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Kevin Harradine's Genealogy Website |
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Where did I come from? See the genealogy page. |
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To contact me: |
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Genealogy and other ramblings |
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Why?
My interest in genealogy was first sparked by my father Ron Harradine. He was a great conversationalist and was always full of stories of everything including his relatives and ancestors.
Most school students do a project on family history in the early years of high school and if they find out the full details of their eight great grandparents they are deservedly proud. My project in year 7 not only included all eight great grandparents but went back six generations on one branch! The advantage I had, apart from Dad’s love of talking, was that due to a compression of generations, less than the common average of 25 years, and a close extended family, he had clear memories of conversing with his great grandmother Catherine Bourke about her family history. Dad and his Granny Bourke, or Big Granny, were only 59 years apart in age and she lived to 1945 when Dad was 12. Dad was the eldest son of the eldest daughter of a WW1 widow Kathleen Beer who lived near to him in Glebe, Sydney, with her mother and as such he was often sent round to the two grannies to run errands or help in some way.
Unlike most school projects it was not left in a bottom drawer and forgotten, I slowly added to my project materials while still a teenager and also whilst in my twenties. I do rue some missed opportunities during these times. I should really have followed up on a guy I met from Kempsey named Mills when I was 15 and wish I took some information with me to the UK in 1988 when I was 23. I was most likely afraid that people would think I was weird at those ages for quizzing them about their family history.
After getting married my interest was sparked again whilst I was working close to the NSW State Library and major life events such as dad’s death and the birth of my own children. In my thirties I worked with one guy, Ross Beattie, who was really into family history which again sparked more interest and I began to list in the genealogical research directory and on the recently formed World Wide Web in 1995.
I still haven’t answered why. Simply researching my family back as far as I can go for the sake of it would get tedious without some overall objective. Even in 1977 I wondered which countries my ancestors had come from. As both my parents claimed Irish ancestry I wanted to know how Irish were they (not as a euphemism for stupid). Imagining that Australian nationality didn’t exist what percentage Irish, or English, or whatever, am I? When someone said “kiss the Irish side of my arse” did they really have an Irish side? By the way, none of my ancestors came to Australia to gain a new nationality they were all British subjects and had arrived here well before Australia became a nation.
How?
While my starting point was the oral history from my father and the small amount of real research he had done it pays to do the routine investigation from the source documents. It is too easy to get sucked in by an inaccurate retold fact. Dad told me that Granny Bourke’s grandfather was a British Army Major named James Charles Mills. It turned that out he was never higher than a private in a 16 year army career. After going through the routine of getting all the certificates for his descendants I was at the stage of looking for “Major” Mills when I found out that another of his descendants, Ken Riordan, had done all the research on Private Mills already. His booklet called “To The Lucky Country” and the book “Commandant of Solitude” are two good sources of information on the real James Mills.
Receiving a certificate from Births Deaths and Marriages is actually very exiting as the information it contains can lead to so many other avenues. E.g. receiving a death certificate can lead to enough detail to get a marriage cert or birth cert or even parent’s names. Usually a relative reported the death so you could even find out a siblings spouse’s name.
What?
Once I made contact with other researchers the growth of my knowledge of my family tree was sometimes explosive. They were usually old ladies writing to me or returning my letters. “You’ve got another letter from one of your girlfriends” my wife would say. They often contained thorough details of three or more generations from where we connected which was often 3 or 4 generations back already.
I had to compile multisheet workbooks in excel in the early nineties to contain the volume of information I was receiving. By the mid nineties I purchased software to hold this data I was up around a thousand people!
What did I find out? I have at least twenty ancestors that arrived in Australia between 1811 and 1887. The first was a Scotswoman of a disreputable background Grizel (or Grace) Johnstone. I say disreputable as she had already been banned from the Edinburgh city region prior to the theft that led to her transportation to Australia. She had a multitude of children to at least three fathers. One was even born (or was it conceived) on the ship she came out on. Her future husband William Watson (aka Reid) was a cobbler from Aberdeen convicted of forgery and transported to NSW for 7 years. It seems unusual these days that a man would marry a woman years older than him that already had 3 children but there was a severe shortage of women at the time as men out numbered them at the time. So he probably counted himself lucky and it is likely that she lead a more honest life. Thankfully the belief in the convict “stain” has died out.
The last of my ancestors to come out to NSW were my Harradines in 1887. They came from a village in Cambridgeshire named Oakington and were most likely suffering a poor rural life before making the decision to travel to the other side of the world for a better life. They actually traveled in one of the first steam ships to come out Australia on a regular basis the RMS Ormuz.
Who?
Essentially I found that I am descended from English, Irish and Scots who all came to Australia for different reasons. The first two mentioned above were convicts, the last were free settlers who paid their own way, others were usually soldiers, or gold seekers, or subsidised emigrants.
In round fractions and assuming Australian is not a nationality I can say that I am more than half English, one third Irish and one tenth Scots. Both my parents were a similar mix as they are descended from many marriages that were mixed e.g. English-Scots, English-Irish.
There were also a large number of marriages of mixed religion, a real no-no in olden days. For instance I am Catholic married to an Anglican. My Father was a Catholic that married an Anglican, his father was an Anglican that married a Catholic. I could go on and on with these combinations, however one interesting one was the Catholic Irishman who married a Protestant Irishwoman. Their son Edward James Bourke received two baptisms and got married in a civil service due to his subsequent dislike of religion and the trouble that it caused! |
