As I’m getting close to the end of the A to Z challenge, I’ve had to be creative with the letters X and Y. Yesterday, I had X for ‘X mark’ and today my topic os Y for Yankee. When I originally sat down and planned what to write about for each letter of the alphabet, I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything for the letter Y. So, I did something I haven’t done in a very long time. I pulled out the dictionary in an attempt to think outside the box. Now, I was at my day job as a library assistant at the time so I had a nice fat dictionary in which to hunt for inspiration. Now, even in a nice fat dictionary Y isn’t exactly the largest section in the dictionary. Finally, I lit on the word Yankee and I suddenly had my inspiration.
Outside the USA, the Yankee nickname is often used to apply to any American but within America the term is generally used by Southerners to refer to people from the Northern states. Originally, the term was specifically used to refer to those from the New England states. My 3rd great grandfather William Henry Thompson was one such Yankee; born in Boston, Massachusetts, the heart of New England.
William Henry was born c.1836 to parents William Thompson and Elizabeth Laycock. As far as I’ve been able to work out, William was the first child born to the couple or at least the first to survive to adulthood. Census records have shown that William had a minimum of four younger siblings, all of whom lived to adulthood. There may have been more children who didn’t survive childhood, but as I’m not very familiar with US records I have yet to find any evidence of this. William Henry appears on the 1850 US Census living with his parents and siblings in Ward 8, Boston, Despite much googling, I have yet to find out exactly where in Boston Ward 8 would have been. I also haven’t found much general information on the whole ward system that was obviously in place.
By 1857 William Henry had left Boston and the US behind, arriving in Sydney, Australia on 3 April. He arrived as an unassisted immigrant, having worked as sort of the ship’s crew on his passage over. William Henry then disappears from the records until December 1872, when he marries Sarah White in Inverell, NSW. Where William Henry was between the time he arrive din Australia and when he married, I don’t know. But it is likely that he became an itinerant worker, travelling from place to place before ending up in the Inverell area. This fits with his movements after his marriage, as the family travelled vast distances from place to place. This can be tracked through the births and deaths of his children, who were born quite close together with a number of them dying in early childhood. This adds up to a move every 12-24 months, and not just to the next town either. Sometimes the places were hundreds of kilometres apart. On all official documents, William Henry is described as a Labourer and whenever a signature was needed he signed with an ‘X’ mark, indicating his illiteracy.
It seems that the longest place William Henry lived after his marriage was in Bingara, NSW where he and his family lived for at least three years. Bingara was also to be William Henry’s final resting place, as he died there on 4 December 1896 at the age of 60. His cause of death was Heart Disease, which he had suffered from for the past 6 months. He was buried in the Bingara Cemetery just one day later. He left behind a wife and seven children, one of whom was born four days after William’s death.
