All family historians have brick walls. The ancestors who simply seem to have
vanished into thin air; the ancestors who left no footprints; the ancestors
from places with poor record keeping.
These are my big brick walls:
1.
William George Morgan, maternal 2 x great
grandfather.
On his marriage in Sydney in 1853, he
claimed to have been born in New Zealand in 1831. On his death certificate his father is named
“John”.
This is almost all we know. 1831 is too early for NZ records, and
newspaper searches have failed to find him.
There weren’t many people in NZ in 1831 except Maori, whalers and missionaries.
I haven’t been able to find his entry to
NSW either – sometime before 1853.
So the search continues.
2.
William Barry, paternal 3 x great grandfather
William was the father of Mary, who married
3 times, the first time to our 2x great grandfather, William Crummy.
Mary was born in Bathurst NSW in about
1842. It’s possible that her father was
a sawyer, and also possible that he was an ex-convict. There are several convicts called William
Barry but the lack of any other information makes identification difficult.
3.
The Irish
a.
Ancestors of Kathleen Keogh, my mother -in –
law.
Kathleen knew who her grandparents were, but beyond that is very hard,
especially as they have common Irish names: Kelly, Dolan, Kilroe and all of
them with alternative spellings (O’Kelly, Doolan, Kilroy etc)
b.
Ancestors of Michael and Ann Gleeson, my
paternal 2xgreat grandparents.
I
had high hopes when I visited Ennis, in County Clare, Ireland in 2017 that I
would be able to crack open this wall, but in fact I ended with more
questions. Michael’s wife is clearly Ann
Hehir, but the local genealogists questioned the origins ascribed to her by
other members of my family on the basis that she had been born too far away (in
the next county) to be his likely spouse.
Perhaps the single biggest lesson
from all of these – particularly the Irish – is that the poor and illiterate
are the hardest to keep track of. They
owned no property, they kept no records, they wrote no letters. If not for the Church records of their
baptisms, marriages and deaths, their lives would be without any official
markers.
All of this makes me grateful for
the convicts in the family. Nobody has
better and more comprehensive records than a prisoner. Paul’s late cousin, Dick Sansom, who wrote
the McCann story in his book, “With Conviction” had reason to be very grateful
to all the felons in the family for the abundance of paperwork they left behind. Dick died, however, with a huge brick wall –
the fate of Mary Fitzgerald, convict wife of Peter McCann, who was the first
member of the family to come to the colony.
Peter McCann drowned in 1806, and
Mary quickly married again, to James Neill (Neale) another convict. Mary had small children – another marriage was
the best form of protection both for her and the children. She and James Neale had two children, James
and Bridget, before she was again widowed, in 1811.
Mary married a third time, to
John Hill (another convict) in 1813. Two
more children, Eleanor and Elizabeth, were born.
No death has ever been found for
John Hill but some of the McCann family genealogists have concluded that he did
die, and that Mary married again. In
1845, a Henry Cooper (bachelor) married Mary Hill (spinster) at St Andrew’s Church,
Sydney. This same couple appear two
years later as witnesses at the wedding of James McCann, at the same church.
Mary Cooper died in December 1870
at the age of 85. Her birthplace is
recorded as Ireland. All of these pieces of circumstantial evidence have pretty
much convinced me that this is the solution to Dick’s brick wall.
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