Welcome to my web site.   Genealogy detail is of particular though enduring  interest to individual descendants. The process of assembling information from old records and memories is unending. So  I shall be pleased to be advised of errors and omissions, and am happy to correspond with readers, whether descended from my pioneers or not, on any matters covered in these pages.

 

         There is a predominence of Irish material, both in Ireland itself and among the early Irish in New South Wales. This derives from the fact that fifteen of my sixteen great great grandparents were Irish. And the sixteenth, born in the Colony had an Irish mother and an English father. Their emigrant children came in the first half of the 19th Century, from all over Ireland, most voluntarily, searching, successfully,for a better life here. A couple of my forbears came not so willingly, chosen as they were “…..by the best judges in Ireland”,

           The sad departure of so many families brings to mind Jeremiah 22 10:

“Weep sore for him that goeth away;

for he shall return no more, nor see his native land.”

 

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One of those referred to above was  my great great grandfather, Edward Markham. Opposing British rule in Ireland, Ed was arrested in 1822 in Co. Limerick, tried, convicted, sentenced to 7 years transportation, and sent to the hulk in Cork Harbour, all on the same day, this under the UK’s Irish Insurrection Act which gave the Brits cover to remove “insurrectionists” to the colony on the other side of the world, for the most minor offences, such as “breaking the curfew” He arrived in the Colony in chains exactly 200 years ago, in 1822, and is an example of the successful readjustment of their lives here, here of so many relatively uneducated Irish rural workers. There are thousands of stories of such migrants, willing and unwilling, who became a credit to their new country.

 

But Edmund Markham’s monument is not material, (his agricultural assets were in any case mortgaged). It is the family of descendants of him,and his Irish wife, (one of a handful of women at the time living at the “Limits of Settlement”) and raising children so far from accessible help) :

    –          Chief Justice of the Northern Territory and President of the Australian Law Council, and Queen’s Counsel; Head of a NSW Government Department; Australian Ambassador to a number of countries;

– NSW Magistrate; Mayor of Maclean, NSW; Chief Clerks of Wollongong and Mudgee in NSW;

                        –   Superintendent, ACT  Ambulance Service; Nurses, one later Deputy  Superintendent, War Veterans’ Nursing Home, Queensland, another transferred to teaching, acquiring a Doctorate of Philosophy;

    –          university graduates (law, economics, engineering, library science, business, journalism, pharmacy, arts), including at honours level in law and engineering, and PhD in Science;

    –          several religious Sisters, at least one of whom was a School Principal;

    –          many in war service in Gallipoli, France, Asia and Pacific in  WW1 & WW11, including at least three who were killed  on active  service and lie buried in France and elsewhere ;

    –          winner of  the George Medal for bravery, in police service in northern New South Wales;

    –          holders of Medal of the Order of Australia; British Empire Medal, Queen’s Police Medal, St John Ambulance Medal, as well as war service and national service medals;

    –          authors and journalists; winner of Eureka Science Book Prize (for book on the Creutzfeld Jakob Disease issues and history); journalism awards for writings on legal, medical, science and Asian issues; author of books on the practice of law and court procedures, winner of the  University Medal (Sydney) in 2018;

    –          winners of secondary and tertiary Government  education scholarships, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Yale;

    –          one or more of farmers, timber getters, sawmillers, builders (including of the Catholic churches at Darbys Falls and Frogmore, and the Anglican church at Darbys Falls) librarians, musicians, schoolteachers, bankers,  police officers, barrister, structural engineer, chemist, company directors, magazine editor, film director, public servants, and tradesmen.

 

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           My story of the early (1820s) availability of schooling for the Irish emancipists’ children is here. The School described is the forerunner of the now 200 year old St Mary’s Cathedral School in Sydney, though there is little public or private recognition of the fact.It also records the first occasion where government funds were given to a Catholic administered school.

 

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The added bonus of my genealogy research is the exposure of early colonial New South Wales life of  settlers in a new land, and their interaction with their communities. Consequently, much of the recorded social and historical information in these pages goes beyond genealogy and deserves a wider audience. My objective, in setting up this website, is to advance that process.  In that context, I have gone sometimes beyond blood relatives and included families to whom “my” families were connected by marriage in the early days of settlement. At the same time, I thank my relatives, close, distant, and very distant, for their contributions to these papers. Hopefully, once they examine these records, they will be encouraged to continue their own research.

 

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 The story of the wreck of the “Letitia” en route to the Colony in 1828, with among others, my g g grandfather Edward Conyngham, is an interesting one. I have added recently most of my research notes which build extensively on the basic incident.