Trove Tuesday: Obituary for John V. Beringer

I discovered an obituary for my great great great uncle John Valentine Beringer, via Trove, in the Catholic newspaper Freeman's Journal (4 June 1931, p13):

It is a great comfort to me that he clearly became such an esteemed member of the Uralla community. He and his brother Adam (and sister-in-law Caroline) came so far, all way from Germany, and settled here in Australia, and made a new life for themselves. Although John Valentine had his share of tragedy - the death of his first wife Catherine, and their son Thomas - he really seemed to find his feet here.

I'd love to see some of his carpentry work... Anyone? Anyone?

Farming in the Macleay region

I was out at State Records again this week. I looked up a whole lot more probate, deceased estate and primary application (a land ownership process, by which owners could convert land granted before 1863 to the new land title system) records.

One of the probate packets I looked at was for Thomas Wickham, who I have previously written about here - going to the Macleay region, rather than the Mackay region which I originally thought.

I found out what he was most likely doing in the Macleay region when I was at State Records, from looking at the probate packet: he was farming. He, unbeknownst to my living family, had two bits of land up there, one part way between the NSW towns of Gladstone and Belmore River, of 44 acres, and the other, less than 10kms away, near Kinchela, of 75 acres. I've managed to find both of them on original parish maps, using maps from the Parish Map Preservation Project of the Department of Lands. The thing is, as a bit of a novice at this type of thing, I'm now not sure whether there is any more I can find out - I'd be hoping that there might be original purchase documents and that sort of thing, but I don't know whether they would still exist... Can anyone help?

Searching through historical newspapers on Trove I found that it is likely that Thomas Wickham was a sugarcane farmer - though I don't know whether the articles referred to Thomas Wickham junior or senior (as both lived in the area). I was quite surprised at this - I didn't realise that sugarcane was farmed that far south on the east coast of Australia - I would have thought Queensland was more the domain of the sugarcane industry.

In the historical newspapers I also found a long listing for title deeds, ready for delivery from the Surveyor General's department, including part of Thomas' 44 acre property - "2057 Thomas Wickham, Kinchela, 22 acres 3 roods, portion 27", from The Empire newspaper, 21 May 1860. I can't find any notices for the other bits of property Thomas owned.

A number of Thomas Wickham's sons lived in the Macleay River region, but I am not sure who moved to the region first from the family. According to a notice in the paper about his death, Thomas Wickham jnr lived at "Belmore River" and I think that this may have been Thomas Wickham snr's 44 acre property, which he would therefore have taken over from his father.

Thomas Wickham

Thomas Wickham (born 23 August 1888, Newtown, NSW, died 22 Feb 1973, Waverley, NSW) was my great great uncle. He was the brother of my Great Nanna.

Thomas was an officer in the NSW Police. I looked up the Registers of Police while I was at State Records the other week. Thomas' service number was 9094. He was accepted into the foot police i.e. not mounted, he was 5'11", 12st 2lbs, blue eyes, fair hair, fair complexion. It was originally noted that he was single, later this was crossed out and "Married" entered instead. His previous calling was wool packer, 6yrs. Religion: Church of England. District: North Eastern. He was made a probationary constable on 26 Apr 1910, an ordinary constable on 28 Apr 1911. He was moved to the Metropolitan District on 6 Jan 1911.

And that was all it had. I assumed that he'd stayed an ordinary constable for the rest of his police career. I was wrong.

Yesterday I decided to delve a little further into his police career because I have a family anecdote about him that I wanted to post. I thought I'd just see if he came up in the historical newspapers on Trove. Yes he does. A lot. It turns out that Thomas ended his police career in 1947, after rising to the rank of Chief Superintendent, and retiring from the position of Chief Superintendent of Crime, Vice and Court Staffs. So he wasn't quite just an ordinary constable for the rest of his police career!

It wasn't until 1921 that Thomas Wickham turned up in the newspapers in relation to his job as a police officer. I'm not sure exactly what path his career took until this time, but by this stage he was already a detective. In 1926 he was one of two detectives appointed to the newly formed Drugs Bureau. He appears to have been promoted to Detective Sergeant later that year. He worked for a good number of years in the Drugs Bureau, and made many many arrests, including Kate Leigh, known as Sydney's "Queen of the Underworld". By 1934 he was in CIB teaching police recruits about court procedures. 1938 saw him promoted to assistant to the chief of CIB, as an Inspector. He was made Chief Metropolitan Licensing Inspector in 1939, and then took charge of the Morality Squad in 1940. He was promoted to Superintendent and became the Chief of the Western Police District, based in Parkes, in 1942. He returned to Sydney in 1942 as Chief of CIB. In 1945 he became Chief Superintendent of Crime, Vice and Court Staffs and was awarded the King's Police Medal for distinguished service in 1946. He retired in November 1947.

After finding all this information on Thomas Wickham in the historical newspapers I decided to Google his name with "police". One of the results that came up was for Underbelly: Razor - my response: "You've got to be joking..." Yes, my great great uncle is being portrayed in the latest series of Underbelly! I haven't watched any of the Underbelly series, Razor being no exception. But apparently Sergeant Tom Wickham, as he is known in the series, is represented as an incorruptible police officer. Glad to hear it! The book from which the series was written, Razor by Larry Writer, gives him a pretty good wrap too. Incidentally, I am quite sure, from the description given in the Registers of Police and knowing the family facial features, that the actor they have playing him looks absolutely nothing like him!

So, finally to the anecdote that Mum told me which first got me looking into Thomas Wickham, NSW Police officer: he shot a hole through the ceiling of my Great Nanna's house at 2 St Clair St, Belmore, when his gun accidentally went off. I'll bet that's one story that wasn't told at his retirement!

Uncle Les

My Uncle Les was married to Grandpa’s sister. Uncle Les died in 1977 whilst on holiday in Canada, and I was only 3 so I don’t remember much of him. However I do remember a story that he had a dog called Dopey who was particularly dim. I’ve often wondered whether they changed his name from something like “Rupert” when they discovered how dim he was. Dad thinks he was always called Dopey, so he must have just embodied his name particularly well. The story goes that whenever Uncle Les put on aviator goggles Dopey didn’t recognize him.

Uncle Les and Auntie Gen didn’t have kids. So going to visit Auntie Gen’s house meant a living room stuffed full of furniture (though with exciting exotic things like gramophones) and no toys to speak of. One particular contraption that Auntie Gen had though, which was Uncle Les’, was a small wooden coffin (about 10cm long maximum) which, as I recall, had a wind-up mechanism. When you wound it up the coffin would open and a small skeleton would sit up. Brilliant fun for small children!

Uncle Les was supposedly from New Zealand. I checked the New Zealand births, deaths and marriages records and could find no trace of him. All I knew of his parents were from his engagement notice in the paper, which gave his father as A.F. Davis, of Manly. Uncle Les’ middle name was Alfred, so I wondered if his father’s name was also Alfred. I didn’t have a NSW death record to check for Uncle Les (because he died in Canada), so I couldn’t confirm his dad’s name that way. In the end, I decided to see if there was a birth record for Uncle Les in NSW. Yep. He was born in Manly, in 1903, to Arthur F and Ida M Davis. So he clearly wasn’t from New Zealand! It turns out that his mother was born in Sydney, and his parents were married in Sydney. I haven’t yet been able to work out where his father was born. Perhaps it was New Zealand, though I haven’t found a birth record for him there either.

Supposedly Uncle Les was in the Imperial Forces and entertained the troops during the Second World War. I haven't managed to uncover any actual evidence of this yet, though we do have photos of him in a uniform.

Family legend says that Uncle Les’ dad rode a bicycle from Sydney to Melbourne when he was 80 years old - Grandma certainly remembers him as being very active. Surely something like that might score a write-up in the local newspaper... I searched the historical newspapers on Trove and found an article which stated that he had been involved in a motorcycle accident with a car and had sustained injuries which might have led to the amputation of his foot. At the time he was 76 and believed to be the oldest motorcyclist in NSW. Dad and I guess that he probably rode his motorbike to Melbourne rather than his bike, but I can only assume that his foot wasn't amputated!

John Merrick

When I first started researching the Merricks, I tried to find out information on them from Ireland. Perhaps I was comparing it to the ease of access to records that we have here in NSW but I really didn't get very far. I knew that James Merrick was from Sligo, but I didn't have a certain birth date, and really didn't know where to search. I had a bit of a go at RootsIreland, but that was pretty expensive and pretty hit-and-miss as well. In the end I gave up.

Recently though, a relative of my husband's did some excellent research on the Irish branch of their family so I picked her brain to find out the secret of her success. She had access to another subscription database (origins.net) and found a number of references to Merricks in Sligo. She passed them on to me, so I made up a spreadsheet of all my Merrick references to see what I could make of them. I also used information from the new FamilySearch website, which is SO much better than the old one (which I found next to useless).

I still had the problem of knowing that there were two sets of James and Samuel Merricks in Australia, both from Sligo, so I focused on the brother of my James and Samuel - John, my great great great uncle. I didn't even know if he had emigrated to Australia, but I had found references to at least one other child born to a William and Jane Merrick in Sligo at about the right time - Mary Ellen. If she hadn't emigrated, but the three brothers James, Samuel and John had, then that could be why only the three brothers were listed in the death notice of Samuel.

These were the pieces of information I had on a John Merrick:

• John Thomas Merrick, born 3 Sept 1864, Sligo. Father: William, mother: Jane. From FamilySearch.
• John Merrick, carpenter in John St, Sligo, 1894. From Slaters Directory, 1894.
• John Thomas Merrick, died in Parkes (country NSW), but lived in Penshurst (Sydney, NSW). Was a builder. Was married to Margaret. Father: William, mother: Susan Jane. Children: William, Mary, John. From Trove (Sydney Morning Herald death notice), NSW BDM, Sands Directories of NSW.

So were these all the same people? My great aunt didn't remember any uncles called John, but I spoke to my great uncle. He remembered an Uncle Jack (✓ - "Jack" often equals "John"), who worked on the Sobraon as a tutor, teaching carpentry skills (✓). Uncle Jack was married to Margaret (✓), had three kids (✓), one called Mary (✓) who worked for the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, and another was a chemist (✓ - this was the son John). My great uncle also told me a lovely story about Uncle Jack's apple: Uncle Jack went to Tasmania and got an apple which was so big it was shared between six people. After that, within the family, if anything was big it was compared to Uncle Jack's Apple. He also, incidentally, remembered one of James' daughters going back to Ireland to visit an aunt - perhaps Mary Ellen.

So, with my great uncle's help I concluded that the pieces of information I had were all for my great great great uncle, John Merrick. The different mother's name - Susan Jane - is probably because it was "remembered" by grandchildren who had never met her, and therefore may have been hazy on her name - close enough though! I came to the conclusion that John had married and had at least one child before he and the family emigrated to Australia. This was confirmed when I accidentally happened across the military service record listing for John's son William in the National Archives of Australia - it listed his birth date and his birthplace - 1895 and Sligo, Ireland.

So there we are - chipping away a little bit more of the Merrick brick wall.

Wealthy butchers?

As I mentioned in my last post about the Wickhams, I needed to work out how they got to Australia. I had searched the Assisted Immigrants list at the NSW State Records but they did not come up. There were a number of Wickhams listed in the Unassisted Arrivals records, but there is very little information on those - it's mostly "Mr and Mrs Wickham" with a few initials for some records. It could have been any or none of them.

Amongst the records that Mum had there was a sheet of paper on which someone, in lovely loopy handwriting, had recorded the dates of birth of the Wickhams - parents and children. They had also written some other important dates in the life of Thomas Wickham underneath, including "Sailed for Sydney Dec 20th 1852, arrived at Sydney April 29th 1853" - this was new information to me. I checked the ships of Assisted Immigrants for around that arrival date (just in case there had been a spelling error in the records) but they didn't appear. Then I checked the Unassisted Arrivals and amazingly Mr and Mrs Wickham were there, arriving on the Chandernagore on April 29, 1853.

I am still surprised at this because that meant they would have had to pay their own way. Thomas was only a butcher and he had a big family - I can only assume that all 11 of their children came out on the boat with their parents. Who knows how he managed to afford it.

I looked up the Chandernagore in the historical newspapers. Evidently it was a controversial voyage as there was quite a bit of correspondence in the Sydney Morning Herald Letters to the Editor after it arrived. It appears that the voyage of the Chandernagore was supposedly for "Emigration upon Christian principles, unconnected with sectarian character". All the passengers were supposed to be "persons of respectability and moral character". And whilst some were "evidently well connected, and of gentlemanly education, and the majority respectable tradespeople" some supposedly were not. Letters flew back and forth in the Herald, accusing various passengers of immoral conduct etc and eventually the editors seemed to get sick of the fighting between the passengers and refused to publish any more letters on the matter!

I have also discovered that Thomas' brother Edward came out to Australia with his family. I can't definitely find them in any shipping lists, but can only assume they came out as unassisted arrivals as well. Edward was a butcher too. There must have been some money in the butchery business in Kent, where they both came from!

The Wickhams

Mum has a whole lot of original birth, death and marriage certificates that have been passed down. There was a marriage certificate for Robert Wickham, fireman, who married Ann Jane Smith, "in private life" on Oct 12, 1876, at the bride's residence. Mum was aware that Robert Wickham died in an accident on the Railways here in Sydney, so I set about looking for him. A search of the historical newspapers at Trove found a funeral notice for a Robert Wickham, Enginedriver, in the Sydney Morning Herald in June 1896. The funeral notice said he was to be buried at the Necropolis cemetery (Rookwood). I looked up the cemetery records for Rookwood and found him listed as R Wickham, buried 14 June 1896, aged 44. In the grave beside him was A Wickham, buried 16 April 1931, aged 76 - if the grave beside was Robert Wickham then this would be his wife Annie. Further searching on Robert Wickham in 1896 showed that this was indeed the Robert Wickham I was searching for:

FATAL ACCIDENT TO AN ENGINE DRIVER. HORNSBY JUNCTION, thursday A fatal accident happened at Beecroft this morning. While the down Northern express, due at Hornsby Junction at 9.44a m. was passing Beecroft, the driver, Wickham, who had been oiling his engine and was returning to the cab, slipped and fell from the engine, breaking his neck. The body was brought on to Hornsby Junction, where an inquest will be held to-morrow. Wickham was highly spoken of by the railway employees, and was generally respected. He was the driver of the train that ran through the slip points at Carlingford about four years ago. Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 12 June 1896.

So now I had the right Robert Wickham. NSW BDM revealed that his parents were named Thomas and Rachel Wickham, but had no record of his birth. So he wasn't born in NSW. The best guess was that he immigrated here, so I checked the NSW Government State Records for him. There was a convict Robert Wickham listed there, who had arrived in NSW in 1830 on the Lady Feversham. Ancestry gave me a hint of a number of family trees with parents Thomas and Rachel Wickham, but of the family trees listed, despite there being many children in the family, none of them contained a Robert Wickham. Although I had no evidence that Thomas and Rachel came out to Australia I did find a death notice in the Sydney Morning Herald for Thomas Wickham in September 1897, so cross-checked it with the Rookwood Cemetery records. There was a T Wickham buried there in September 1897 (with an E Wickham) and an R Wickham (with a D Wickham) buried in the plot beside. On a long shot I rang Rookwood and asked if it was possible to find out who owned a burial plot... depends... (presumably on privacy laws). She looked it up for me. "Those two plots were owned by a Mr Robert Wickham." Bingo! She looked up the names: Rachel (with Dorothy) and Thomas (with Emma). Double bingo! Dorothy and Emma were two of their unmarried daughters.

Robert was part of the family I had hints for on Ancestry. I still don't know why Robert wasn't listed in those family trees on Ancestry - presumably the first one missed him and everyone else copied that tree and missed him too, never bothering to check if there were any more children.

And it's still a mystery to me how the Wickhams got to Australia, so that's some research for another day.

Of cads and cannibals

One of the family mysteries was where my great great grandmother came from. Her name was Frances Merry Nandin before she married my great great grandfather. Searches turned up virtually nothing on the surname Nandin (apart from some in Dubbo, but no "Frances"). In the end I decided to get a copy of her death certificate, to see what it contained about her parents, birthplace etc. Happily, it revealed a great deal.

Frances was born in Limerick, Ireland. Unfortunately the names of her parents were listed as unknown. The big surprise was that Frances had been previously married, at the age of 17, in Cooktown, Queensland. And her previous married name had actually been "Naudin" rather than "Nandin" - clearly a transcription error. The death certificate listed her first husband as Augustus Naudin, and showed she had two children by Augustus, Louis and Charles. Then, when she was 23 years old, Frances married George Valentine Turnbull in Brisbane, and had six more children with him.

So what happened to the first husband? There was no record of his death in the Queensland Births Deaths and Marriages. Hoping there might be something in the historical newspapers, I searched Trove, and also trawled the internet for anything on Augustus Naudin. I came across a relative of his, living in France, and together we, along with another relative here in Australia, put together some semblance of a story about what happened to Frances' first husband.

Frances' husband usually used Theophile or Augustus as his first name, but also used various permutations of them both - I'll use Augustus to save confusion. He was apparently born in Paris, France, in about 1845. Somehow, at some stage, he made it to Australia. Family legend has it that he left France after fighting a duel (which was illegal). Another story is that he was studying to be a priest but published a pamplet containing some "advanced" ideas so he had to give up taking orders. Who knows if any of that is true - he certainly seems to have had a very tenuous relationship with the truth...

Augustus Naudin first turned up in Dubbo, NSW, in 1868, marrying Charlotte MacMun (sic - it's actually McMunn) and then fathering a child with her, plus three more children in later years. Then apparently, he left, while Charlotte was still pregnant with her fourth child and headed north, supposedly going on an exploration trip to New Guinea, but leaving instructions that the baby should be called Charlotte if it was a girl (it was and she was dutifully called Charlotte).

The next we hear of Augustus was in 1877 where he was in Cooktown, Qld, marrying Bridget Murry/Murray on Valentines Day. Bridget Murry is Frances Naudin - for reasons unknown she changed her name to Frances. On the marriage certificate Augustus is listed as a storekeeper (and also a "Bachelor" - though as far as can be ascertained he was still married to Charlotte), Bridget as a servant. Bridget gave birth to their first child, Louis Alexander on 9 Dec that same year. The Cooktown Courier then has a record in April 1878 of Augustus (noted as an employee of Messrs. Walsh & Co's Gympie Stores, Charlotte St, Cooktown) being on the crew of the boat "Swan" which apparently mutinied and instead of sailing to Somerset, headed for New Guinea to explore for gold. In a letter he wrote back to Australia he said he intended to stay for six months. He obviously returned at some stage for he fathered another son with Bridget, Charles Augustus Naudin, born 22 Oct 1879.

The next we hear of Augustus, he was, according to the Cooktown Herald of 16 April 1880, about to leave the next day for New Guinea on the Annie Brooks, to "procure specimens of natural history" and also to test for evidence of gold. This is the last we hear of Augustus alive.

On or about October 12, 1880, the party of naturalists from the Annie Brooks was murdered by New Guinea natives, and eaten. I hate to think how poor Frances heard the news. So there she was, widowed, with two small sons to look after. Sometime in 1881 she arrived in Sydney with her boys and there met George Turnbull, my great great grandfather. You'd count your lucky stars if you met a man who was willing to take you plus your two young sons on, and it seems that George was willing. Soon Frances was pregnant with their first child, Herbert Louis Turnbull, who was born in Sydney on 19 June 1882. Most likely George's parents were not at all happy at the birth of this illegitimate grandson (George was not actually named as the father when the birth was registered - the father was named as Guss, but Augustus had been dead for too long for it to be him), so George, Frances and the three boys left for Queensland. George and Frances were married in Brisbane on November 1, 1882. They then had five more children in Brisbane: George Valentine, Ethel Mabel, Gertrude Adeline, Frances and Norman Percy. The family came back to Sydney, in 1900 after the deaths of George's parents, and George and Frances lived in Balmain until their deaths.

The Beringers

I first started working on my family history at the beginning of last year. My husband and our (then) two kids were living in Freiburg, Germany over the six-week Christmas holidays, and while I was there I decided to start looking into the German branch of the family, the Beringers. I signed up to Ancestry.com.au (the non-subscription bit at that stage), probably because that was the only program I had heard of for family treeing - from watching Who Do You Think You Are? on telly. I didn't get very far before we came home to Australia, partly because I was relying mainly on memory and what I could get from my parents while I had limited access to email over there.

One of the first things I researched with the Beringer family was finding out how they got here. Mum knew the name of the ship they arrived here on - the Abergeldie - and I worked from there. We are pretty lucky here in the state of New South Wales that our archival records are reasonably good. The passenger lists for many of the immigrant ships have been digitised and are available at the NSW Government State Records. I found the passenger list for the correct journey of the Abergeldie (it brought immigrants here on a number of voyages) and found them.

Adam, aged 28, a locksmith, and Caroline M. Beringer, 27, arrived in Sydney on December 23, 1884. They brought with them their two children, Matilda, 3, and Adolph, 1. Also on that ship was a Valentine Beringer, 26, a cabinet maker, also from Germany.

What was their voyage like? And where did they go, disembarking on a Tuesday, two days before Christmas? I know from the last page of the ship's list that the voyage took 52 days. I found an article from the Sydney Morning Herald, on Trove (which has Australian historial newspapers digitised) which gave me some idea of what they did on the voyage, but not really any idea of where they went after they disembarked from the ship. I'll never know how they found lodgings, and how they went about finding work, and generally beginning life in a country so foreign. However, Shaun Tan's graphic novel, The Arrival, does give some idea of what the new immigrant faces on arrival.

The next record I could find of the Beringers was in the NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages records. There was a record of Matilda, the daughter, dying in 1885, in the country town of Uralla. It does list her mother as "Matilda", but that was Caroline's middle name, and although the Beringer family did not ultimately settle in Uralla, Valentine Beringer, who changed his name to John, did. So I can be reasonably sure that it is them, because although I only confirmed this morning for sure that John Valentine was related, it was a reasonable guess to assume he was, with such a uncommon surname, coming out to Australia on the same ship. Imagine coming all the way to Australia to have your eldest child die within a year. Surely you'd wonder what kind of God-forsaken place you'd come to...