You guessed it, I’m still waiting for the missing link. New DNA matches come and go, but none of any significance in the hunt for my Mystery Great Grandfather, dear old MG. Not yet.

In the meantime I haven’t been resting on my Christmas derriere, no no no, I’ve been working quite hard – in the old traditional way.

A quick re-cap. In 1909, my grandmother, Edna May Willock, was born in a Sydney hospital and then adopted by another family. Finding the truth about her birth mother, Miriam May Willock, has been a major focus of my DNA journey.

I got to thinking, what do I really know about the Willocks? Why was Miriam alone in Sydney when her family lived in the Bathurst area or later, in the Mallanganee area? Where was the family support? Did she have any support?

So I’ve been digging a little deeper, looking at records, reading local histories, buying birth, marriage and death records, trying to form a picture of life in the Willock family. And this is what I’ve learned…

Miriam’s father, Edward Willock, was born in Carcoar, about 50km south-west of Bathurst New South Wales. Carcoar was established in the late 1830s and by the time of Edward’s birth in the 1850s it was the third most populous town west of the Blue Mountains and the Great Dividing Range, just behind Bathurst and Wellington in the population stakes.

It was rural but it wasn’t tranquil rural living. It was the early days of the gold rush, gold fever was in full swing and the town became the banking and administrative centre for the area. With that, came a criminal element. The town was a hub for renegade convicts, horse thieves and bushrangers. On 13 July 1863, renowned Australian bushranger Ben Hall, along with Johnny Gilbert and John O’Meally, held up the Carcoar Commercial Bank in broad daylight. It was Australia’s first daylight bank robbery. 

Edward Willock and Winifred Davies (otherwise known around the region as Ted and Minnie) were married at the Wesleyan Parsonage in Bathurst in 1882 and in the ensuing twenty years, Minnie popped out nine little Willock babies who were all born in the general Bathurst region. Their last baby was born in Tuena, 85km south of Bathurst, in 1902. Coincidentally, their eldest daughter gave birth to a baby in Tuena that year.

By the time Miriam was giving birth to Edna in 1909, Ted and Minnie had moved more than 760kms north to Black Camp Creek, near Tabulam and Mallanganee, almost on the Queensland border. It was half a world away from Carcoar, from where they had lived and worked for decades, and from where they had raised their nine children.

I wonder what motivated them to move so far away from everything and everyone that they knew? In the first decade of the 20th Century, Crown land in the Tabulam area was being opened up for ‘free selection before survey’. The idea of free selection was to bring land within reach of the working classes, and encourage mixed farming and grazing rather than wool production. Don’t let the label fool you – the land wasn’t free, there was an annual payment. Were Ted and Minnie meaning to take up free selection?

Tabulam and Mallanganee was fine timber and dairy country, with opportunities for prospecting in the rivers and streams – was it one of those things, or the whole combination, that was appealing enough for Ted and Minnie to make such a big move?

Was there something in Tuena that they needed to leave behind?

Records show that Ted and Minnie and their four youngest children, all sons, made their lives in Mallanganee. All four of their daughters and their eldest son may have gone to Mallanganee for a while or they may have visited at some stage, but all of them are are notably absent from the Mallanganee records. They are, however, very visible in the records of other places that are nowhere near Mallanganee.

It seems there was a divide between Ted, Minnie and their older children. A literal Great Dividing Range.

Miriam gave birth to Edna in Sydney, more than 700kms from Mallanganee. Nothing in the records suggests that Miriam ever went to Mallanganee.

And yet, it can’t be a coincidence that the father of the three brothers, one of whom my DNA results seem to suggest is probably MG, was living just 40kms from Mallanganee at the time that Ted and Minnie made their big move… can it?