TheBanyanTree: Family matters

[Janice Money]

It's hard now to remember why I started.  Probably, like most people, I just
wanted to know where I came from and, maybe, the mystery of my
great-grandmother made that desire a little more compelling than it would
otherwise have been.  The how of it is easy; the internet and, in
particular, the Colonial Family Link database at the Tasmanian government
archives office.

 

I had a name, Jessie Biggs, and a story; she was never married to the man
who was my great-grandfather which meant, of course, that my grandfather was
a bastard.  Poor Pop didn't find out until he was in his 50s when, for some
reason, he had to get a copy of his birth certificate.  He was shattered to
learn that the man he'd always thought of as his father wasn't his father
and that the name he'd thought was his own wasn't.  As for the name of his
real father, by the time I was interested to know what it was the matter had
been hush-hush within the family for decades, Pop was dead, and nobody else
was really sure of anything except that it was an odd name.  For years I had
the impression that it was Postlethwaite or something equally obscure.

 

So I began by entering Jessie Biggs into the appropriate name fields in the
Family Link database and clicked search.  Only one result came up.  Clicking
the link on that page brought me to the record.  Damwright.  The father's
name was Robert Damwright.  Who has ever heard of anyone named Damwright?
Not me.  I put Damwright into whatever search engine was the big one in
those days and got not a single hit.

 

Over the years I've made several more or less desultory efforts at finding
out more.  In 2004 I actually went to the trouble of ordering copies of
Pop's birth certificate and Jessie Biggs' marriage certificate.  From the
former, with its curlicued cursive, I began to suspect that Damwright could
have been a mistranscription of Wainwright.  From the latter I learned that
Jessie Biggs' mother was Helen Biggs and her (reported) father was John
Bull.  So Jessie was a bastard too.  

 

Further searching eventually revealed that John was actually Joseph, that
Helen had another daughter (Ellen) by him and that, lastly, she had a son by
a fellow named Chung Tue, or Tue Chung.  Ellen, Helen's daughter, also had
children by a Chinese fellow.

 

I found Joseph Bull's parents.  They were William Bull and Mary Ann McLaren.
Both were convicts.  He was a pickpocket transported for life when he was
about 16.  She was a prostitute, transported for a mere 7 years.  After
having sought and been granted permission to do so, they did actually marry.
But I could find nothing more about Helen Biggs, or about Helen Briggs, or
about Ellen Briggs.  Where did this woman come from?  What was she doing
taking up with a Chinese fellow?  Wasn't interracial marriage frowned on in
those days?  Maybe she wasn't European.  How could I find out?  

 

It was all too hard so that's where I left it until about six weeks ago when
the urge to know about Helen grabbed me again.  Not knowing where to begin
to look I gave the job to a genealogical researcher.  In the meantime I
started googling other family names and discovered that there is vastly more
genealogical data on the web now than there used to be.  There are even
three Damwrights but two of them are my grandfather and great-grandfather
and the other seems to be a nickname used by a man who's some sort of
competitive shooter and lives in Carolina or somewhere like that.  

 

In a nutshell, I've discovered that I have not two but at least five, and
likely seven, convicts up my family tree.  The others include a
counterfeiter and forger, an army deserter, and three thieves.  Of the
thieves two are the parents of the mysterious Robert Damwright, assuming his
name was really Wainwright.  That fellow shot through to Western Australia
and turns up north of Kalgoorlie in 1903.  I know because someone stole his
grey mare and that event made the papers.  He lived in places such as
Kookynie, Meekatharra and Wiluna.  If north-east Tasmania was remote in the
very early 20th century (and it was) the places where that bloke went were
so far beyond remote that the word has no real meaning.

 

And Helen Biggs, the woman who lived in sin with an habitual drunk who was
the son of a pub-keeper before moving in with a Chinese man and bearing his
son?  She turns out to have been Ellen Rachel Biggs, a member of a very
respectable family indeed.  Ironically, her great-uncle Abraham Biggs was a
Methodist preacher who moved to Tasmania not just to preach but also to
fight against the demon drink.  Her father was a carpenter and
organ-builder.  He's responsible for building the organ now housed at the
Albert Hall in Launceston, for making playable the organ at St David's
cathedral in Hobart, for building sundry other organs in both Tasmania and
Victoria and is a bit of a legend among the members of the Organ Historical
Trust of Australia.  

 

Also, it turns out that, while not common, it certainly wasn't unheard of in
those days for European women to marry  Chinese men. Some of them even
travelled to China to meet the rest of the family and lived there a while.
Serious disapproval of such unions came later. I suspect that was because
new European currents of thought took a while to get to tiny towns in remote
places and start to influence the way Europeans thought of people of other
races.  I suspect that Helen Biggs looked at Chung Tue and simply saw a man,
not a lesser man.

 

So now I'm just waiting to find out when Robert Wainwright moved to West Oz.
If it was before February or March 1898 that will rule him out and I'll have
to think again about who might have been Pop's Dad.  Or maybe not.  "It's a
wise child who knows his own father."   (Apparently that's from Homer's
Odyssey.)

 

Janice