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…
Category: Life and times
The Baron of Yarramalong
You briefly met my great grandfather William Hill in an earlier post. William Hill was the son of an Irishman named William Hill, the cousin of William Hill, the father of (George) William Hill and the grandfather of… you guessed it, William Hill. In 1937, one of the Williams featured in a handful of news…
Timothy Callaghan is good… and probably useful
Doctor Allayne, Mr Wise, and the Reverend Sheridon, all of the Immigration Board, came on board the ‘Samarang‘ as she lay in Sydney harbour. The crew of Samarang were tired and impatient to offload her passengers. After 108 days of being relentlessly tossed about on an unforgiving sea, they were all keen to go ashore….
Tuppence and Thrippence
I’ve got a new mystery to solve. Its about these pictures of my second great aunts. They are my great grandfather Francis Sendall’s sisters. They were working class people; their father was a butcher, their grandfather was a blacksmith. How did they afford to look so grand? And to be photographed? The women in the…
Barbaric Beauty
There’s something about Norfolk Island that keeps drawing me in. It’s a beautiful speck in the ocean with a frighteningly murderous past and its like there’s a big Norfolk Magnet pointing right at me, genetically speaking. It starts with James Neale, my 3x great grandfather. He was a British Redcoat who guarded convicts. He ‘met…
A life more ordinary: Francis Sendall, family man.
The story so far… Francis Sendall left his ordinary English home and family far behind to look for a life less ordinary… In 1892 Francis was living with missionaries in the New Hebrides, surrounded by cannibals and beset by hurricanes. From his plantation Sana Roba, on the island of Malo, he traded all things coconut…
Hurricanes, cannon balls and cannibals: Francis Sendall, the tropics
Following the disastrous end to his marriage to Jennie, Francis was looking for something exciting to fill the void. In September 1891, Francis left Sydney on board the steamer Waroonga, bound for the warm, tropical climate of the New Hebrides. After sailing around most of the islands of the New Hebrides, Francis bought several pieces…
A life less ordinary: Francis Charles Stewart Sendall, the early years
Meet my maternal great grandfather, Francis Charles Stewart Sendall, an ordinary man who it appears liked to chew on the left side of his considerable mustachio. Francis was born in Bath, England, in 1852 to parents William Sendall and Caroline Neale. The Sendalls were ordinary working-class people. William Sendall was a butcher, and his father…
Shining a light on my Ancestry
For the past 40 years I’ve been interested in where I am from, whose blood flows through my veins and what characteristics they gave to me. What I’ve learned is that my ancestors lived very ordinary lives, but sometimes ordinary is extraordinary! I want to share my journey with you by shining a light on…
KINdling 