The
personal website of
Tony Whelan
Australia
Tony Whelan
Australia
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My mother was born in 1919, in Burnie, Tasmania. She was given up for adoption, and renamed.
Her then-unmarried biological mother was born in Burnie, Tasmania, 1900, to Daniel Williams and Alice Mary Burgess.
Alice Mary Burgess was the daughter of William Burgess and Sarah Jane Nash, who were born in Launceston, Tasmania. William was a son of two convicts, Richard Burgess from Sussex England, and Johanna Saunders from London, England. Both had been convicted of stealing and arrived in the penal colony in June 1818 and February 1825 respectively. They married in April 1826. William's second wife, Sarah Jane Nash, was born in Hobart in 1847, to Vivian (John) Nash and Hannah Allen, who had married in London in 1842 and migrated to Australia several years later.
The origins of Alice Mary Williams' husband Daniel had been unknown to me until late December 2017, when I made contact with a couple of people who matched me and my siblings on DNA. Thanks largely to their research on Daniel's half-brother Robert Williams, it now appears that Daniel Williams was actually born William McDaniel in Port Sorell, Tasmania, in 1869. His mother was Ellen Lee, and his father John Jennings. Ellen had come to Tasmania as a child when her mother Ann Sheridan was transported for theft in 1848 and John came to Tasmania in 1844 from Ireland as a teenager with his mother Eleanor McDaniel and stepfather Richard Jennings, along with two other male children. Eleanor & Richard had married in India in February 1829 after each was widowed. It appears John was born John McDaniel around 1828 at about the same time his biological father had died in India. Eleanor & Richard Jennings had a daughter Eleanor in 1831 who died in 1833, and a son Richard in July 1834 in Bengal, at which time Jennings was described as a corporal in the 38th Regiment. That regiment returned to England in May 1836 and then went to Ireland.
NB The Irish name "McDaniel" is one of many spelling variants including McDonel and McDonald.
During the period of about 12 years that John McDaniel/Jennings lived with Ellen Lee/Williams, they conceived a number of children (at least 6) though they were not married to each other. Just prior to his early death in 1871, apparently realising he was ill, John applied to have three sons placed in the Queen's Orphan School in Hobart. The document listed their surnames as Jennings, but in a subsequent letter to the school John asked that they be known by the surname McDaniel, his own birth surname; in fact at least one of them (William) had been baptised with that surname. Two of the boys were accepted to the Orphan School but the youngest (William) aged 2&1/2 was rejected as he was too young. His mother Ellen, by then back with her husband John (aka Richard) Williams, took the child and evidently they renamed him from William Jennings/McDaniel to Daniel Williams, so retaining part of the father's birth surname as his given name. All very convoluted and confusing for we researchers!
John Jennings' mother Eleanor died in Hobart in 1877, as a pauper. She was shown as aged 80 and of Irish birth, but no other details were recorded. There is no trace of "Richard" Jennings' fate but the clue is that the newspaper report of the family's arrival in 1844 calls him Richard but a letter to the Admiralty in 1843 seeks to arrange passage and victualling for "Sergeant Redmond Jennings and 3 sons", naming him as an overseer of convicts. We can see a death record for Redmond Jennings in 1857 in Hobart, so it looks as if Richard Jennings and Redmond Jennings are one and the same. Although this is rather curious (Redmond is an Irish form of Raymond, not Richard), I am confident they are the same person. UK Military Pension records show him as Redmond Jennings throughout and detail the units he served with, and when. It all fits.
Of the three sons mentioned in the letter to the Admiralty, the only detail is their ages - 17 (hence born c1826), 15 (hence born c1828) and 9 (hence born c1834). We have the 1834 birth record which is for Richard junior (later known as Redmond, like his father), who married in Tasmania and had a son Redmond James. The son born c1828 would have been the stepson John (McDaniel). The boy born 1826 was probably named John, there is a baptism entry for his birth in Bengal but no parents' name available (yet!). The mother was probably Susana Jennings who was buried in Madras 5 Nov 1826, being the wife of "R Jenings, Corporal HM 30th Regiment, aged 30 years". We know from pension records that Redmond Jennings was in the 30th Regiment at that time.
The records of the East India Company are held in the British Library, and although some have been digitised or transcribed, most have not. So John McDaniel's birth record may well be amongst the yet-to-be-examined records, as it is not able to be located in online records to date.
The 1912 Queensland death certificate for Redmond Jennings' son (also called Redmond despite his 1834 Bengal birth record showing it as Richard), says his mother was Eleanor Jennings nee Holloway. I have yet to find any other evidence of her maiden name.
My mother's unknown father was also a mystery till fairly recent times. Again, DNA matching narrowed things down. A combination of autosomal DNA and X-DNA matches tells me that my mother's biological father was one of the sons of John Carlton Sice and Charlotte Ellenton. We can't pinpoint which of the sons was the father, but it scarcely matters. John Carlton Sice was a son of George Sice and Grace Carlton, both transported to Tasmania for theft in 1830 and 1834 respectively. They married in 1838 and had a large family.
Looking at the records of our convicts, you can see that they were sometimes savagely penalised for even minor infractions in the colony, frequently with months of hard labour and sometimes solitary confinement. They were harsh times and we might do well to admire their resilience in surviving such a system.
My mother lived her early years in Burnie with her adoptive parents and the family moved from Tasmania to North Melbourne around 1930.
My mother died in 1995 and it was her death that started me on the path of family history research. I'm unsure if she'd have been happy to know she had a few convict ancestors, but nowadays its a bit of a status symbol!