TheBanyanTree: Family matters

[Kitty]

I commend you for your tenacity!  I, too, have little knowledge about my 
ancestors.  As a young person, I could have, should have asked, but I was 
not curious.  And there were no stories told about the "early days". 
Perhaps there was nothing to tell.

Once my parents died and my children grew to adults, my daughter asked about 
her grandparents and their families.  When I could tell her nothing, she 
expressed an interest in doing a search as you're doing.  I hope she's as 
successful (and tenacious) as you've become.

Kitty

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Janice Money" <pmon3694 at bigpond.net.au>
To: <thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2011 5:35 AM
Subject: TheBanyanTree: Family matters


> 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
>
>