#52 Ancestors Week 44 Trick or Treat

#52  Ancestors Week 44 - Trick or Treat

Celebrating Halloween is a very recent phenomenon in Australia so I have chosen to write about some of the treats in my 35 years of ancestor research – and a couple of people who have proved to be quite tricky.

Amongst the treats: 

•        Having the scraps of memoir that both of my parents wrote.  Dad’s was truncated by his increasing dementia, but his reminiscences about his early life, particularly his school and University days, are very detailed and evocative.
•        Visiting Mum daily in her nursing home after she had a stroke (July 2018), I was grateful for her unimpaired speech and memory.  She was a wonderful storyteller.
•      Receiving from my cousin Mark, his mother’s family memorabilia, which mostly comprised postcards sent to and from her mother, my grandmother, by family and friends.  Most date from the first twenty years of the 20^th century.
•      The box of McCann and Keogh memorabilia and photographs that came to us from my mother-in-law, Kathleen McCann.  I had actually been through the photos with her when we created an album for her 65^th birthday (1979) so most were identified.
•      My mother-in-law also gave me some family silver from Ireland and the travelling writing desk that belonged to her great uncle, the priest Father Kieran Kilroe of Athlone, Ireland.
•      The amateur historians on Facebook pages like “Good Old Days in Lismore” who have come to my rescue with information about faces and places when I have been unable to identify photos.

 One of my trickiest ancestors is my maternal 2x great grandfather, William George Morgan.  On his marriage papers (Marriage to Bridget Mary “Bedelia” Power on Sydney, 1853), he stated he was born in New Zealand in 1831.  Ten years later, he is shown living in Liverpool St, Sydney, working as a wood turner.  He and Bedelia had ten children together in 16 years and he died in Surry Hills in 1880 aged only 49.

I know nothing more.  There were no New Zealand birth records in the 1830s, and we don’t know when he came to Australia.  There was a ship’s carpenter called John Morgan who might have been his father - he worked for a wealthy ship owner called Thomas Street, of Sussex St, who had a few New Zealanders working for him.  William’s death certificate names his father as John, and calls him a master mariner – this could be a conflation of his real position.

The other really tricky one is my paternal 3x great grandfather William Barry.  William’s daughter Mary married three times, the first to my ancestor, William Crummy, a man many years her senior.  When this marriage took place (1859) they were living on or near the goldfields around Bathurst/Orange.  Mary’s death certificate states that she was born in Bathurst in 1842 and her father was called William.  The informant didn’t know the mother’s name. 

Perhaps one day I will tackle the long list of convicts and others named William Barry in the colony in 1842.  It seems like a daunting task.