certificate has been found, but imagine my surprise when I found her parents marriage certificate: their date of marriage, 1869 in Goulburn, NSW. This means they were married when Adeline was 15 years old, if the age she gave on the marriage certificate is correct. So, obviously she was born illegitimate. Was she registered under her mother’s maiden name perhaps?

But wait, the plot thickens even further: according to the marriage certificate of George Cole MILNE and Margaret BLAKENEY (on which Margaret’s name is listed as MILLER) and she is a widow. The parties list their professions as Schoolmaster and Teacher respectively. Interestingly, Margaret signs the registry with an ‘X’ mark, If she is a teacher, why can’t she sign her name? Digging further into the MILLER name I found that Margaret that Margaret had been married before, in 1852 shortly after arriving in Australia from Ireland. Upon connecting with an individual researching the same family, I found that George Cole had also been married previously to an Amelia BRIDGET OR TAYLOR in 1840. No death has been found for either of the previous spouses, but Margaret and George Cole had 7 children together before their marriage and two after the marriage. None of the children are registered except for the two born after the marriage and the younger children were all baptised en masse in 1870. Except for Adeline, who according to my math would have been about 16 years old at the time.

Adeline continues to be missing from the certificates of her father’s death and the certificates of her siblings who were registered in 1870 and 1872 respectively. The NICHOLS family continued to live in Goulburn for some years, and there is reference to an Adeline NICHOLS in the Goulburn newspaper in the 1890s who is a nurse. Is it possible that this is my Adeline?

The family moved around later in the 1890s before ending up in Sydney where Adeline died in 1940 at The Home of Peace in Marrickville. On her death certificate, it is noted that she had been known as ‘Adeline SHUTES’. What?? Again her father is listed as George Cole MILNE but it is noted that she was born in England, not Sydney as noted on her marriage certificate and her children’s birth certificates.

 

 

So, Adeline please come to dinner, I have many questions for you!!

  • Where and when were you actually born: where you born in Sydney or in England?
  • Who was your father, really? Was it George Cole MILNE as is noted on your certificates or was it Henry MILLER or someone else entirely?
  • Were you a nurse when you lived in Goulburn?
  • Was your mother really a school teacher? If so, why did she sign her marriage certificate with an ‘X’?
  • If George Cole MILNE was your father, why aren’t you mentioned on his death certificate?
  • If Henry MILLER was your father, what happened to him? Did he die, where/when?
  • When/Where did you mother Margaret die?
  • Why did you and your family move from Goulburn?
  • Where were you and your family between 1895 and 1930?
  • Why are you not mentioned in any newspaper accounts of your brothers/sisters deaths and your husband’s death?
  • Why were you living in ‘The Home of Peace’ (a nursing home of sorts) when you died in 1940?
  • Why were you known by the name of SHUTES at the time of your death?

 

So, Adeline I would love to know a bit more about you as you have been a mystery to me for so long.

Week 2 – Favourite Photo

The prompt for Week 2 of #52 ancestors is Favourite Photo. Since starting family history research I have gathered together quite a collection of photos from various family members, some of which have been unseen by other family members for generations. So, it is hard for to pinpoint just one photo as a favourite. I have decided that one of my ultimate favourites is the photo below of my mother Wendy Nichols and her sister Jayne, taken sometime in the 1960s. My mother is the one on the right with her sister Jayne on the left.

This is one of the first photos that became part of my collection, and I remember asking my mother about it and she can remember getting ready the night before the picture was taken. She can’t remember exactly how old she was, but she does remember the photo being taken and that it was before her parents marriage broke up. My mother was lucky enough that she had natural curls, so her preparation was pretty basic. However, she remembers her sister Jayne as having have her hair done up in rags so that she would have  beautiful curls for the photo. The two girls are dressed in identical dresses which were handmade by my grandmother, as nearly all of their clothes were.

I have always loved this photo not just because it allows me to see what my mother was like as a child but because I grew up hearing a lot about her sister Jayne. One of my middle names is Jayne so it was explained to me why my parents had chosen that name. Jayne was only a year older than my mother and so they were very close when growing up. Unfortunately, Jayne died at the age of 20 following kidney failure as a result of contracting Nephritis at the age of 14 and in her memory I was given her name as a middle name. As a relatively young child, I accepted that this was a sad event and promptly forgot about it except when people asked about my middle name. However, I can remember at the age of about 9-10 coming across a photo that I hadn’t seen before and upon asking who it was I was told that this was Jayne as a young woman before she died.

At the time, I didn’t think anything much of it beyond that it was a photo of someone I’d never met but in later years as a teenager I revisited the photo and realised that I resembled her. My mother had been telling me this for years and, being a teenager, I didn’t believe her but now I could see the resemblance. As an even older teenager, this realisation made me sad as my grandmother had gotten dementure which worsened as she aged and got sicker. I was just seventeen and a half years old when she died and in the last days and weeks before she died I can remember visiting her and not being recognised as Samantha, her granddaughter, but as her daughter Jayne.