Exploring the past

Exploring the Past

A repository of short pieces, fun facts, proof arguments, photographs
and more, concerning my ancestors who settled in Australia during
the last two hundred and thirty years.

On my mother’s side:

John Warby, Sarah Bentley, Thomas Terry and Ann Crouch, English
convicts from Hertfordshire, London, unknown and Hertfordshire
again who arrived between 1792 and 1816.

Alexander Macdonald, a Scottish convict from Edinburgh who
arrived in 1813.

John Campbell, a Scotsman from Caithness who arrived in Adelaide
in 1855 and sought his fortune on the Victorian goldfields.

Mary Jane Martin from Birkenhead Cheshire, England, who arrived in
the same year and married him in Adelaide – my mystery lady who
may have been Irish – something has to explain my Irish DNA.

Richard Davies, a Welsh minister and his wife Maggie Morgans,
whose reason for emigrating to Australia in 1887 remains a mystery.

On my father’s side:

Marcel Houtzaager, who was displaced by the German invasion of the
Netherlands in 1940 and arrived in Australia in 1950. His father was
Dutch and his mother Belgian. They met after his mother’s family
became refugees in the Netherlands following the German invasion of
Belgium in 1918.

Click on the relevant name, dive in and see if anything interests
you. Feel free to question and comment – many mysteries remain. I
will be adding entries from time to time.