Australia Day 2018

Having a very relaxed Australia Day 🇦🇺 With a First Fleet ancestor in family the day always has a strong genealogy tie for me. My ancestor Mary Wilkes Turner arrived here on the Lady Penryhn, a ship which had been built as a slave ship. The female convicts who sailed captive from their homeland on her voyage here must of regarded it as a ship of misery. The treatment of the female convicts of the First Fleet is something not enough people know about, one of those darker stories of history that people prefer not to acknowledge. Mary may very well have been a flawed human being (who isn’t) but she was obviously mentally and physically strong, a true survivor! Without her being forced to come here my family and I would not have the life in this wonderful country that we do and so today I will celebrate and toast her memory.
More posts on Mary can be found here and here.

Lady Penrhyn

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The Kendall Children.

I started this post a while ago and was going to finally finish and post it yesterday however our four grandchildren came over and I got sidetracked. Our grandchildren range in age now from six down to one; they are so full of life (each of them lights up a room when they enter it) and we feel extremely blessed to have them in our lives. After spending the afternoon researching this post, their arrival made this tragedy even more poignant for me and so I appreciated their company even more than usual and hugged them a bit tighter too! This morning I woke up to a cold, wet and windy Wagga day and the thought of three little girls out in August weather like this, in light weight dresses with no shoes or jumpers impacted on me even more. Those poor babies! One of the girls was found still clasping her doll that she had carried with her over the whole tragic journey. When my husband and I were looking around the Wagga Wagga Monumental Cemetery some time ago we came a...

My First Fleet Connection - Mary Turner (aka Mary Wilkes/Wilks)

My 5th Great Grandmother Mary Turner (also known as Mary Wilks/Wilkes) is my earliest known and documented Australian relative. She was tried at Worcester on 5th March 1785 and sentenced to seven years. Mary arrived on the ship Lady Penrhyn in 1788. It seems the 5th of March was not an auspicious trial date for Mary in 1785 or later in 1789! On the 5th March 1789 she was tried for stealing six cabbages from the garden of William Parr, she was found guilty and sentenced to 50 lashes. Later in March 1789 she also was in trouble for her testimony in the trial of Royal Marines accused of stealing from the government stores (six of them were found guilty and executed) in which it was believed by some that she had perjured herself. Mary was sent to Norfolk Island in 1790 on board the ship Sirius . Apparently she stayed on Norfolk Island until 1793 when she returned to Port Jackson on board the ship Kitty . Her de fact...

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