In March 1844, the convict ship Blundell departed for Norfolk Island. She was the first convict ship to sail directly, rather than via Sydney. The Blundell was fitted out with a humane experiment; sufficient sleeping room for every convict to allow them to leave their bed without disturbing others. On board for the voyage was…
Category: Goodson Family
On “Tasmania” to… Tasmania!
When my 4x great grandmother Mary Ann Goodson departed from her homeland on the convict ship Tasmania in September 1844, I wonder, did she have any idea about what lay ahead? Was she frightened? Nervous? She had every reason to be worried; aged 42 she was not like the young girls that she’d stood next…
Not for all the tea in China
It was late May 1831, and the ship Larkins was at Deptford preparing for departure. She was to deliver a cargo to Van Diemen’s Land and then bring back tea from China. On board, William Evans (the Royal Navy’s Surgeon), began to write in his journal while Captain William Campbell, Lieutenant Espinasse, Ensign Fortescue, Assistant…
YESTERDAY DETECTED AT GOODSON’S POINT
I was sitting at home when the phone rang. It was my friend Judy at Windermere on the banks of the Tamar River near Launceston in Tasmania. This is where various members of my Goodson convict family lived from about 1832 until about 1881. James Goodson (the convict father of the Goodson family) served his…
The mystery of baby John
On 24 November 1846, the death of an eight month old baby was recorded in Hobart. His name was John Goodson. His parents were not named, he was simply a ‘child of a convict’. Who was baby John? From time to time (perhaps too often), female convicts gave birth to babies which were taken from…
Tamar Seed
Two hundred years ago, or thereabouts, an illiterate convict ploughman named James Goodson began sowing the seeds of a dynasty; first in poverty-stricken despair in Essex, and then in the rich and fertile north of Van Diemen’s Land, at Windermere on the banks of the River Tamar. Tamar Seed is a collection of family stories…
All at sea
Cold, starving, poor and desperate. A wife and two small children to feed; vagrancy, homelessness, had become a reality. With diminishing means and the lives of his family in his hands and on his conscious, he stole some oats – 2 1/2 pecks, not a small amount by any man’s standards, but maybe enough so…
KINdling 