Thomas and Margaret

I have begun digging into the story of Thomas and Margaret Henderson this week. They were the parents of Robert Henderson, who was baptised in Parramatta in 1796. 

Thomas and Margaret were Irish, so we face the same difficulties in researching their forebears as we did with Patrick and Elizabeth Geary (see my last post). The destruction of many Irish records during the Irish Civil War makes it very difficult to trace ancestries in Ireland. 

There is also the problem of misunderstanding Irish accents and recording different names for the same person. In this case, the name Henderson is often recorded as Anderson and in at least one case, both versions are interchanged in the same document.

The other problem is not restricted to Irish ancestors and that is the quality of earlier research. In the Ward and Henderson families, we were lucky to have so much work done by Joan Taylor, who was thorough in her research and very good at quoting her sources. The same cannot be said for all family historians and some family trees contain information that is just plain wrong. This often means that whole branches of a tree can be completely wrong, based on a simple mistake with a single ancestor.

For this reason I try to check out all sources for myself and for key facts, such as the parents of an individual, I look for an official source such as a birth certificate, (it is mostly not available). In the absence of a high-quality source, I look for at least three secondary sources or key deductions before I accept it as a fact. 

In the case in point, there is amble evidence that Thomas and Margaret Henderson were the parents of Robert Henderson. There are baptism records naming both parents, legal papers naming both Thomas and Robert and Thomas was a witness at Robert's wedding. But there are other aspects of the story that are more difficult to work out.

Thomas and Margaret both arrived as convicts aboard the Sugar Cane in December 1793. Thomas had been convicted in Dublin in November 1791 and Margaret was convicted about 9 months later in July 1992. Both were charged with theft and were sentenced to transportation for 7 years. 

We know nothing of their life before they were convicted. We assume that they were already married before Thomas was convicted, but there is no evidence of a marriage either in Ireland or New South Wales.

Some researchers have named the parents of Thomas Henderson and I can easily find the same baptism records that give those parents. But there is nothing else that I can find that links that baptism to the Thomas who was sent to New South Wales as a convict. The baptism was 150 km away from Dublin where Thomas was tried and there is at least one other baptism recorded in Dublin that could be our Thomas. Added to the fact that the majority of baptismal records have been lost, and I just can't justify including this information in my profile of Thomas.

Some researchers, including Joan Taylor, also suggest that Thomas and Margaret had a son John born on the voyage to Australia. Joan Taylor references an extensive Pioneer Register compiled by Smee and Provis and published  in 1990. I think there may be an updated version and will put it on my list to check when I go to the National Library.  The reference given by Joan gives a few more details - particularly that John Henderson married Ruth Chambers and had a daughter Maria. He died in Maitland in 1844. 

Unfortunately there is a trail of clues that disprove this idea! The John Henderson who died at Maitland was married to Ruth and had a daughter Maria, but his wife's birth name was Ruth Hill (not Chambers) and they were both convicts. This John arrived in New South Wales on the Neptune in 1818, so there was no way he could be the son of Thomas and Margaret. The evidence is in the records of Convicts permission to marry. 

Of course it is still possible that there was a son John, but at this point I have found no evidence that he ever existed. At least one other Henderson researcher has similar doubts about John.

On a more positive note, there is evidence of another child after Robert. Mary Henderson was born at Parramatta in  1803.  She died on the same day as she was born. Margaret also died the same day. The logical conclusion is that Margaret and her baby daughter died during the birth. 

Thomas was left a widower with a 7-year-old son. He was about 51 years old and would have completed his sentence in 1798, so he was a free man.  

In my next post, I will look at the next phase in Thomas Henderson's eventful life and I am pretty sure we can trace him a bit further than Joan Taylor did.