Partners in crime

I could not resist doing a bit more research into Catherine Mitchell's co-accused at her trial in the Stirling Courts in 1833. The trial was reported in The Scotsman on 14 Sep 1833:

Mary Martin and Ann Stean did not appear, but the other three were all sentenced to transportation for 7 years. They were aboard the convict ship George Hibbert when it sailed from the Downs (an anchorage near London) on 27 July 1834. There were no male convicts aboard. There were 144 female convicts, 11 free women and 64 children aboard. It was a longer than average voyage but all arrived safely in Sydney on 1 December. It was the last convict ship of the year to arrive in Sydney.

The three young women are on consecutive lines in the detailed indent of convicts who arrived on the George Hibbert. 

• No 139, Christian Cock (alias Cook), was 20 and was the oldest of the three. Her trade was 'needlewoman', she was 166 cm  tall, had a fair ruddy complexion, brown hair and hazel eyes. Robina could read and write. She married John Purdy at Cobbity in 1835. I have not discovered any children of this marriage and Christian died at Paramatta in 1842 aged about 29. John Purdy remarried and had a large family with his second wife.
• No 140, Robina Lochie, was 18 and originally from Ayrshire (she also gives her native place as Edinburgh in other records).  She was 146 cm tall (4 foot 10 inches - very small), had a freckled complexion, sandy hair and grey eyes. She was the only one of the three that had a prior conviction. Her calling is listed as 'nursemaid and housemaid' and she could read. She married Edward Alders at Port Macquarie in 1836. She was 19 and still on bond (serving sentence). Edward was 33 and a former convict who arrived in 1819. They had 12 children at Port Macquarie and later Kempsey. Robina died in Kempsey in 1898 (aged about 83 by my calculations).
• No 141, Cathrine Mitchell, was 17. She was 160 cm tall, had a ruddy complexion, dark brown hair and dark eyes. Her calling was 'housemaid' and she could read. As we know, Catherine married William Ward (37) in 1837 when she was 20. They had 10 children. Catherine died in Sydney in 1897 aged 81.

I was struck by the similarities between Robina and Catherine's lives. They both lived to a ripe old age. I wonder if they stayed in contact? Neither could write according to the convict records, but they both lived in coastal areas that were largely served by shipping, so they may have remained aware of each other.

I sometimes wonder of these sidetracks divert me from the main goal - to document the story of our family. But every now and then going down these 'rabbit holes' pays dividends. In looking into Robina Lochie, I discovered that she was mentioned in the log of the ship's surgeon, having been treated during the voyage to Australia. Our ancestor, Catherine Mitchel is not mentioned anywhere in the journal, indicating she had a healthy voyage. But the discovery of the journal is a little gem in itself. The Surgeon concludes with some general remarks that give us a far better picture of the voyage aboard the George Hibbert. It will take me time to digest, but I am sure some snippets will find their way into Catherine's story as I write it up.

I said last post that I had ordered a copy of the trial papers from Scotland. The researchers have been in touch to say that have a huge backlog due to the closure of the Archives Office during Covid, but things are open again and they are working through their backlog. I can't wait to find out exactly what this group of young women did, but will have to contain my impatience until the researchers can get to my request.

Catherine Mitchell

Catherine Mitchell was the mother of Manasseh Ward. There are well-established and verified linkages proving this, including the details of Catherine's marriage to William Ward at St Phillip's Church in Sydney in 1837 and the accompanying documents. Most interesting in the 1837 documents is the register of 'Convicts permission to marry' available from NSW State Archives. This shows that on 25 January 1837 permission was granted for William Ward, 37 year-old free man who arrived on the Almorah on a 7-year sentence to marry Catherine Mitchell, 20 year-old bond woman who arrived on the George Hibbert also on a 7-year sentence. The 'bond' indicates that Catherine was still serving her sentence.

The George Hibbert was a convict ship that had arrived in Sydney in December 1834. The convict records give us a quite detailed description of Catherine, who was 17 when she arrived in the Colony of New South Wales. Catherine had been convicted at Stirling Court of Judiciary on 12 September 1833. I have found some convict records incorrectly give Perth as the place of trial, but the Scottish Archives confirm that the trial was at Stirling.

Joan Taylor's landmark family history reveals that Catherine was convicted of 'household robbery' and that she was a housemaid. This week I found a few more details from the Scotland, Court and Criminal Database:

Tried with Robina Lochie and Christian Cock. Tried in conjunction with Mary Martin or McDonald. Also Ann Stean. Pannel cannot write.

Crime: Theft by housebreaking, habit and repute

Verdict and comments: Guilty in terms of own confession - theft, Transportation 7 years. 

Robina Lochie and Christian Cock (a female I think) were aboard the George Hibberd with Catherine, each with a 7-year term. Ann Stean was 'not called' whatever that means. Mary Martin may be the villain of the piece.  Her trial record says that she is the wife of William McDonald, hatter and her verdict was 'outlawed'. The sentence reads 'Outlawed and put to the horn'! This was old Scots law where the culprit was proclaimed at the Great Cross in Edinburgh, together with three blasts of a horn and other formalities.

I have signed up to get a full report on the trial. If this delivers as advertised, it will give is the minutes of the trial as well as any other documents that survive. This will take a few weeks I think. While waiting for this, I will continue to look into Catherine's origins in Scotland.

Surprises deflated

In my last post I forecast some surprises as I started to research the ancestry of Catherine Mitchell. Sorry to disappoint, but the surprise did not stand the test of forensic investigation!

About 3 years ago I received a message through ancestry.com asking if I knew that Catherine had a half-sister in Australia. The suggestion was that John Mitchell, Catherine's father, had married Isobel (or Isabel) Miller in 1800 and had a daughter named Mary Ann in 1801 (in Alloa). Isobel died in childbirth and he later married Catherine McGregor in 1807 and had a large family with her.

My normal course of investigating family connections is as follows:

• First see if I can find a birth or baptism record that names the parents.
• Next look for other children of the same parents - this is usually a search for baptisms based on parents names, a rough location and a timeframe of 10-15 years either side of the person I started with.
• Next I look for the marriage of the parents, based on the birth of the first child.
• Finally I look for the birth or baptism of the parents, assuming they were between 20 and 40 when they married, or when their first child was born.
• If I find the parents baptism or birth, then the next cycle starts from the beginning.

There are some other checks and balances that I use, but you get the picture.

When I started to apply this process to the story I was given by my contact, the alarm bells started to go off very quickly. First the marriage he was quoting was some 30 miles from where Mary Ann was born. Then the search for siblings turned up other baptisms in Alloa before the supposed marriage and after Isabel supposedly died. A final check of baptisms near the supposed marriage suggests that there were almost certainly two separate families. Our John Mitchell and Catherine McGregor were married before the last of John Mitchell and Isabel Miller's children was born. I doubt our John married twice, with the marriages overlapping!

My next step was to look at how my contact made the connection in the first place. He was tracing his wife's family and came to a Mary Green (married name)  who was in and out of a Benevolent Asylum in Sydney with her two daughters. On one of her discharges in 1859 there is a note that 'Mary Green would be going to her sister with Mr Spears at Brisbane Waters'. My contact then discovered that the Convict Catherine Mitchell had been assigned to William Spears at Brisbane Water and he immediately concluded that Mary Green's sister was Catherine Mitchell.

He failed to take account of the fact that 22 years had passed between Catherine Mitchell leaving the Spears household in 1837 to marry William Ward (he knew about that) and Mary Green's discharge in 1859. So I don't think there is any likelihood that Mary Green's maiden name was Mitchell, let alone that she was in any way related to our Catherine.

This is a side story, but it is a good illustration of how badly done research can easily lead people astray. The problem is that people put this stuff on internet family trees and it gets copied as fact.

If anyone is interested, I will include the details of this proposal and the results of my searched, in the research notes as I progress the Catherine Mitchell story.

William Ward's birth a mystery

I have finally completed by work looking for the birth and parents of William Ward. This has taken me more than a month doing up to an hour each day. 

As reported in earlier posts, I found 18 William Wards born in London between 1797 and 1800 (inclusive dates). I looked into other children born to the same couples, possible burials in the same parish as the baptism and later Census records.

• I ruled out 7 Williams because they could be traced in later life. One or two were clearly from wealthy families and were excluded on this basis.
• 8 more were unlikely in my opinion.
• 3 remained possible but there were no facts that favoured one over another.

My conclusions are as follows:

• It is highly unlikely that either of the current theories about William Ward’s parentage are correct (ie, William Ward and Ann Catherine Hennell or James Ward and Mary Preston).
• It is also unlikely that the parentage of William Ward could be verified from the historical records currently available.
• It remains possible, if not likely that William Ward was born outside the identified time period or was born in a rural area rather than London.

There remain some avenues that could be investigated, particularly any apprentice records that may not available electronically. In rural areas, these records may be in Parish registers and we need to remember that many of these records have been lost.

There is also the possibility that DNA linking could reveal some relevant information although I have been told that getting back to William's generation is at the extremes of where DNA linking is likely to be useful.

If anyone is interested in following what I did, I have kept rough research notes and have loaded the PDF onto the resources section of my Ward family history website at wardkemp.com. Be warned, it is a rambling document, containing a lot of thoughts and speculations (1799-ward-william-birth.pdf).

One of the things that this work illustrates is the role that online family tree services like Ancestry and Familysearch (Morman Church) play in spreading the results of poor research. Both continue to offer James Ward and Mary Preston as the 'suggested' parents of William Ward, even though it is quite easy to disprove this theory. The lesson for me is to check everything myself, verifying the source of the information and always look for other supporting information. 

I am now moving on from William to his wife Catherine Mitchell. Catherine is a more rewarding subject I think and my next post will have some new information for some of us at least!

Forget William Ward and Ann Catherine Hennell?

 My big discovery this week is a negative one - that the the only remaining theory of our William Ward's parents is probably not true!

Building on what I said in my last post, we know from the convict records that our William was a chimney sweep in London before be was arrested and tried for theft of a shawl in 1816. Chimney sweeps were apprenticed at a young age and were almost always from poor families. It was not a sought-after occupation. The boys lived and worked in awful conditions and were not paid.

Up until now, we knew that Ann Catherine Hennell came from a family of successful goldsmiths. I was still working on the basis that she may have fallen out of favour with the family by marrying below her station.

Then this week I stumbled upon an ancestry.com hint that led me to the last will and testament of Ann Catherine's mother, Sussana Hennell nee Gee. The will names her children and the reference to her eldest daughter reads:

Ann Catherine Ward, wife of Willian Ward of the Stock Exchange London.

Ann Catherine had died before this will came into effect and the final paragraph, under the heading 'Proven' shows her as 'the late'.

This might provide a lot of clues to find out more about William Ward Snr, and perhaps track down what became of the child born in 1799, but I don't think this would advance the cause of my research any further.

In my opinion, this moves this couple into the highly improbable category in the search for William's parents.

A PDF copy of the will is now on my website. I have added a new resources section on the Ward page for this as a 'disproving' resource.