Doris Moss, Convicts and Norfolk Island

https://olneyfamilyarchives.blogspot.com

I hope you have read my blog on "Doris Moss, Napoleon and St Helena".   As I was writing that blog I realised there were two families involved here - not just the father of Doris, but also the mother of Doris and their families.  Each side of the family warrants their own blog!

To think that just several months ago we knew next to nothing about Doris Olney (nee Moss), and now through some research, there is so much to share with you all. I will be repeating myself a little as I need to establish the generations back from Doris, which includes her father Clement and mother Matilda, back to her "First Fleeter" arriving on Norfolk Island.

I dedicate this blog to "Narnie".

Sue was “googling” around and came across the Olney Family Archives Blog as that was her maiden name.  She was quite emotional to see a photo of her “Narnie” who died when she was a young child. Up until that moment, Sue had never seen her face, and as she read the caption underneath - Doris Gwendolyne Moss 1896 - 1961, she realised that apart from knowing her as "Narnie", she didn't even know her name.  Sue also saw a photo of her father at the age of 2 with very fair hair, for she never knew he had fair hair as a child. Sue emailed me with questions about her “Narnie”, Doris, as she is the grand-daughter of Arthur and Doris Olney (nee Moss). Those photos are attached below.

Doris Gwendolyne Olney nee Moss 9 June 1896 - 27 July 1961

Roy (born 1917), Allan (born 1919) & Keith Olney (born 1915).

The family knew very little about “Narnie”.  About all we have known is that Doris was born in New Zealand on 9 June 1896, her Mother was a Glasson and died when she was about 3, and she was brought up in an Orphanage in Sydney. It is known that Doris worked for a Mrs. Ruth Vane and her daughter Isobel in their Pastry shop in Sydney before coming to Melbourne. Doris married Arthur Olney in 1915 in Melbourne when she was nearly 19 years of age.  Sue seemed to think there was a connection with South Africa. So our search began.

Firstly there was the announcement of the marriage between Arthur and Doris in “The Argus” on Wednesday 14^th April 1915.

Marriage: Olney – Moss.  On the 16^th March 1915 at St.Leonards Presbyterian Church, Brighton Beach by the Rev Hume Robertson BA, Arthur Edgar Olney, 2^nd son of David and Annie Olney of “Lipson” Elm St, Hawthorn (late of Yea, Victoria) to Doris Gwendolyne Moss, daughter of Clem and the late Tilley Moss, late of New Zealand.  Present address St.Johns Avenue, Camberwell.

"Lipson" 44 Elm Street, Hawthorn where Arthur Olney was living with his parents in 1915.

 

44 St Johns Avenue, Camberwell, the first home of Arthur and Doris Olney.

We now had the names of Doris Moss' parents - Clem and Tilley Moss.

Tilley was short for Matilda! “Geni” was very helpful with a large family tree for Matilda Louisa Smith who was born in Hamilton, Tasmania on 29 October 1857 to parents Henry and Henrietta Smith. They had 9 children and moved to New Zealand late 1860s. The Smith family ancestors have been researched back to 1778 in England and 1770 in Ireland. More about them later. Thank you to Maria in New Zealand who managers the Smith tree on “Geni” and “Ancestry”.

Matilda Louisa Smith married Arthur Evelyn Glasson (born 1856 in Boreham, Hampshire, England) on 5 February 1880 in St John, Leeston, Canterbury, New Zealand.

Together they had 4 children:

Leonard Arthur Glasson, born 17 December 1881 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Winifred Lucy Glasson, born 21 September 1883 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Lionel Evelyn Glasson, born 5 October 1885 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Stillborn son, born 1 June 1892 at 60 Matheson’s Rd, Linwood, to wife of late Arthur E.Glasson. (Same address that Clement George Moss was living at in 1896 – NZ Electoral Roll).

Arthur Evelyn Glasson died 18 January 1892 in Leeston, Canterbury, New Zealand, leaving Matilda with 3 young children – 11, 9 & 7.

 

What happened to Arthur and Matilda’s three young children after their Father and Mother died in 1892 and 1898?

Leonard married Myrtle Jessie Waghorn (born 1889) on 27 November 1912 in Claremont, Perth, Western Australia. Leonard died 1963 at Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia and Myrtle died 1972 in Malvern, Victoria, Australia. They had a son Edgar Leonard Glasson born 1914 & died 1972.

Winifred married John Addy (born 1882) on 23 February 1914 in Kensington & Chelsea, Middlesex, England. Winifred died October 1970 in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England and John died 1972. They had 2 sons - Alleyne John Addy (1917 – 1994), and Robert Francis Addy (1919 – 1993).

Lionel married Elizabeth (Elsie) Mary Hume (born 1886) at 61 Hope St, Spotswood, Victoria, Australia. Elsie died 20 June 1916 at Bendigo, Victoria, Australia with no issue.

Matilda Glasson (nee Smith) married Clement George Moss on 30 June 1894 at Church of the Good Shepherd, Linwood, Christchurch, New Zealand.

New Zealand Newspapers 12 July 1894 and 6 August 1894 gave us - 

Marriages: Moss – Glasson. On June 30^th 1894 at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Linwood, by the Rev.H.J.C.Gilbert, Clement George, 5th son of the late Walter B.Moss of Ashburton and the nephew of F.J.Moss esq. British Resident at Raratonga, to Matilda Louisa, widow of the late Arthur E.Glasson.

Together they had 2 children:

Doris Gwendolyne Moss, born 9 June 1896 in Nelson, New Zealand. Her birth Certificate says her father Clement George Moss, 25 years, was born in St. Helena.

Doris Gwendolyn Moss born 9 June 1896 in Nelson, New Zealand.

Claude Clement Moss, born 10 August 1898 in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.

When and why did Clement & Matilda Moss leave New Zealand and come to Adelaide?  Did Doris ever know she had 3 Glasson step-siblings?

23 October 1898 Matilda Louisa Moss died in Adelaide. She was buried on 25 October 1898 at West Terrace Cemetery Adelaide (Road 3, Path 29, Site 14).

Deaths:  Moss- October 23^rd 1898 at “Morton”, Adelaide, South Australia, Matilda Louisa wife of Clement G.Moss and the widow of the late Arthur E. Glasson, aged thirty nine years. (New Zealand “Star” 26 October 1898).

What happened to Doris (2 years) and Claude (2 months) now that their mother Matilda had died? 

Clement George Moss married again in England.

Clement George Moss 1870 - 1913

Clement George Moss was on U.K. 1911 Electoral Roll, 38 years, born 1873 at St. Helena, lodger at 50 Oxford Road, Islington, widower, 1 child, Commercial Traveller in Stationary.

Clement George Moss, 40 years, born about 1873, widower, married Emily Swift, 34 years, spinster on 1 September 1913 at Holy Trinity Dalston Borough, Hackney, London.  A Confectioner, father Walter B Moss (dec), Solicitor. Bride’s father Frederick James Swift.

Clement and Emily Moss had 2 daughters and 2 sons:

Vera Emily Moss, born 6 October 1914, Clement Frederick Moss, born 10 June 1916, Cyril Herbert Moss, born 25 July 1919, and Kathleen Marjorie Moss, born 6 December 1922.

Clement George Moss died March 1933, aged 60 years, at Edmonton, England.

I have now had a contact with some of Clement's grandchildren in England, and found his two daughters are still alive.

Did Doris ever know her father went to England and married Emily Swift and that she had 4 step- siblings?

Baby Claude Moss grew up in New Zealand.

What happened to Claude Clement Moss after his mother died when only 10 weeks old?  It would appear that Claude was "adopted" (whether officially or not is unknown) by his father's eldest brother Valentine Rofe Moss who married Elizabeth Ellen Fricker on 21 June 1884 in Greymouth, New Zealand.

Valentine Moss died at the Bank of New Zealand, Westport on Christmas Eve – 24 December 1912. Claude would have been just 14 years old when Valentine died.  I appears that Claude continued to live with and look after Elizabeth Moss in her older years, even after he married Marjorie Huai Shepherd in 1926.

24 September 1926 Claude & Marjorie Moss performed at “The Sailors Friendly Society”.  Claude lived at 55 Kainui Road, Wellington, New Zealand from 1919 – 1949 (at least). Claude Moss was a Captain in the N.Z. Army in 1942 (No.69403). On 8 March 1940 Savage Claude Moss captivated “the boys” at camp. Claude got a “hole in one” 23 September 1937.  

Marjorie & Claude Moss.

Claude Moss with son Barry.

Claude Moss with son Barry.

 

Marjorie Moss with son Barry.

 
Elizabeth Moss died 2 May 1933 in Wellington, Marjorie died 1972 in U.K. and Claude died 1989 in New Zealand.

Claude and Marjorie Moss  travelled back and forth a number of times between England and New Zealand because Marjorie came from England. There is a Passenger list for Claude and son Barry Moss who sailed on “Akaroa” from Wellington to Southampton, U.K. on 6 October 1950. 

Barry Moss became a talented Musician.
1958 Barry Moss: "Essay" for strings (Publisher Novello). Commissioned by the New Zealand Music Society,  this is written in a modern dissonant style but is clear enough in design and quite well written.
1958 The Monthly Music Record Volume 88-89 Page 114.(Publisher Novello) Barry Moss: "Essay" "This is a solid piece ... will be most effective in performance".
1958 "The Chesterian" Barry Moss has given us a very fine op.3 in his "Essay" for strings.
New Zealand Herald 27 December 1961. "New Zealand composer Barry Moss, currently working in London as a music copyist, has received a commission from the Wind Music Society, London, following on from his twice winning the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize.  In 1957 the New Zealand Music Society commissioned his "Essay" for strings which was first played at Wigmore Hall, conducted by fellow New Zealander John Matheson".
1961 British Broadcasting Corporation. Barry Moss: Title "Essay" for string orchestra, Category String Orchestra. 
1961 British Music Collection. An archive of Scores, recordings and information for U.K. Contempary music.
1971 "London Calling" Barry Moss born 1930 in New Zealand.  He came from New Zealand in 1950 as composition scholar to Royal Academy of Music.  Twice awarded Royal Philharmonic Society Prize.  Music performed at I.S.C.M. Festival (Stockholm) 1956 and by BBC and NZBC. 
   

What happened to Doris Moss between 1898 and 1915 is still a mystery!

The Smith Family.

We do know Matilda Louisa Smith's parents were Henry Smith (1823 - 1910) and Henrietta Letitia Smith (1832 - 1898). Henriette was a staunch suffragette in New Zealand and her 3 daughters - Matilda, Henrietta, and Elizabeth were founding members of the New Zealand Council for Women who fought for women's right to vote in 1896 in New Zealand.

Together they had nine children:
1. Henrietta Grace Smith born 7 July 1856 in Hamilton Tasmania and died 1948 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Married 1. Albert Godfrey Saunders born 1844 and died 1902. They had 9 children.
Married 2. William Thomas Champion Mills born 10 August 1838 New Norfolk, Tasmania and died 4 August 1927 Christchurch, New Zealand.

2. Matilda Louisa Smith born 29 October 1857 in Hamilton, Tasmania and died 25 October 1898 in Adelaide, South Australia.
Married 1. Arthur Evelyn Glasson, born 1856 Boreham, Hampshire, England, and died 18 January 1892 Avonside, Christchurch, New Zealand.  3 children - Leonard, Winifred and Lionel Glasson.
Married 2. Clement George Moss born 7 November 1870 in St Helena and died March 1933 Edmonton, Middlesex, England. They had 2 children - Doris and Claude Moss.

3. Ada Clara Beatrice Smith born 8 July 1859 Tasmania, Australia and died 1937 Perth, Australia.
Married Archibald Lewis Glasson born 1857 Sherbourne, Sussex, England and died 18 January 1899  Menzies, Western Australia. They had 4 children.

4. Cecilia Annie Smith born 1862 Tasmania and died 30 November 1918 Featherston, New Zealand.
Married Arthur Jary born 23 April 1852 Heacham, Norfolk, England and died 5 August 1911 Featherston, New Zealand.  They had 4 children.

5. Henry Herbert Smith born 27 April 1866 Tasmania, Australia and died 1930 New Zealand.

6. Sydney Edgar Langford Smith born 6 January 1869 Christchurch, New Zealand and died 11 November 1950 Wentworth Falls, New South Wales, Australia.
Married Charlotte Emily Webb born 19 September 1874 Darlinghurst, New South Wales and died 1963 Kellyville, New South Wales, Australia.  They had 1 child.

7. Elizabeth Herbert Smith born 31 March 1864 Cambridge, Tasmania.
Married Edward Thomas Bradshaw born 1856.  They had 1 child.

8. Evelyn Laura Smith born 13 September 1870 Christchurch, New Zealand and died 18 July 1956.

9. Amelia Eleanor Gertrude Smith born 1873 and died 18 July 1962.
Married James Bowie born 1871 and died 1961.  They had 1 child.

First National Council of Women of New Zealand at the Inaugural Meeting in New Zealand in 1896. Elizabeth seated centre with white front.  Henrietta second left standing.

Inaugural meeting in Christchurch in 1896.  Matilda 3rd left middle. Elizabeth white front centre of photo.  Henrietta standing back left.

Next generation up Henrietta Smith's family.

Henrietta's father was Henry Laporte Smith born 2 July 1792 Ireland and died 1 May 1877 in Launceston, Tasmania.  Henry was convicted for 7 years on 4 December 1841 for Forgery. On 10 February1842 Henry was on Gosport Hulks in Hampshire.  He was transported on "York" to Australia for fraudulently signing a cheque to get the Langford inheritance.

Henry Married 1. Maria Louisa Langford born 1804 March, Cork, Cork Island and died 2 March 1841 St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Island.

Together Henry and Maria had 8 children:
1. Eliza deLaporte Smith born 1825 Dublin, Ireland and died Winchester, Hampshire, England.
2. Charlotte Smith born 1827 and died 1840.
3. John William Smith born 1830 England and died 1855 Crimea, Ukraine.
4. Henrietta Letitia Smith born 1832 Chelsea, Middlesex, England and died 2 February 1898 Christchurch, New Zealand.  Her mother died when she was 9 and she became a Ward of well to-do family friends, - the Herberts. Henrietta came to Australia to be a Governess and married Henry Smith in 1854.
5. Maria Louisa Langford Smith born 1835 Dublin, Ireland and died 17 November 1920 Auburn, New South Wales, Australia.
6. Rowland Smith born 1836 England.
7. Susanna Langford Smith born 1838 England and died 27 October 1922 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia,
8. James Smith born 1839 St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands and died 1883.

Henry Married 2. Clara Yates Cummins born 1813 Plymouth, Devon, England and died October 1898, Surrey, United Kingdom, on 10 June 1841 in St Martin, Guernsey.

Henry and Clara Smith had 1 child - Margaret Isabella Smith born 10 April 1842 Fort George, Guernsey, Channel Islands and died June 1860 in London. Margaret was born after her father was convicted.

Next generation up Henry Smith's family.

Henry's father was George Smith born 1778 Solihull, Warwickshire, England and died 5 January 1858 Hobart Town, Tasmania, Australia.

George Smith married Grace Mossisby born 28 January 1797 Norfolk Island, New South Wales, Australia and died 31 July 1827 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Together George and Grace had 7 children:

1. Grace Smith born 21 June 1812 Clarence Plains, Tasmania and died 3 March 1897 Hobart.

2. William Smith born 1814 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

3. George James Smith born 4 November 1816 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

4. James Smith born 1819 Hobart, Tasmania and died 1896 Southport, Tasmania, Australia.

5. Richard Smith born 1821 Hobart, Tasmania and died 1886.

6. Henry Smith born 17 May 1823 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and died 7 January 1910 Christchurch, New Zealand.

7. Ann Smith born 1825 Clarence Plains, Tasmania.

Grace Morrisby's parents Ann Brooks and James Morrisby were Convicts and "Second Fleeters" to Norfolk Island. 

Grace Morrisby's mother was Ann Lavender Brooks who arrived in Norfolk Island as a Convict in 1790 with a young son William Brooks born 1786 England.

On 25 April 1791 Ann Lavender Brooks gave birth to Richard Brooks Larson who died 13 July 1849 in Ralphs Bay, Tasmania, Australia.

Grace Morrisby's father was James/John Morrisby born 1756 Cawood, Yorkshire, England and died 29 May 1839 Clarence, Tasmania, Australia.

5 November 1791 James/John Morrisby married Ann Lavender Brooks born 1765 Middlesex, England. Ann died 2 February 1813 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Together James and Ann Morrisby had 5 children:

1. George James Morrisby born 25 November 1793 Norfolk Island, Australia and died 14 November 1826 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

2. Grace Morrisby born 28 January 1797 Norfolk Island, Australia and died 31 July 1827 Hobart, Tasmania. 

3. Dinah Morrisby born 4 February 1799 Norfolk Island, Australia and died 27 September 1875 Hobart.

4. Henry Morrisby born 11 May 1803 Norfolk Island, Australia and died 25 March 1856 Rokeby, Tasmania, Australia. Henry Morrisby married his neice - Grace & George Smith's daughter Christina Smith (1810-1885) in 1831.

5. John Morrisby born 9 December 1805 Norfolk Island, Australia and died 25 October 1852 Williamstown, Victoria, Australia.

More about Ann Lavender Brooks.

Ann was living in a Court off Parker Lane, London. She was supporting a small child by dealing old clothes at the rag fair. She was brought before the Courts, but the case was discharged and she was released on grounds of humanity for having a young child.

On 12 December 1787 Ann Lavender Brooks, aged 25, (No.10827) was convicted in Old Bailey, London for Burglary (stealing a pair of sheets from a room in Drury Lane to sell to support her son William), found guilty and sentenced to 7 years transportation.
Ann (and presumably William) spent 15 months in Newgate Gaol. 
Ann and son William Brooks (born 1786) departed Plymouth, England on 29 July 1789 on board "Lady Juliana", arriving at Port Jackson, Sydney on 3 June 1790 - 310 days later.
On 1 August 1790 Ann and William embarked on HMS "Surprise" along with 194 convicts and was transferred to Norfolk Island, where she stayed for the next almost 17 years.

"Lady Juliana"

Route taken by "Lady Juliana" from England to Sydney Cove July 1789 - June 1790.

"Lady Juliana" was the first convict transport to leave England after the "First Fleet" sailed in 1788, and was the first female convict ship to leave England on 29 July 1789 with 245 female convicts onboard and arriving at Sydney Cove 310 days later on 3 June 1790.

When the ship was out to sea every man on board took a convict women for his "wife". The voyage took 10 months, calling into Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town before arriving in Sydney Cove.  While in these ports it was an open ship, and was later to become known as the "Floating Brothel". During the voyage there were seven births and five convicts died. At least eight children accompanied their mothers.

The women slept in the orlop deck just above the ships bilge which contained the ships holding water, human waste and remants of food.  Despite such hardships, the ships conditions may have seemed preferable to many of the women compared with those they had left behind in London's prisons.  For some women the journey to Sydney Cove itself offered an opportunity for them to better their positions. Many of the women on the "Lady Juliana" were what could be regarded as fairly old. Fifty-one women were 10 - 19 years, One hundred and sixteen 20 - 29 years, forty 30 - 39 years, fifteen 40 - 49 years and 8 over 50 years.

For the English Government, the female convicts were to serve two purposes - to prevent the starving and isolated male colonists from engaging in "gross irregularities" and to act as a breeding stock for the troubled settlement. When the "Lady Juliana" arrived in Sydney Cove the female population more than doubled, but the colonist had expected food and supplies, not a cargo of over 200 women!

The "Second Fleet" consisted of 6 ships - 4 transport ships (Neptune, Scarborough, Surprise and Lady Juliana) and 2 store ships (Guardian, Justinian). Convicts were mistreated, rations were poor and sickness rife.  Of the appoximate 1250 male convicts, over 25% died en route (in comparison to just 2.8% of those on the first fleet) and many more died within a year of reaching Sydney.  Almost half of the convicts who arrived in Sydney required immediate hospitalisation and about 80 died within three weeks of arrival.

On arrival at Port Jackson on 3 June 1790, 114 of the women convicts were sent to Norfolk Island on 1 August 1790, including our Ann Brooks and son William. Many of the women convicts were to marry or live with men who were on the island or would arrive later, convicts, ex-convicts and soldiers.  On 5 November 1791 a group of about 100 couples were married on the island by the Rev.Richard Johnson.  Sixty women from the "Lady Juliana" were later resettled to Van Diemen's Land either with their husbands or alone between 1805 - 1815.

More about James/John Morrisby.

 

James/John Morrisby 1756 - 1839

On 7 July 1784 James/John Morrisby was sentenced in the Old Bailey to transportation for 7 years. He stole a 10lb iron bar valued at 10 pence.  He had been observed wrenching it from a window it secured.  James was a Blacksmith and stated that he had served about 10 years in the Guards and that he and his wife had 5 children.  (A James Mossisby from Cawood had enlisted in the Scots Guards on 3 April 1776 - he was aged 19, 5 feet tall and had brown eyes).

James was transferred from prison to the "Censor" hulk moored on the River Thames.  
13 May 1787 James embarked on the HMS "Scarborough" at Portsmouth, arriving Port Jackson 19 January 1788, 251 days later and sailing some 13,000 miles.
The "First Fleet" consisted of 11 ships - 2 Royal Navy vessels, 3 store ships and 6 Convict ships with 1000 convicts. The 6 Transport ships were Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Lady Penhyn, Prince of Wales and Scarborough. The "Scarborough" had 201 male convicts, 30 crew and 50 marines.

"Censor" prison hulk moored on River Thames, London.

HMS "Scarborough" transported James Morrisby 13 May 1787 - 19 January 1788 England to Port Jackson.

The First Fleet January 1788

After 2 years in Sydney James was transferred on 1 March 1790 to Norfolk Island aboard the HMS "Sirius", arriving 13 March 1790, along with 116 male convicts, 67 female convicts, 27 infants, 65 marines and 5 marine's wives. James lived on Norfolk Island for 17 years.

HMS "Sirius" transported James Morrisby 4 March - 13 March 1790 Sydney Cove to Norfolk Island.

The arrival of  HMS "Sirius" on 13 March 1790 at Cascade Bay under the command of Captain Hunter and including the newly appointed Lieutenant Governor Major Ross was not without its dramas. "Sirius" arrived in Norfolk Island in foul weather. Because of the conditions they could not risk the usual anchorage position off the settlement at Sydney Bay and sailed around to Cascade Bay. By 15 March all people had been put ashore but they had to walk overland to the settlement Sydney Town on the south side and these included all the women and children. With an overnight doubling of population, food and other supplies seriously short, starvation was a real possibility.  Within a week Martial Law was inforced. "Sirius" eventually sailed around to the south.  Captain John Hunter wrote "These people were no sooner on shore than the wind shifted to the eastward and the weather became hazy and blew strong so that I had no prospect of being able to land any part of the provisions.  I knew the exhausted state of stores and considerations gave me much anxiety and uneasiness". The ship was driven out of sight of the island and would not appear for 3 days.

On 19 March Captain Hunter brought "Sirius" across Philip Island to the south point of Nepean and into Sydney Bay.  He brought the ship's head to the wind (that is facing out to sea).  Just as the loading of the longboats had been completed Captain Hunter noticed his ship was rapidly drifting towards the shore.  Immediately Captain Hunter gave the order to sail windward on a port track.  At that moment the wind shifted direction two points to the south. This wind shift was to spell disaster for the "Sirius" She struck upon a reef of coral rock, which lies parallel to the shore and in a few strokes she was begiled.

Immediately the "Sirius" ran aground. As much as possible was thrown overboard with the hope it would float ashore. To rescue the crew a rope was fastened to a barrel and floated ashore, then fastened to a pine tree allowing the men to scramble ashore.

In the following weeks all hardware and sails was stripped from the ship as it was desperately needed on the Island. Soon "Sirius" disappeared from view. The wreck of "Sirius" meant that the colony now had only one small leaky vessel between it and possible death from starvation. It was a dramatic and ominous tragedy which drove home to everyone, especially the powerless convicts, the precarious nature of their existence on the island. The disaster meant that the population leaped from 149 to 498 to rely on the limited resources of the island. Martial law and convict life changed dramatically.  Stealing from the public stores was now punishable by death, as it had been on the mainland, and punishments for all offences more frequent and severe.

Melancoly loss of "Sirius" 19 March 1790 off Norfolk Island

James Morrisby and Ann Brooks

In July 1791 James was living on a Sydney Town lot and sharing a sow with Ann Lavender Brooks and her son William.

5 November 1791 James Morrisby and Ann Brooks married on Norfolk Island by Rev Richard Johnson along with about 100 couples.

December 1791 James and Ann occupied 12 acres at Mt.Pitt Path (Lot No.57), this had increased to 34 acres by 1796.  The family had increased with the birth of 6 children between 1791 and 1805.

25 December 1807 James, Ann and their five children left Norfolk Island on the HMS "Porpoise" as part of the demise of the first Norfolk Island settlement. The family arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 18 January 1808.  They left behind 55 acres of land, 14 of which were sown in grain, 10 in pasture and the rest fallow.  They owned 7 hogs and held 200 bushels of maize in store.  Their buildings were valued at 90 Pounds which included a house 12 ft X 27ft, boarded, floored and shingled, also two floored barns and one outhouse.

The family settled in Clarence Plains (now Rokeby) in Tasmania. In April 1809 James received a Land Grant of 80 acres in Clarence Plains, Tasmania.

Ann Morrisby died 2 February 1813 aged 51 years.
James Morrisby married Eleanor Murphy aged 40 on 18 November 1816 in Hobart.  Eleanor died 14 February 1821.
James Morrisby died 29 May 1839 aged 83 and is buried in Clarence Plains, Tasmania.

Richard Brooks Larson married Ann Whiting Kidner in 1812 in Tasmania. Ann's father Thomas Kidner was a First Fleet convict, convicted in Bristol for Larceny, received 7 years transportation and arrived  in Sydney on the "Alexander" in January 1788. Ann's mother Jane Whiting arrived on the "Lady Juliana" on 3 June 1790. Both parents were transferred to Norfolk Island. Children born to a convict woman were given the mother's surname, whether officially married on Norfolk Island or not. Ann Kidner was born in 1798 on Norfolk Island and died 1854 in Clarence Plains, Tasmania.

Richard Larson died 13 July 1839 and Ann Larson died 18 January 1854.

The Morrisby family has continued to establish links to farming and orcharding at Muddy Plains (now called Sandford), Clarence Plains (now called Rokeby), and Orielton, all nearby to each other not far from Hobart. Tasmania.

A little bit of trivia. On 10 September 1960 I (Joy) with my sister Dawn, our Mother and Grandmother visited  Russell Morrisby at his property in Orielton, Tasmania.  Dawn rode his horse.

Little did we know at that time that James Morrisby was Russell Morrisby's Great Great Grandfather. Russell Morrisby's Father, Alfred Rowland Morrisby married a long time friend of our Grandmother (Amy Leah Christina Neylan) in 1922. Reading my Grandfather's diary in 1926, He and my Grandma visited Alfred & Amy Morrisby at Sandford, Tasmania.

Memorial to the First Fleeters and Norfolk Islanders who came to Van Diemen's Land during the evacuation 1807 - 1813.

The Memorial is in St David's Park, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Included on the Memorial is Jane Whiting and her daughter Ann Kidner (who later married Richard Larson in 1812).

James & Ann Morrisby sailed from Norfolk Island on "Porpoise" on 25 December 1807, arriving Hobart 17 January 1808.

If you have more information that you consider needs to be added to this blog, or any corrections, please contact the author by email - joyolney@gmail.com

The last few months have been an exciting adventure as I have discovered so much about the family of Doris Olney nee Moss who we previously knew so little about.
Refer to "Doris Moss, Napoleon and St Helena", also "Doris Moss and her extended family".  Also take a look at Solomon/Moss Family Archives Blog and Norfolk Island, First Fleeters and families Blog.

If you are researching your family, my advice is to persevere and follow the leads as they appear. You just never know where they will lead to.

The Smith story in outline by Ian Bowie, December 2019

https:// olneyfamilyarchives.blogspot.com

Doris Olney's heritage has been one of fascination and exploration.  

She was born Doris Gwendolyne Moss in New Zealand in 1896 to Matilda Louisa (nee Smith) and Clement George Moss. Matilda died when Doris was two years old and she was brought up by the Glasson Family, the family of Matilda's first husband Arthur Evelyn Glasson.

You can read in previous Posts about the Moss family and it's connection to Napoleon and St Helena.

Then I discovered the Smith family and it's connection to Norfolk Island and the First Fleet in 1788.

More recently I have had a connection with Ian Bowie, a descendant of Henry and Henrietta Smith.

His story reflects on Henry Laporte Smith, our Convict, his daughter Henrietta Smith's life in Van Diemen's Land, marrying Henry Smith, and bringing up 9 children in New Zealand.

I invite you to read Ian Bowie's fascinating story about the Smith family.

The Smith story in outline (Ian Bowie, December 2019)

I have mixed feelings about today’s preoccupations with family history in ‘western’ countries. I suspect that a lot of genealogical research reflects widespread desires to find identity and importance, or at least meaning, for our lives and a significant industry has grown up to exploit these desires, something made possible by official passions in the last couple of centuries for  recording things and by the recent rise of the internet.

That industry must benefit from the fact that people are often not good at sharing information or corroborating findings about ‘their’ families and, so, different parts of an extended family may often be working at odds over the same material. One of my reasons for writing about my origins at some length below is so that ‘my’ information can be shared. When I talk here of ‘my’ family it will be in the sense of ‘pertaining to’ rather than in any sense of ownership. Not a lot of my information has come from my own discoveries.

I suppose that we’re all a bit like the small child who asks ‘where did I come from?’ Although I was curious, I was not at all rigorous in searching for more about my family history until the last decade of the twentieth century. Neither my father nor my mother seemed seriously interested in their antecedents, though they kept records of their paternal (but not maternal) lineages and family trees compiled by my father. Both from time to time mentioned various cousins, aunts and uncles, none of which made much sense to me until I got more seriously into my family’s history.

Both my father and Grandpa Bowie included other information on their origins in memoirs that they wrote, respectively in the 1960s and the 1940s (now held in the Archives of Canterbury Museum in Christchurch), but that information came mainly from family stories which have turned out to be neither complete nor completely accurate.

It came as a surprise to me, for example, to learn from Trevor Langford-Smith in 1995 that he and I shared common NSW First Fleet and Second Fleet convict ancestors who had lived on Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land (and a marine who was on the first fleet to Hobart and in the first, failed, British settlement on Port Philip). My father appears to have known nothing about this when he’d written his memoir some thirty years earlier.

As I started to look closer at my family history after 2000 it came as a further surprise to learn of the work that was being done around the world by various cousins and others more distantly related to my ‘Bowie’, ‘Smith’, ‘Caesar’ and ‘Gardner’ relatives on their respective family trees, and about letters and other records (including of enquiries made by Grandma Bowie and her siblings into matters relating particularly to the disappearance of my great-great grandfather, Henry Laporte Smith) held by cousins in Christchurch.

I didn’t want to become more involved but those letters drew me in because they included not only letters between several of [great grandmother] Henrietta Letitia Smith’s children but also letters to her from Mrs (later Lady) Herbert (wife an important British politician) and Clara Yeates Cummins (Henrietta’s stepmother) since donated to the Canterbury Museum. These talk about Henrietta’s life and offer insights into things such as education, migration and family life that might be of use to social historians and historical novelists.

After I’d learned about the Smith letters my cousins and I hired a photocopier for an afternoon in 2003 to ensure that we at least all had a copy of what seemed to be the more significant of the genealogical material held by the first two. Now, with a lot more material to work on, I began transcribing information gleaned from family and public sources (and, more recently, from my own and others’ research) into electronic records respectively on my Bowie, Smith, Caesar and Gardner families.

Mostly, these records contain little more than details of births, marriages and deaths in many cases and work is needed to fill out sources and references. However the files do include several what I would describe as ‘family histories’, and extended family trees, which helped me better to understand something of where I came from and which have encouraged me to tell this story and a fuller story about ‘My Generations’ which is held in the Archives of Canterbury Museum, albeit in need of some revision.

The 2003 project set a precedent for an even more ambitious project between 2013 and 2016 in which I digitised and copied onto CD-ROMs just about every document that I had or had copied relating to my family history. If this seems a little obsessive, let me say in my defence that every good researcher should work to ensure the preservation of records. Moreover, I want our daughters to have copies because I know how families can lose access to hard copy records.

I have continued adding to these electronic files and hope to put them onto updated CD-ROMs in due course. In the meantime I spent some months through 2019 checking particularly the birth, marriage and death information in them against public records and indices, so that I now have information in which I have sufficient confidence to post some of it onto Ancestry.com, Family Search.org and Geni.com websites where this might be available to a wider audience.  

The stories that follow here seek to put flesh onto the bones of these birth, death and marriage details. I’ve not indicated sources or given references here but most of that can be found in my electronic records. While new information may become available down the track I’m confident that my stories are substantially accurate.

Surprisingly, for only a few of my more recent ancestors seem to have been distinguished (or notorious for other reasons), I now have some information (mostly corroborated, and displayed in the chart on the next page) about all sixteen of my great-great grandparents, who were born in the decades before and after the beginning of the nineteenth century. I also have photographs of all in the last three generations before me.

 The roots of some of those great-great grandparents have been traced back further, possibly more than two dozen generations further in the case of one of my Caesar/Fry line,  and it is interesting to observe how kind the great events of history such as wars, famines and depressions seem to have been to most of my known ancestors. Even their relocations, across and from Europe, caused by the spread of empires and by the industrial revolution seem to have done little harm to them.

However, although I know whence these people came, I know little about them as people or about their genetic make-up. From what is known about their place origins, these people were of mixed race and I cannot discern racially ‘stereotypical’ features in any of them. From what is known of their lives culturally also they were mixed, a mixing that has continued to the point where I cannot see in myself many traits that that have been ascribed to particular parents or grandparents. Genealogy has its limitations as a practical study.

Genealogy 

The Langford/Smith line

My Smiths have roots which are uncertain and have been a source of endless fascination for their descendants, not least because of the stories that have been passed down to descendants of my great-grandmother Henrietta Letitia Smith who is reported by her sons to have talked of her mother being a niece or ward of an Irish Lord Langford and heiress to money in Chancery, who had eloped with a ‘Scottish’ ship’s surgeon. Her sons also told stories about a paternal grandfather having been a lieutenant in ‘the Life Guards’ of George III and having served at the Battle of the Nile.

Variants of these stories have passed down through six generations of Henry and Henrietta Smith’s descendants but we know now that some of what was passed on, particularly to their eldest son Henry Herbert Smith (H H Smith, Herbert), was confused as to the facts. Some has been confirmed, some has been corroborated but much remains to be uncovered.

For example, it has turned out that it was the maternal grandfather of Henrietta’s husband (James Morrisby) – who was known in Van Diemen's Land as a ‘guardsman’ and ‘early settler’ who had been in the 3^rd Regiment of Foot Guards (the Scots Guards), though his rank is unknown; he and Ann Brooks his wife were two of three ancestors who as convicts were transported to Australia! It was said that their son-in-law George Smith was at the Battle of the Nile (1798), though that would have been before he became a marine so perhaps as a seaman.

The third of the three convicts, Henry Laporte (or delaporte) Smith (who seems to have gone under the name Laporte, which he may have adopted in adulthood), as well as his first wife Maria Louisa Langford (or Longford), remain enigmas today as they seem to have been for their own daughters and grandchildren.

Maria Langford

Maria, who died in Guernsey in 1841 aged 36, is stated on her headstone (photographed in 1913, fortunately as it is now almost illegible) and in Irish newspaper advertisements in 1898 by her daughter Henrietta Letitia Smith (who perhaps ‘knew’ this from the headstone) to have come from ‘Langfords Lodge, County of Limerick, Ireland’ (technically it is just within Cork).

On the strength of this, research done for Trevor Jury (descended from one of Maria’s grandchildren) linked her to ten generations of an Anglo-Irish family of Rowleys (which included the not always so-distinguished Lords Langford) planted in Ulster by James I. No connection between Maria and the Rowley family has been found and as this family had its seat at Langford Lodge in County Antrim this now seems unlikely.

A more likely Maria Langford was baptised in the South Cathedral (Roman Catholic) parish in Cork in 1804, as a daughter of a James Edward Langford who is given in the 1806 baptismal record of one of Maria’s sisters as 'Prvt' which suggests an army rank. This James Langford could be the Irish-born soldier who enlisted in England in 1793 and. may have been the J E Langford who was a corn merchant in Cork in 1810. He appears to have had two sons, including James junior, baptised as Langford or Longford in Cork’s North Cathedral (near the Collins barracks).

Our Maria did have a brother, James Edward Langford who was an executor of Laporte’s 1841 deed of settlement onto his second wife. Army records and gazette notices record that this Langford was born in Cork in 1802, promoted from Gentleman to Quartermaster in 1834 but ended his army career as a Paymaster in India in 1845 when he was cashiered for being ‘drunk, deficient in his accounts’. He unsuccessfully claimed insolvency relief in Poona in 1849 and may have been the James Langford who returned to England in 1855.

He may also have been the Cork-born James Langford who had an earlier army career as a foot soldier between 1819 and about 1830.

Henry Laporte Smith

Laporte Smith claimed on his wife’s headstone to be from ‘Ballinatrea’ County Cork [Ballinatray is in Waterford on its boundary with Cork, near Youghal] and Stephens Green Dublin’ but I wonder, from the fact that nothing ‘known’ about him or his family before 1841 has been corroborated and from the detail on this headstone, whether Laporte was using the headstone to give himself a back story in Guernsey (where burials in the [Candie] town cemetery were then mainly limited to locals, suggesting a more local connection).

From the ‘Laporte’ in his name [the Ottoman court at Constantinople was often referred to as ‘La Porte’], Blair Smith speculated that Laporte was a son of John Spencer Smith, an envoy in Constantinople from 1795. This would have Laporte a nephew of Admiral William Sidney Smith and related to other notable (and sometimes shady) Smiths and Smyths (including the Lords Strangford) who did have associations with Ballinatray. As with the back-story researched for Maria, no links with these families have been confirmed.

No documentation of Laporte’s birth or his first marriage (in 1821 according to the 1841 settlement) has been found. Nor has anything been found to support the ideas that Laporte had been a surgeon and maybe eloped with the Maria born in 1804 who would have been 15 in 1821. Did the two meet shipboard somewhere? Might Laporte have had some military connection (though by the 1820s England was no longer the military camp it had been a decade earlier). All of this is the stuff of speculations at present!

Nor have traces been found of any of Laporte’s siblings listed in his convict indent, even of Lt Charles Augustus Smith who also was another executor of Laporte’s 1841 settlement, though he might have been the merchant’s clerk of that name bankrupted in London in 1844. Indeed, the only ‘official’ record found of the years or places of the births of Laporte’s and Maria’s children is an adult baptismal one in 1850 for our Henrietta (which discounts any links to a similar family that lived in London).

Family stories suggest that the Smiths (or Langfords) had money and connections with Dublin’s Roman Catholic establishment through banker, merchant and nationalist Nicholas Mahon and family solicitor Thomas Richmond Evans. They have connected them also to Sidney Herbert, an important political associate of Peel and Disraeli (he became Baron Herbert of Lea) and it has been suggested that Laporte was related to Florence Nightingale whose grandfather was a William Smith and who was a protégé of Sidney Herbert and his wife.

None of these connections have been proven and relevant Irish records may have been destroyed in 1922. If the Smiths were connected with powerful and distinguished military, diplomatic and political Anglo-Irish families they would have been linked to the heart of the English and Anglo-Irish Establishments. But Laporte possibly disgraced himself if he did marry Maria as a Catholic girl who was under-age in 1821. And he certainly disgraced himself in 1841. Perhaps people including Maria’s children covered these up.

Indeed, all that was known to Maria’s grandchildren with any degree of certainty about Laporte, Maria and their children came out of four sets of events in 1841: Maria’s death (which is proven); Guernsey’s census of that year (which has her family at Vauvert Cottage; and may be reliable as to the birth order of the siblings if not as to birth years); Laporte’s known second marriage; and the ‘disappearance’ of Laporte after that. Even now, no firm evidence from before 1841 has yet been found. But there were stories….

In 1841, Laporte and Maria had come (perhaps recently from Ireland and/or London) to Guernsey with their seven surviving children all of whom except Eliza (Ireland) were reported in the census of 1841 as born in England (some later claimed Ireland, and Guernsey), including our Henrietta who was born in 1831. In February 1841 Maria died, in June Laporte remarried and in August he ‘disappeared’ leaving both his pregnant new wife and his born children apparently without any knowledge of what had happened to him. For the next 165 years nothing more seems to have been known about Laporte.

It had been thought (including by my father) that Laporte’s disappearance was somehow related to the 1841 deed that settled £3000 (say $370,000 in today’s dollars) onto his second wife, half of the money apparently previously settled on Maria. It was thought also that Laporte might have carried out plans which he had shared with his second wife, Clara Cummins, and migrated to America or Australia perhaps under the name of Courtney (which, curiously, is the family name of a possible Rowley ancestor of Maria).

However, in 2006 Anne Mason discovered that in fact Laporte had been arrested and on 4 December 1841 convicted in the Royal Court of Guernsey of forging three bills on the Bank of Ireland totalling £530 (say $65,000) in July 1841 (after his second marriage!). He was sentenced to be exiled from Guernsey (a sentence with meaning only for a Guernseyaise) but also to be transported for seven years. After the rejection of a petition to the Privy Council, he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Candahar in March 1842.

All of this seems to have been unknown to his descendants or, in the case of Sydney Edgar Langford Smith (S E L Smith, Edgar, who may have found something about the Langfords in 1913 and who surely knew when he buried his aunt Louisa (as Mrs Gee) in 1920), it may have been covered up (Edgar, who knew that Laporte was a ‘forger’, did worry about the possibility of a ‘convict stain’). Strangely, also, my father noted Laporte’s father as John when he penned a family tree in the late 1940s. The secrecy is curious for a number of reasons.

Firstly, Laporte’s trial was widely reported across the British Isles and elsewhere  including in The Times of London (why, I wonder?), though not as extensively as the trial about the same time of Edward Beaumont Smith for forging a much larger sum of Exchequer bills. Beaumont Smith, who was a son of Admiral Sidney Smith and so would have been a cousin of ‘our’ Smith if Blair was correct in his suppositions, was convicted of the ‘Exchequer Fraud’ in 1841 and also transported in 1842 to Van Diemen's Land where he died as a schoolmaster in 1877.

Secondly, notwithstanding any scandal, great-grandmother Henrietta seems to have known Mrs Elizabeth Herbert, wife of Sidney (who was a brother of the 12th Earl of Pembroke), describing her as her ‘guardian and friend’. Also, Henrietta claimed to have been fare-welled when she left England in 1854 by another Elizabeth Herbert, Sidney’s sister who was married to the Anglo-Irish Earl of Clanwilliam (and/or by Florence Nightingale); her ship – the Constance –did indeed anchor in 1854 off Deal where the Earl of Clanwilliam was Captain of Deal Castle.

Thirdly, while it true that no traces of Laporte after the 1850s have yet been found, records and newspaper entries have now been found online which roughly confirm many of the family stories through Henrietta about the movements of Laporte’s children (including Henrietta and, separately, three of her younger siblings to Australia) and which suggest that rather more may have been known to his children than was passed on to his grandchildren about Laporte’s movements after 1841.

In particular, after the three younger siblings arrived in Sydney in late 1854, they placed advertisements in the Empire newspaper that indicate that they understood that their father – as ‘Mr Laport Smith’ – had been in Sydney but were unable to contact him. Another newspaper advertisement placed from Christchurch in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1880, suggests that he was known to have been in Victoria and this is more-or-less confirmed in lists of unclaimed letters awaiting him – generally as ‘Laporte Smith’– in Melbourne in 1854/5.

At his trial, Laporte claimed to be a native of Cork in Ireland and was reported to be the son of John, a ‘highly respectable person’ in Cork. He claimed to have been a partner in a firm with business in London, Cork, Jamaica, Lisbon and Gibraltar but declined to reveal the name of the firm other than that his name was not in it. One of the bills was drawn on the firm Kinahan Son & Smythe, and it may be that Laporte was in the sugar or spirits trade (he was described in his convict records as a ‘provision merchant’, though other sources have described variously as ‘yeoman’, ‘esquire’, ‘accountant’ and even ‘physician’).

Since the rediscovery of Laporte in 2006, it has emerged that after serving time in a road gang based at the Bridgewater probation station (at Granton) he became a petty constable in the Richmond police force in 1844 and was watch-house keeper at the Richmond convict depot until 1847 (‘neglectful of duty’ on one occasion). Towards the end of 1847 his pardon – though it had been recommended a year before had been that he should remain in the Australasian colonies – was  gazetted, curiously conditional only on his 'not to return or be found within the limits of the Island of Guernsey'.

Laporte resigned from the police force at the end of 1847, presumably left Van Diemens Land shortly thereafter and had been in Melbourne by 1848/9 (when unclaimed letters awaited ‘Smith, Laport’ and ‘Smith, H de L’ at the Post Office). He was residing in Sydney as ‘Laporte Smith’ by 1851 and was still there in 1854. The 1880 Sydney Morning Herald advert suggests that he was ‘in Sydney in 1855 but last heard of in Avoca, Victoria’ which perhaps was information that came through James, his son who is thought to have gone to the goldfields.

Further unclaimed letters awaiting ‘Smith, Laport’ and ‘Smith, Laporte’ at the Melbourne GPO in 1854/5 suggest that he returned to Victoria, while other unclaimed letters, to Henry L Smith (1854) and H L Smith (1855) in Sydney might have been letters to him, perhaps telling of his children’s movements. The letters and advertisements do suggest that, contrary to what is said in letters between Laporte’s children (copies of which still exist), some people had clearer ideas about his movements in Australia than has been suggested to Henrietta’s descendants.

It seems that James lost contact with his sisters because in 1877 he advertised in Tasmanian newspapers (coincidentally in the issue of the Hobart Mercury that advertised Beaumont Smith’s intestate estate) seeking his sisters. We don’t know whether he made contact but the timing is curious in that it could have been related to the death from senility in that year in Launceston, of an ex-convict invalid Henry Smith born about 1795. And, perhaps, it was this that gave basis to the vague idea that James was or had been in Queensland.

However, other deaths were registered in Australia of Henry Smiths born at the end of the eighteenth century. Other deaths were registered in Britain and Ireland (including an 1864 death in Limerick informed by a Rowland Smith of a Henry Smith born 1792, that I cannot confirm) and, given Laporte’s possible occupation as a providore and the fact that in Sydney he had lived near Darling Harbour, it is possible that he returned ‘home’; there are ship-related records that could be related to such a return. We may never know.

The children

Although Laporte’s second wife understood him to have been a man of property in Ireland, she made no claim to this property (which was subsequently embezzled, according to family mythology, though it might have been called on by Laporte). She returned to her parents, living in London and France for some years and losing touch with children of Laporte’s first marriage until after her return to Guernsey by 1851. Yet, rather than being sent to a poor-house, six of Laporte’s children were boarded during 1842-3 at the expense of the Parish of St Peter Port, during which time Henrietta reported a visit from Uncle James (Home on leave from India).

It is not known why or for how long the Parish Douzaine took on this expense. However, in 1849 three of Henrietta’s siblings left Guernsey while she, having finished private schooling on Jersey, was enrolled (after her Anglican baptism in Jersey) in a one-year course at an Anglican teachers’ training college in the Close of Salisbury Cathedral (1850-51) with her home address given as at Pierre Percée, the estate of James and Elizabeth MacCulloch, members of an influential Guernsey family known for their Methodist charity but linked by marriage to other important families such as the (Anglican again) reverend Brocks.

Although there is online speculation that there was an orphanage or boarding school at Pierre Percée, Henrietta claimed Mrs MacCulloch also to have been a ‘guardian’. So, with MacCulloch’s father a wine merchant in Brittany in the 1790s, it is possible that there had been ‘mercantile’ connections (licit or otherwise) between the Smiths and the MacCullochs earlier in the nineteenth century. If so, the Smiths may have had dealings also then with the Herberts, for the 11^th Earl of Pembroke had been Governor of Guernsey between 1807 and 1827.

In reviewing both what Henrietta is reported to have told her children and the fragments that exist in a number of documentary records that I have located over the last decades I wonder whether Henrietta had been singled out for special treatment compared with her siblings (and,  if so, why) but we can only speculate about that.

Henrietta’s younger siblings may have also had lived at le Manoir du Pierre Percée but James MacCulloch died in 1850 and Elizabeth may have moved out then as she isn’t recorded in the Channel Islands (or English) 1851 censuses. The 1851 census has Henrietta’s sisters boarding with teachers more-or-less next door to le Manoir , while James was boarding near the school attached to St Pierre du Bois (the church of the Rev Thomas Brock until the latter died in 1850) and Rowland was working (for a family of the same name) on a farm in St Pierre du Bois.

Despite the scandal of 1841, Henrietta went to a church teachers’ college and (from letters written to her by Elizabeth (later Lady) Herbert) interacted socially with Mrs Herbert in London, during 1850-53. Certainly, Wilton House home of the Herberts (which Henrietta claimed to have known, pointing to the room where she had stayed) is close to Salisbury where Henrietta studied but the nature of her connection with the Herberts remains a mystery (apart from suggestions that Laporte was connected with Sidney Herbert or his wife).

What is known more certainly is that after completing her course, Henrietta taught in ‘Martin Wiltshire’ (now in Hampshire) in 1851-2 from where she left ‘in peculiar circumstances’ and near ‘Sudbury Norfolk’ (Maria Ericksen has established that it was more than likely the new school at Foxearth in adjacent Essex) in 1853. She was in Winchester in 1852, which may have been to be near Elizabeth MacCulloch who was in Droxford (nearby in Hampshire) and died there in 1853, or to support her married sister in Soberton (also nearby in Hampshire).

Sailing for Australia

In 1854 Henrietta sailed on the Constance, ‘for her health’ (according to family legend and whatever that might mean), to a female-deficient Van Diemen’s Land where she was to meet and marry an unrelated Henry Smith, a son of Grace Morrisby. Her parents were the other two of ‘my’ transported convicts.

James Morrisby, for whom five generations of Yorkshire ancestors have been traced (including a father who was killed in the Cape Breton Island battle of Louisbourg, in 1758), had enlisted in the Scots Guards in 1776 but after his regiment had returned from America in 1783 he was convicted in 1784 for breaking-in. He arrived in Port Jackson on the Scarborough in 1788 and was moved to Norfolk Island in 1790 (where he was disembarked from the Sirius four days before it was wrecked. In July 1791, at the expiry of his seven years’ sentence, he was living with Ann Brooks in ‘Sydney’ (now Kingston) and cropping 12 acres there.

Ann (whose family name might have been either Brooks or Lavender) was apparently a Londoner who was convicted in 1787 for stealing two linen sheets. She arrived in Port Jackson with her first son William generally known as Brooks on the Lady Juliana, subject of Sian Rees’ book The Floating Brothel’, in June 1790, and was sent to Norfolk Island on the Surprize two months later (by which time she had become pregnant with her second son, who became known as Richard Larsom though his father is not known).

It is said, but there is no archival record, that James and Ann were married by the Revered Richard Johnson during the latter’s three weeks on Norfolk Island in November 1791 (if so, with more concern for good order amongst the convicts than for any previously married states or children from them). Ann’s sons and the five further children she was to have with James were recorded variously as ‘Lavender’ or ‘Morrisby’ in the several Norfolk Island Victualling Books and Musters.

By 1796 Ann and James were living on one of their leases along Watermill Creek below Mount Pitt (James farmed 74 acres of leasehold including that of his eldest son). The Morrisbys prospered there and when the Norfolk Island settlement was to be closed, James and Ann went with their five shared children on the Porpoise in 1807 to Van Diemen’s Land where James was granted 80 acres in the Clarence Plains near Rokeby in exchange for his earlier leases on Norfolk Island.

James was to farm Belmont Lawn successfully there and was granted 300 further acres in Muddy Plains, Clarence Plains, in 1828. Grace, the older of his and Ann’s daughters and second of their five children together), married George Smith from here, in Hobart in 1810.

George Smith was a Warwickshire man who attested as a private in the Marines in 1800, though he may have been previously at the Battle of the Nile (1798).He came, firstly to the failed Sorrento (Victoria) settlement on the transport ship Ocean in 1803 (accompanying HMS Calcutta) and then on to Hobart in 1804. Later in 1804 George was charged with insubordination and was sent to Port Jackson in 1805 where he stayed till 1807, awaiting a court martial which didn’t eventuate for lack of judicial officers.

George was eventually returned to Van Diemen’s Land where he was discharged in 1812, to be granted 120 acres of land at Broadmarsh (near Herdsmans Cove) in 1813. He sold this land to his father-in-law in 1817 when he and Grace appear to have been living in Clarence Plains (a little further south), possibly on the Kimberley Farm at Ralphs Bay, Clarence Plains (south of Rokeby), of which George sold fifty acres to his oldest son in 1841. A clearing sale notice gazetted in 1816 and Grace’s death as a ‘poor woman’ suggest that George (like other marines it has been observed) may not have been successful as a farmer.

This Henry Smith was the second youngest of seven children born in Clarence Plains to Grace Morrisby and her Marine, George Smith. Grace who was married at 13 (so young) was dead at 30 (dying in Hobart as a ‘poor woman’: childbirth?) and her youngest children (including ‘our’ Henry) were brought up at Summerfield, Broadmarsh, by her daughter Grace who (at 16, reflecting a still-enormous gender imbalance in Van Diemen's Land) married William Stanfield and (later) James Staples. No more is known of George Smith apart from his sale of land at Ralphs Bay (Rokeby) to his oldest son.

Henrietta Letitia Smith, accompanied by a Mrs Frederick, sailed on the barque Constance (not to be confused with a larger clipper of the same name) from Gravesend on 6 February 1854. It anchored off Deal on the 8th, apparently called into in Hobsons Bay to drop mail and embark passengers from Melbourne and eventually made its way up the Tamar to Launceston on 27 May 1854. As Henrietta was not government-assisted it has been speculated that her fare may have been paid by Sydney Herbert’s Tasmanian Female Emigration Association or Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonisation Loan Society.

However, the funding might have been linked in some way to the MacCullochs. It also might have come from an Irish connection of the Smiths or Langfords. It has even been suggested that Henrietta might have been a beneficiary of the will of Nicholas Mahon who died in Dublin in 1841. Certainly, Henrietta seems to have been under the impression (though she would not have understood it as a child) that she was to inherit money that her brother John claimed later was being embezzled.

Another possibility is that Smith siblings had been supported in Guernsey by the money that had been settled on Clara in 1841 but which she did not call on. If so, whether or not uncle James (Langford), the family solicitor (Evans) or even Laporte himself had been drawing on it, that money might have been nearly exhausted as to both interest and principal by 1854, giving us reasons for sending four younger siblings to Van Diemen’s Land and Sydney and suggesting the possibility that Laporte might have contributed toward the passages of his children.

Henrietta’s three younger siblings sailed shortly after Henrietta, on the Hanover which arrived in Sydney in September 1854, as domestics and in James’ case as a servant possibly with the Westbrook family (who also had ties to Droxford) with whom they had sailed. James’ fare was paid by person(s) unknown but half of each of the girls’ fares (£25 each) was paid by the Family Colonisation Loan Society, which suggests that they may have been intended to meet Laporte in NSW to recoup these payments (which may not have happened).

Henrietta (and Henry) in Van Diemens Land

Henrietta was ‘sent’ to Dr William Valentine at The Grange in Campbelltown in what was still Van Diemen's Land, perhaps as a governess to Valentine’s three children. She was lonely there and soon moved south to James and Grace Staples’ Summerfield. If we are to believe letters from both Lady Herbert and Clara Cummins Henrietta was unaware that her father had been a probationary convict in nearby Bridgewater and then a petty constable in Richmond not so many years earlier. Seven months after arriving in Van Diemen's Land, Henrietta married her Henry Smith (no relative) at the end of 1854.

Henry Smith started out as a sheep farmer in 1846, three years after George’s death, but in 1852 he and his brother Richard spent seven months on the Bendigo goldfields. In 1853 he leased the 3800 acre Rathmore run (he added to it the 2662 acre Pelham run and in 1861 another 8000 acres at St Patrick Plains near Shannon) at Hollow Tree near Hamilton, sixty kilometres north of Hobart in Van Diemen’s Land, to which he took his new bride. Over the next ten years Henry and Henrietta had five (or, possibly, six) children in what became Tasmania in 1856.

Henrietta probably found Rathmore even bleaker and more isolated than either Campbelltown or Broadmarsh and was very ill during the first year of her marriage (pregnancy? endometriosis?). She was joined there for a while by her younger sisters from Sydney and in 1859 Henrietta was advertising the services of a ‘young lady’ as a teacher – Louisa perhaps, because Susan was about to marry?) but not by James who is believed to have gone ‘to the goldfields’.

The times were hard, Henry was unsuccessful as a grazier and is said to have been ‘generous with his money’ (certainly including loans to a nephew who became insolvent), while Henrietta may not have been coping with her rapidly growing family. In 1861, after failing to get financial help from Henrietta’s childhood ‘guardian’ Lady Herbert, the Smiths put Rathmore up for sale, anticipating leaving Tasmania. While awaiting a sale they leased the smaller Milford estate at Cambridge near Rokeby in 1862.

Henry and Henrietta in New Zealand

Two years later, with a fifth addition to the family, the Smiths sailed on a mid-winter’s voyage on the tiny Chrishna (259 tons), from Hobart to Lyttelton in 1864. This begs the question ‘why did they go to New Zealand?’ and the best answer I can come up with is that this was somehow connected with the fact that Henrietta’s sister Louisa – with whom Henrietta may have maintained ties (as she did with Susan) – had gone to Otago with her (already married) lover (George Leopold Morton) in 1863 and was still in New Zealand when Henrietta sailed.

Baptisms, family stories and letters from England have the family initially in Rangiora in 1864. Henry is said to have farmed then on Kaiapoi Island and Flaxton but his farming troubles were to continue there and Henrietta returned to school teaching in between having four more babies Henrietta may have been the Mrs Smith who taught in Rangiora and is reported to have obtained a teacher’s certificate in 1866.

Henrietta may have taught then at Flaxton and either there or Burnham in 1868 (a letter from England suggests she was living in Burnham in 1869) despite indifferent health and in St Albans in 1872 (she would have been pregnant with my grandmother Amy) but none of this has been confirmed; Henry and Henrietta and Smith are common names, unfortunately. Family memories too may be uncertain and, while Edgar Smith wrote of the Smiths moving to Leeston in Easter 1878, he may have confused Doyleston with Leeston (they are close one to another).

From 1879, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives), show that Henrietta was teaching at the (Doyleston) side school of Leeston school for three years 1878-1880 and then, after breaks (perhaps due to illness and probably spent in Christchurch), at Silverstream (now Kimbell, near Fairlie) where she was sole teacher for four years from when it opened in 1884 until 1888 and at Burnham school as sole teacher during the three years 1890-1892 (notwithstanding poor inspectors’ reports which perhaps encouraged her to retire).

A letter to Henrietta suggests that the Smiths were actually at ‘Allan Vale’ Doyleston in 1876 and marriage notices indicate that they were still there in 1880. However, in 1879, Henry who was there as a market gardener declared insolvency. Henrietta sought a retirement allowance on the grounds of ill health (she’d been teaching for 14 years; it is not known whether the allowance was granted but she was given a small promotion). After that, nothing is certain about Henry until 1893 but advertisements suggest that he was with Henrietta (and Amy) at Silverstream, market gardening and as sub-postmaster.

Henry’s name doesn’t appear on electoral rolls before he was resident at Doyleston in 1880/1, which suggests that he did not own or lease any of the land he farmed in New Zealand. After then (property qualifications were abolished in 1879) his further absence suggests that he may have remained an undischarged bankrupt until after the introduction of universal adult suffrage. (1893), perhaps a consequence of the long depression (and perhaps the 1879/80 marriages of four daughters!).

It appears that Henry and Henrietta were back in suburban Christchurch in 1893, probably renting. A readdressed envelope in Blair Smith’s hands suggests that Henrietta may have visited Victoria in 1893/4 (after Edgar Smith followed his optician-employer to Melbourne in 1892 and by which time three of her daughters also had moved to Victoria) but by 1896 electoral rolls show the parents, with children Herbert and Amy in Christchurch living with daughter Eveleen (Bradbury) in Salisbury Street where Henrietta died in 1898.

It has been said that Henrietta became involved in the women’s movement then. A ‘Mrs H Smith’ was identified in an 1896 photo from a meeting of the National Women’s Council and two of her daughters are said to have been in other photos. However, I cannot find Henrietta or any of her daughters in the 1892 and 1893 petitions for women’s suffrage. Only Henrietta and her two youngest daughters, Eveleen (Bradbury) and Amy (my grandmother) appear to have been enrolled to vote in New Zealand in 1896.

My Grandma Bowie was born Amelia (Amy) Smith in 1873, the last of nine children born to Henry and Henrietta Smith in Tasmania and New Zealand. Little is known about her life except in the roles of wife and mother though she was in South Canterbury with her mother as a girl. She may have shared her mother’s and older sisters’ reported interests in women’s suffrage and an interest in spiritualism with sister Elizabeth, and (like others in her family) she sang in public – perhaps this is how she met Grandpa Bowie.

As the only unmarried child in New Zealand after Edgar Smith went to Melbourne (where three of her sisters had married) and Herbert Smith (who’d returned from Sydney) married in 1896 Amy helped care for Henrietta during her last years when she and her parents lived with Eveleen or another of her married sisters in Christchurch. After Henrietta died, Amy went to Tasmania with a Colonel F A and Mrs Buckley, reportedly to stay for two years from 1898 (possibly with her aunt Susan).

Amy returned to Christchurch where she married Grandpa (James Stirling) Bowie (whom she’d known before) in 1902. They were to have four children: Enid, Colin, Edgar and Neil.

After Henrietta’s death Henry moved with Eveleen and her husband to Nayland Street and later Alexander Street (Clifton Hill), in Sumner (where Mr Bradbury was Mayor, briefly) where Henry died in 1910.

Published with permission of Ian Bowie.

If you have any additions or comments to make, please email the author of this Blog Joy Olney on joyolney@gmail.com