Which Thomas Watkins?

 I have been working this week going over the information that I have on Thomas and Sarah Watkins, who were early settlers of Mangrove Creek, a settlement in the lower Hawkesbury River region of Colonial New South Wales. I have written previously about both Thomas Watkins and his wife, Sarah Lewis. Thomas was a convict who arrived in Sydney on the Baring in 1815. Sarah was born in the colony, probably of convict parents.

The problem is that there were a number of people in the Colony who carried the name 'Thomas Watkins'.  That is not particularly unusual with the more common surnames. Christian names like Thomas, William, James, John and Joseph where also a dime a dozen at the time. William Ward was another relative that had the same problem - there were 35 or more convicts of that name over the history of convict transportation!

When considering a new piece of evidence that refers to a person of interest, in this case Thomas Watkins, I usually look for a second collaborative detail to make sure I have the right person. For a convict, this is often the ship on which they arrived, but I also accept locations or other details that give added assurance. So with William Ward, we can be sure that any reference that mentions the Almorah or Brisbane Water are likely to be my ancestor.

But this gets more complicated for Thomas Watkins, because there were two convicts of that name aboard the convict ship Baring. The two men often appear on the same page of convicts and the key detail that separates them is the place that they were tried.

• One was a native of Bristol and had been convicted at Gloucester on 6 April, 1814. His occupation was carter.
• The other was a native of Herefordshire and had been tried at Hereford. He was a labourer.

Both had been sentenced to transportation for life and were of a similar age (within five years). You can often find them both on the same list of convicts.

Click to enlarge - list of convicts in Baring.
There are two men named Thomas Watkins.

So which one was the Thomas that married Sarah Lewis? They had to get permission from the Governor to marry, but the records of that permission just describes Thomas as coming on the Baring.

The answer requires a bit more detective work than normal.  

In 1826 our Thomas Watkins was accused of stealing wood and his Ticket of Leave was revoked. Sarah appealed to the Governor and in her letter says that Thomas had held his Ticket of Leave for seven years. This matches up with a request to the Governor in 1919, which says that Thomas was recently married.

The investigation cleared Thomas of any wrong-doing and a new Ticket of leave was issued. This document is the clue I neeeded. It gives his native place as Bristol, his place of trial as Gloucester and the date of trial as 6 April 1814. It also  details the cancellation of the earlier Ticket of Leave. So there is no doubt that the Thomas Watkins who married Sarah Lewis was the one from Bristol. They are linked by Sarah's letter to the Governor.

The Hereford Thomas was granted his Ticket of Leave in 1824, at which time he was in the Illawarra region. I have not traced his history further.

It is not surprising that some family historians have mixed up the two men, and you will find some family trees that have the events of both men combined into a single story. 

At one point a few years ago, I was living at Wentworth Falls in the NSW Blue Mountains. Our house was on a section of the original 'Cox's Road' that had been built in just six months by William Cox. I had a short-lived thrill when I found the name of Thomas Watkins, who arrived on the Baring among the convicts assigned to work on the road. Of course it was the Hereford Thomas, not our relative.

The coincidences are interesting. I was browsing old copies of 'The Gloucester Journal', where I knew there were reports of Thomas's trial. I did a search for 'Thomas Watkins' and 'horse-stealing' and got an immediate hit in the right timeframe. I was about to save my find, when I noticed that it was a report of the Hereford Assizes (courts). I was sure I was in the right edition of that paper, and did some page flipping, and sure enough, the Gloucester Assizes, and our Thomas's conviction, were reported on page three, while the more distant courts, with the other Thomas, were on page four. And they were both convicted of horse-stealing.