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ELIZABETH JOHNSTON

(1878-1953)

&

THOMAS HENRY LELLO

(1868-1940)

A CONCISE ACCOUNT OF THEIR ANCESTRY

by Gwyneth Daniel

Willows Books Publishing

Canberra * Christchurch *Hobart*Los Angeles

© Gwyneth Daniel

1st Edition Revised 2005, March

17 Wylly Place, Hughes, ACT 7260, Australia

107 Pauntley Road, Christchurch, Dorset, BH23 3JJ, United Kingdom

21 Mt Stuart Road, Mt Stuart, TAS 7000, Australia

1875 Oak Tree Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90041-2020, United States of America

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

ELIZABETH JOHNSTON 1878-1953

THOMAS HENRY LELLO 1868-1940

APPENDIX I FAMILY LAND IN TASMANIA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most grateful thanks are to my Lello and Brown cousins for their input and help in compiling the information that has allowed me to put together this small work. I am beholden to Brian Rollins for guidance and advice on land title questions, and for providing vital information and charts.

The Tasmanian Land Department and Hobart Archives have been extremely generous with their help, as has the State Library.

My affectionate thanks are due to my son Alexander Woodruff, who took time out of his busy life to look for stylistic points and root out typing errors.

I wish it were possible to name and thank the unknown donors of the original research cited in the sections on Samuel Odkenbaker and Mary Brennan. Despite my best efforts, I have failed to discover who some of these are, but I'm closing in on them, and will amend my source list to take account of what I discover.

Any assumptions or opinions expressed within these covers are, however, mine alone.

SAMUEL BAKER

1. May 30th 1818, Hobart Town Gazette, 'Govt. Public Notice', from 'Secretary's Office, Hobart Town, Saturday, 30th May, 1818. The following Constables, established in the County of Cornwall, by the COMMANDANT of Port Dalrymple, are approved and confirmed: Mr Thomas Massey, Chief Constable....9. Samuel Baker...'.

2. Saturday October 31st 1818, Hobart Town Gazette, contains the notice that Mr Baker of Launceston 'or any respectable person in Hobart Town' would collect the subscriptions for the Hobart Town Gazette at Port Dalrymple.

3. Samuel's land grant for a block on Blackstone Heights was made 31 December 1820, quit rent 1/- (one shilling) Locatees were often on the land before it was surveyed. Earlier musters show Samuel working land and off the victualling list.

4. c. 1822/3 'Return of the Juvenile Population of Launceston, Van Diemens Land Requiring Education from Four to Nineteen Years of Age' shows Samuel's two older daughters, age 6 and 5, as 'reader' and 'writer', if the 'ditto' marks mean this rather than 'no entry', but this is doubtful otherwise the column could have been left blank.

5. After 1826, Samuel was allocated two small blocks in Port Dalrymple on the north side of Brisbane Street and Wellington Street, running through to the alley behind.

MARY BRENNAN

The burial register for St John's Launceston describes her as 'formerly convict' and her death occasioned by drink.' It is not known whether Rev. John Youl was the author but it seems unlikely anyone else would have completed the church register.

PREFACE TO REVISED FIRST EDITION

This is a revised edition, produced specially for the Internet, of a small work printed for family members in early February 2005. Since then, new information has come to light, as always happens in the study of family history. The original is now out of print, but an expanded second edition is in preparation and will be printed off within a matter of months. This will contain sections on Harry and Bessie's children and an outline of their lives.

Almost every family in Tasmania whose history goes back beyond 1900 can claim to be descended from pioneers and diggers. My family is no different: five separate strands of settler blood, going back almost a century, mingled when my grandparents Bessie and Harry Lello began having children in 1897.

One of the problems in getting to the truth about my ancestry lay in the fact that my mother, their oldest surviving daughter, left home at 17, quitting Tasmania for good at 26. Bessie left West Tamar at 22. Harry was just 16 when he sailed away on the Antiope. All were separated from their parents when too young to know what questions to ask, as was I at 18.

In the last three years, the truth has started to emerge from public records and family sources, including Bibles and oral history. Fresh research in Scotland has added substance to some of the stories. Thorough checking of the record in England has demolished almost all the Lello myths. There is, though, plenty still to do. This little work points the way to any who wish to follow in my footsteps and finish the work. The fine detail can be found on my website http://www.lendingtheway.com, through which I can be contacted.

I hope this will go some way towards setting straight the incorrect account of our ancestry, accepted then as gospel, in my mother's little memoir, A Tasmanian Girlhood, published in 1997. We had no idea then (because our family had not got together in a spirit of cooperation to share material), that almost all of this was already known, even among first cousins. More's the pity: my mother died ignorant of her true ancestry and I'm very sad indeed about that.

This is my main reason for making everything I know available as widely as possible: it's a moral question. Everything we inherit from shared ancestors is 'ours' not 'mine'.

Gwyneth Daniel, Wynyard March 2005

ELIZABETH JOHNSTON 1878-1953

Elizabeth Johnston, known to her family as Bessie, was born on 19 November 1878, the middle child in her family. Her parents, Thomas Shankleton Johnston and Maria Brown, had a small home on land at Flowery Gully in West Tamar, not far from one of the Ilfracombe Company mines.

Thomas Henry Lello married Bessie when she was only 18. By the time she turned 24 she had given birth to three babies (two surviving) In 1902, she left West Tamar for Queenstown. There she lived with her family until 1940.

As far as we can tell, Bessie was of mainly Scottish extraction with around 1/8th English blood. At the last count she has well over two hundred descendants.

***

Bessie's father, Thomas Shankleton Johnston, was born 7 June 1850 in Dalton, Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Dalton is a small farming community near Lockerbie, but he did not live there for long.

His parents were mobile farm workers and he was the second of three boys. There were also two older girls in the household, his half- sisters. Two more children were born in Tasmania: Georgina and Joseph. Georgina married James or John Snoxall and died young.

Given that Thomas met his bride Bessie in the area around Beaconsfield, it is fair to assume that from an early age he worked on the land, then at the new mines nearby, once opened. He lived for a time at Flowery Gully where his father Joseph is recorded as living from 1866 to 1869, on land leased from Robert Sladen. After that the record becomes confused until after Thomas was married, although it seems likely that the Johnston family were farming there throughout this period.

At some point, Thomas took out a mortgage to buy 50 acres in Flowery Gully, land previously allocated to John Adams. The block can be seen opposite the southern end of Peaked Hill running up to the road. It has two small lakes and is opposite a larger dammed lake on the opposite side of the road. Thomas shared this land with his brother William who inherited it on Thomas's death.

The Hobart Gazette for 1885 shows that Thomas as owning a 'Hut and land'. To get to work in the Ilfracombe mine, Thomas had a walk of about 1 kilometres. Another ½ kilometre further was the nearest post office. There he posted his letter to the District Registrar at George Town to inform him of Bessie's birth.

Thomas Shankleton died at the age of 36. By then he had given up mining and taken to farming full-time. His death registration states that he died from phthisis, usually tuberculosis, but some say silicosis, probably aggravated by working in the mine. Bessie was not yet eight when he died. His land, heavily mortgaged passed to his brother William who was already occupying half of it.

***

Bessie Johnston's mother, Maria Brown, was the tenth child of John Brown and Elizabeth Baker. She was born on 12 April 1852. Her birth was registered at Launceston.

Maria and Thomas Shankleton Johnston married according to the rites of the Church of Scotland at Sidmouth on Boxing Day 1872. Maria was still under 21, but Thomas was of full' age. She was described as a servant' while he was a miner'. Maria had a difficult and busy life. When Thomas died, she was 34 and left with six children under the age of nine. Two months to the day after his death she gave birth to Hester. It is not too surprising she sought the support of her brother-in-law John (known as Jim) whose own wife, Ellen Cooper, disappeared from his life, for unknown reasons. Ellen had a child William who was buried, as she was, under the name Snoxall, and was taken to be the child of James or John Snoxall, widower of Georgina Johnston.

To her own seven, Maria added four more through Jim, three of whom survived. All of these later children were registered in the name Brown. Even had Ellen Cooper no longer been alive, Maria would not have been allowed to marry the brother of her dead husband, nor indeed given these children his surname rather than her own maiden name.

Maria was still having children when her own offspring were already becoming parents. She did not live much longer after the birth and death of her last child in 1901, and died visiting a daughter in Victoria. She was only 53.

***

Jane Ferguson, Bessie's paternal grandmother through Thomas Shankleton, was born around 1818 in a small Scottish farming community at Dryfesdale near Lockerbie in Dumfriesshire. This is not far from the English border. The family repeatedly returned to Dryfesdale when seeking work. Some of her own children were born there, so perhaps there were family ties.

Jane's own parents were Janet Kennedy and David Ferguson, and she was one of several children. When her father died, her mother came to live with Jane and her family, but had to be left behind in Scotland when Jane emigrated with her husband Joseph.

Janet Kennedy Ferguson, now aged 71, gamely set to and supported herself by working as an agricultural labourer in Lockerbie right up to the age of 84. She died in 1867. Her maternal grandparents were William Kennedy and Jean Wright, both born around 1750-60 in the same area. Almost certainly, they too were farm workers. Early Scottish records, however, are very patchy indeed, so we know no more.

Jane Ferguson's first marriage was to a man whose surname was Laidlaw. We know this from the 1851 census record for Scotland. So Jane's two oldest children (assuming she had no others) were Elizabeth and Jessie. They travelled with their mother and her second husband to Australia in the name of Johnston rather than Laidlaw. Perhaps they might otherwise have been excluded from the scheme the family sailed under. On the passenger list, Jane was described as a general servant', her two daughters as dairy maid'.

Elizabeth Laidlaw was born in 1837 in Dryfesdale, Jessie Laidlaw on 9 December 1840, somewhere in England. We have no idea what happened to Elizabeth Laidlaw once she reached Australia, but Jessie, Thomas's half sister, married an Englishman from Yorkshire named Robert Sleightholm. They founded a large family in Tasmania, now scattered around Australia. Jessie died in South Africa where one of her daughters went to live.

In all, Jane had at least seven children, the last when she was 40, in Launceston. By the time she died at 67 in 1885, she had twenty- nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Their surnames were Illingworth, Johnston, French, Tevelein, Sleightholm, and Snoxall. At the last count, she and Joseph left 653 descendants, with many still not on the record.

***

Joseph Johnstone, Jane's second husband, was a Scot born in Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire. Lochmaben is the ancient seat of the Johnstone clan, just outside Lockerbie.

Joseph was twenty-eight when he married the widowed Jane Ferguson. It is just possible this was not his first marriage, since by the time of the 1851 census when the couple were recorded with the first three of their five children, any children from an earlier marriage of Joseph would already have left home to work, being between 10 and 25 years old. Indeed, it is conceivable that some of the other Johnstons on the Ben Nevis were his children or other close relatives, a point for further investigation. They were almost certainly the largest contingent of Johnstons to sail to Melbourne in a group, on the same vessel, that year.

Joseph was variously described as a farm servant' (in Scotland), a ploughman' on the immigration scheme papers, and then as a shepherd.' Whatever the truth, he was an experienced farm worker, known in Scotland as a farm servant'. They had no property and were largely unpaid. Every six months or year, they had to auction their services at a kind of market, and in return were given a home, clothed and fed. The whole family, though, had to work for the employer, and once the contract was completed, they were forced to look for fresh work.

He, Jane, and their children, were recruited in a drive to bring to Tasmania a superior' kind of immigrant. They were wanted specifically to work on the farms of Scots free settlers and larger landowners, who found themselves suddenly bereft of convict labour at the end of transportation. To make up for this deficit, the St Andrews Caledonian Society joined with the British Government in a bonus scheme, based on a form of sponsorship. Agents scouted the agricultural areas of Scotland looking for farm workers and their families.

Joseph and his wife were ideal candidates. They sailed from Liverpool to Melbourne, leaving in October 1855 on the Ben Nevis sailing barque, used purely for this kind of immigrant. On the Melbourne records, they are listed as unassisted' passengers, a slight stretching of the truth. They completed their journey to Launceston on the Black Swan, leaving Melbourne on 9 October 1855.

So where did the Johnston family go? Whose farms did they work on? Alexander Learmonth, the family's Presbyterian sponsor, lived in Launceston, although he also had interests in Victoria. Given that the couple had two more children (Georgina and Joseph) on their arrival, both registered in Launceston, it seems likely the family worked on one of the Learmonth farms close by. He was also recorded the first reference to Flowery Gully, working on land owned by Robert Slaiden.

All the Johnstone and Laidlaw children could read and write, a testament to Scottish schooling at the time, giving them a head start over many others. Joseph survived to a good old age, dying in 1912. He outlived all but two of his own children and clearly became prosperous enough to buy and sell land, as the list in Appendix II shows. Bessie's maternal grandparents, Maria's mother and father, were John Brown and Elizabeth Baker. They may have met in the Launceston area even though John moved to the Tamar river to carry on his work as a boat builder. They married at St John's in Launceston on 18 July 1831 and had a very large family, of whom Maria was the tenth child.

***

John Brown, whose birthday was always claimed to be 10 February 1801, is something of a mystery as he was said to be the illegitimate son of Captain J. W. Gordon,' known as Huntley Gordon. Another family tale was of an ancestor from the Cairngorms, the area near Aberdeen where many Gordons hail from.

But first John's birth. An illegitimate baby, the only one recorded in the Old Parish Records for 1801, was born to Helen Brown at Hallbank, Tundergarth, Dumfries. Tundergarth is to the east of Lockerbie. Helen was nearly 30 and unmarried so was probably a servant living in'. Highly unusually, no father's name was given on the baptism record for 15 August 1801 at Tundergarth church, nor do the Kirk records mention Helen being fined or chastised (scolded), in itself most unusual. Perhaps John's baptism was delayed because in practice naming the father and chastising him was too tricky. If we have the right child, maybe J W Gordon came from a high-born family.

One of the five or six Captain J Gordons (John or James) (some in the army, others naval) so far traced would have been only 16 or so when John Brown was conceived. Another, a childless Viscount in Helen's area, would have been into his 50s. A more likely candidate, Captain John Gordon, a sailor, married Helen Maitland in Edinburgh in 1796. She was 16. As an officer he must have been older, so was probably born around 1770-75, so old enough to be John Brown's father. The Captain and his wife moved about, including to Glasgow, a major port, and had at least three sons. John Brown would have been a couple of years older than the first of these boys. Perhaps this Captain Gordon is our man.

A perfect fit with the right initials would be Sir James Willoughby Gordon (1775-1851) who worked his way up to General, roved the world in service of the crown, and was knighted for his efforts. Willoughby in north Sydney is named after him. He was, however, not a genuine Gordon, as his father, Captain Frances Grant, RN, changed his own surname. But if his own wife, or his mother, was a Gordon from the Huntly clan, this could then fit. Research through two university archives has yielded nothing about his ancestry, though.

Staying with the Huntley Gordon' connection, the ancient Norman- Scottish house of Huntly, based in the Cairngorms of Aberdeenshire, is of particular interest. The Gordons of Huntly are listed in Burke's Peerage. If John Brown's father was a Huntly' Gordon, this might explain the delay in his baptism. Negotiations over his support and the name he was to bear, could have taken time, especially if there were fears he might surface to claim his share of the family's fortune.

Huntly village parish records show three possible John Gordons. One was too young, another nothing to note, a third born to Isobel Wynne and Thomas, baptised 1st September 1775. If Captain J W Gordon took his mother's maiden name to mark him out from the others, he might have been Captain John Wynne Gordon. However, the Georgian cursive handwritten W can easily be confused with the H, so our ancestor might have been Captain J H Gordon, perhaps J Huntly Gordon. This combination of middle name and surname continues to the present day. Burke's Peerage shows three Huntly Gordons named John.

Most intriguing of all, a mysterious entry in a Brown family Bible, hardly legible, refers to J Wolrige Gordon'. Who wrote this is not known, and nor on what it was based. But this is a very tempting option indeed. The Wolrige Gordons were and still are part of the Gordon clan and therefore Huntly stock.

Searching this branch yields no Captains with this name, although such a match might one day turn up. Family history has a habit of constantly surprising us. So we are left with no certainty, just as much a guess as any other, but a seductive one: the Huntly Gordons are linked to almost every royal house in Europe.

Family papers in Tasmania say John Brown was sent with his father's man-servant Andrew Kenny to Hobart some time around 1821 or 1822. Some say he was being punished for refusing to join the army. Whatever the truth, John would have been around the age of his majority, when presumably he would be seen to be capable of fending for himself. Andrew Kenny certainly existed, and Huntley and Gordon appear as middle names right down the family for generations.

Naturally, family papers recording oral history are as subject to error as any historic document. So for Huntley Gordon perhaps read Huntly Gordon, whether Wolrige or not. Whether Huntley is a reference to the village of Huntly, or to a family, is yet to be discovered.

John himself said that he and Andrew Kenny jumped overboard and swam to land, then moved on to Launceston. Maybe John helped Andrew Kenny, who was only a few years older, to escape to a new life, and made his own bid for freedom at the same time.

Once settled in the West Tamar area, John is said to have cleared land near Devil's Elbow on the west bank of the Tamar and lived in Sidmouth working as a boat builder. Some of his boats he is said to have sailed round the coast. One was named Salus.

Much else is shrouded in mystery, including his death. The 1869 electoral roll for George Town details a John Brown, leaseholder of cottages at Sorell St. A man of the same name was in Wells in 1873, and in Sidmouth in 1875, but by 1878 there was no sign of him. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Andrew Kenny died in 1876.

In 1881, the undertaker in Launceston completed the death record for a John Brown born in England' (at that time meaning anywhere in the British Isles save Ireland) John Brown was aged 77 years and died of destitution'.

Although this is not a perfect match for a birth in 1801, this could be our John. Perhaps losing Andrew Kenny was the last straw and John took to wandering. Helen Brown, whether John's mother or not, was born in 1771, in a small village named Lanholm, in Dumfriesshire. She had a brother named John. Her father carried the same name. Her own ancestors Brown, Dalgleish and Lawson can be traced back to the early 1700s in a cluster of villages in the area. Some years after John was born, she married George Richardson, but there are no records of any children, and it is far from clear Helen was our John's mother.

***

Maria Brown's mother, Elizabeth Baker, was born on the 10 August 1818, the middle of three daughters of the first settlers in the family, Samuel Baker and Mary Brennan. She married at 12, had her first baby seven months later, produced ten children for her husband John Brown over the next 22 years. She died at the age of 36, shortly after the last, Hester or Esther, a short and probably very tough life. No record exists of her death registration, although the family Bible gives the date.

Her father Samuel Baker, shown in the records as Odkenbaker (Otken/Oaken), but later as plain Baker, was transported to New South Wales on the Matilda, leaving Portsmouth 8th January 1791. He arrived in the Third Fleet with over 2000 other convicts. More than 200 died en route.

Some say he was a gypsy, but this is by deduction, rather than based on the written record: like some gypsies, he was a chimney sweep and a chair-bottom maker, was mobile (thieves and working men were), and had a strange middle name. This, though, is yet another guess, the consequence of having no proof on his birth and parentage. In the author's view, it's an unlikely scenario: the court would have been told, without a doubt. The prosecution didn't mince words and were after a conviction: anything to blacken Baker's name would have been thrown in to the pot: gypsies were unpopular.

With one accomplice, on the night of 7th August 1788, Odkenbaker broke into the shop of Francis Millard, a draper at Hockliffe in Bedfordshire. They stole stockings and handkerchiefs worth £6 15s and probably £3 13s 6d in cash and were picked up two days later, along with a third accomplice, helping' carry a burthen'.

The court sat on 11th March 1789. All three plaintiffs were condemned to be hanged, but a reprieve was handed down' on 29th April 1789. Instead, the guilty men went to the Ceres hulk in Langstone Harbour at Portsmouth, helping rebuild Fort Cumberland at Eastney Common. On 8 January 1791, Samuel left on the Matilda from Portsmouth, going on to Norfolk Island on the Mary Ann.

Samuel, a sawyer', would have had to work long hours in minimal conditions, with severe punishment for misdemeanours. His name is found in most of the standard Norfolk Island lists and victualling books.

He seems mostly to have kept out of trouble, though, as he was finally freed to farm on his land. In 1801 a son, William, was born to Samuel and convict Elizabeth Lewis but died within three months. Elizabeth returned to Port Jackson in 1809. By then, Samuel held 15 acres of land with 14 pigs with a small dwelling house'.

In 1813, Samuel was moved to Tasmania on the Minstrel along with several other shiploads of convicts and freed convicts from Norfolk Island, maybe with some of their animals. They sailed to Port Dalrymple (Launceston) to help clear the land and supply cheap labour to free settlers. At the time Tasmania was being hailed as the future bread-basket' for the whole of Australia.

Those, like Samuel Baker, who were now free and had been forced to abandon productive farms on Norfolk Island, were to be compensated with assigned servants and a larger piece of land. Samuel was allocated 30 acres (it actually measures 40 acres) on the South Esk precisely where Baker Court runs at Blackstone Heights. This is now in an outer suburb of Launceston. He appeared in the 1818 muster as having land, although the surveyor didn't get round to his block until 1820, when the Title Deed was finally drawn up. This can be seen in the Hobart Archives, and plans of his block are available from the Land Department. He later appeared as locatee of two small blocks in Port Dalrymple itself, the third and fourth in from the corner with Wellington Street (see index of family land) on the north side of Brisbane Street.

***

Well before this, in 1814, Mary Brennan, a 26-year-old Dublin convict, arrived from Sydney on the Kangaroo. She was probably assigned straight to Samuel. No record has been traced of a wedding, perhaps because she was already married. Seven years had to elapse before remarriage, so many simply lived together and had children regardless. After all, the British Isles were half a world away.

Mary was born on 10 September 1816, Elizabeth on 10 August 1817, and Sarah on 3rd November 1820. The two oldest girls appear in an assessment in 1822 or 1823 of the educational needs of Port Dalrymple for children between 4 and 19 years. Against Samuel's name appear two girls of 6 and 5, both marked as 'ditto' for 'reader' and 'writer.' All three were jointly baptised on 22nd August 1825 at St John's in Launceston. It could be that the children were baptised only when Samuel and Mary moved down to Port Dalrymple. At that point, many settlers were abandoning their farms over trouble with displaced Aborigines. It seems the Reverend John Youl finally caught up with the Bakers, although he was likely to have known Samuel Baker before this point. The free population of Port Dalrymple numbered hundreds.

There is other, albeit circumstantial, evidence to support the suggestion Samuel was farming, even if on a casual basis, perhaps merely clearing the land and selling the timber, but perhaps growing a patch of grain. He is on the record as being fined for selling illegal spirits, known as sly grog', and was fined 5/-, five times, for intoxication. Spirits fetched around 6/- a bottle, four times the value of the wheat it was made from. Many farmers turned a proportion of their grain into grog. Distilling machinery found its way early to the colony, fuelling extreme drunkenness among convicts and free alike.

Despite the odd run-in with the law once over the theft of a blanket (the case was discharged) Samuel was approved constable in Launceston in 1818, as shown in the Hobart Town Gazette. This was quite normal for the times, although he was by then off the victualling lists, so would not need his extra half-ration from the stores. He may also have been the Mr. Baker' appointed around the same time to collect in subscriptions for the Hobart Town Gazette, a top-up for his income.

Whatever the case, Samuel couldn't keep out of trouble for long, as the court records show. He plainly had a drink problem, like Mary. Despite this, his girls went to school, and that is to his and Mary's credit. Nothing is known about Mary Brennan's background as many early Dublin records were destroyed in a fire, but she was probably one of Dublin's wild women, a drinker and a thief, typical of many in the big cities all over Europe. There is a story around that she burned down a building. Another that she came from Dunleary, as a country' girl, but the former is as hard to prove as any other theory about her origins.

Mary Brennan was tried in Dublin in 1813 at the age of 35 years (25 in some records), and sentenced to transportation. In some of the papers she is referred to as Ann, so perhaps she was Mary Ann. To reach Cork, the embarkation point for England, convicts were sometimes walked in chains from Dublin gaol. From Cork, Mary would have sailed to Falmouth to wait in a hulk, perhaps even on board the Catherine herself, until all the passengers had been assembled. Many of them, like Mary, were from Ireland.

The Catherine sailed from Falmouth on the 8th December 1813. Its master was William Simmonds. She weighed only 304 tonnes and carried 97 female convicts. She arrived in New South Wales on 4th May 1814.

The voyage would have been grim: the better conditions granted to convicts from the 1840s onwards did not apply to early transportations. The long journey was usually broken by putting in at Tenerife, then under British administration, to take on water, fresh vegetables and fruit, and animals. Some of the women might even have been allowed on shore under escort. Transport vessels often stopped again in the Cape Verde Islands, then at Rio de Janeiro if conditions called for it. The final stop would be Cape Town. Later ships called at Melbourne.

Sydney was the distribution point to the penal colonies. At the time Mary Brennan arrived, plans were well advanced to abandon the old colony on Norfolk Island in favour of Van Diemens Land. Mary was transported to Van Diemans Land on the Kangaroo, then into the care of her master', Samuel Baker.

Contemporary accounts of early life in the colonies suggest that the severe shortage of women, and the frequent excessive drinking of both convicts and free settlers, leave question marks against the true paternity of many children. Debauched revelry was common, with the women being shared. Certainly Mary Brennan and Samuel Baker had ready access to alcohol, the record plainly states. To judge by the fact that Mary's name is recorded in the list of notorious strumpets and dangerous girls' (see Phillip Tardiff's book of that name), suggests life might have been quite lively in the Brennan-Baker world.

Mary Brennan did not last long. Within ten years, she was dead, occasioned by drink'. When she died on 27 August 1826, her oldest daughter was just 10, Elizabeth only 8 years old and Sarah 5.

While the youngest, Sarah, waited until she was 19, Mary was the first to marry, a couple of months before her 15th birthday. Elizabeth promptly married two weeks later, a month before her 13th. Her first baby was born seven months after her wedding. Young though she was, she must have made a good mother, as she raised a large healthy brood.

At the last count, with many missing from the record, Samuel Baker and Mary Brennan had more than 1200 descendants down nine generations.

***

When Bessie Johnston married, she had well over 60 first cousins, and countless second cousins, most in the Launceston and Beaconsfield areas.

Harry Lello was joining a veritable ready-made local clan. It is tempting to wonder whether this relative loner did not find this a tad overwhelming. Perhaps the comparative isolation of Queenstown, and the challenge of a new job in the Mt Lyell machine shops rather than in the mine itself, were just too tempting to resist.

THOMAS HENRY LELLO 1868-1940

To his closest family, Thomas Henry Lello was always known as Harry. To others he was Henry'.

The oldest child of five, Harry was born on the 3 November 1868 at the isolated Scottish farm of his maternal grandparents. He was then raised in the Liverpool area, but left for Tasmania weeks after turning 16, following three uncles and a cousin to the Beaconsfield area.

***

Harry's father, also Thomas Henry Lello, was born on 5 April 1844 in Shifnal, a small English town serving an agricultural area in the north of the county of Shropshire (also written as Salop') The surname, Lello, is thought to be a shortened form of the Welsh surname Llewellyn, and to mean little lion'.

Thomas was the third youngest of ten children born to William Lello and Eliza Pidgeon. He had four older brothers, three of whom left England for Tasmania ahead of Harry. His oldest brother William was a lepidopterist: his microscope for examining his butterflies was passed down to the Tasmanian family.

Of Harry's uncles, Charles died in Tasmania, leaving a widow and two children (who also left Tasmania in due course) George restlessly travelled the world, and John, having lost his only son John (Jack) to typhoid in Tasmania, roamed to Nebraska then returned to England. His wife and son have a gravestone in Otford Kent where John previous owned the mill.

Thomas's younger brother Robert, a carpenter, moved with his parents to Ludlow and stayed. Thomas's sisters, one younger and three older, all left Shropshire. Three lived out their older years in the London area, near their husbands' families. Their descendants are the Harrison, Hedges and Petrie families, no longer in touch with the rest of the Lellos.

Rather than follow his father into the currier and tanning business, Thomas opted for drapery. We do not know where he completed his apprenticeship, but it could have been with his cousin of the same name, three years older, who was also a draper.

Normally, drapery apprenticeships took 7 years, and involved living in hostel accommodation provided by the employer, sometimes over the shop'. A draper's assistant would help prepare for sale the various and many items sold by drapers: fabrics, threads, buttons, in essence everything for making up' clothes and soft furnishings. Often drapers sold hats and gloves in today's terms, accessories.

To do this job properly meant developing the ability to advise clients on suitable materials, know where to obtain what the client was looking for, and how to set about making particular objects. Buying for a large drapery business, Thomas's occupation for many years, was a sophisticated activity demanding travelling, good social skills, impressive self- presentation, and clinching the best deal by understanding the business, the products, and the whole field. By the time Thomas finished his career, he described himself as a draper'. Perhaps by then, he was well enough off to buy himself a store.

After retiring to Ludlow, Thomas used his business acumen to trade in property, including old Lello assets once owned by his uncles and his father. He made enough money to live comfortably until he died, leaving a reasonable but not large legacy, none of which is thought to have reached his Tasmanian descendants.

On Christmas Eve in 1932, Thomas died of pneumonia at the age of 88, at his daughter's home in Cheltenham. Harry's mother was known as Ellenora (later as Eleanora), Ellen for short. Her middle name was Armstrong, often the surname of an admired figure or godparent, rather than an ancestor.

***

Eleanora Crocket was of pure Scots derivation, from two old Lowland families, both from the border areas in Dumfriesshire (also referred to as Dumfries) and Kirkcudbrightshire (pronounced Kerkoobrisheer and often called Kirkcudbright)

Eleanora's baptism has never been traced, but the evidence from her marriage, census material and other sources suggests she was born in November 1846 at the family farmhouse, Seeside Farm, in Terregles (pronounced Treggles) It is still used as a farm today.

She was the eighth of ten children born across 18 years. The family included twin girls. Eleanora left school at 12, as did all the Crocket children. It seems likely that she had a choice either the nearby village school, linked to the Terregles church (where the Maxwell vault lies), or the private academy at nearby Holywood where her Crocket family had old connections. From then on, her life revolved around home and the farm: needlework, cooking, light duties on the farm, although there were resident labourers who slept in the barn, and a live-in domestic servant.

One or two at a time, the Crocket children were boarded out with their unmarried uncles and aunts. Uncle Robert lived at Greenhead, a farm in the grounds of the old Maxwell castle at Caerlaverock. The aunts lived in an old Crocket house in the castle grounds known as Castlewood Cottage. Both of these houses still stand and have been kept in good condition. The school at Bankend would have been within walking distance. In the same area were Eleanora's McKill cousins, although there is no evidence that the Crocket children ever stayed with them.

Eleanora and Thomas married by licence on 15 November 1867 at St Paul's Cathedral Church in Liverpool. Her first child was born one year later, so it seems possible she and Thomas waited until she turned 21, then married quickly. Her sister Margaret, twelve years her senior and still single, was a witness. Both gave their address as the hostel of a local draper. They were probably seamstresses, the usual occupation for the working Crocket women. Thomas was 23 and a commercial salesman, and since he too worked in the drapery business, presumably met Eleanora through his job.

It looks as if Margaret and Eleanora headed alone for the bright lights of England. Their oldest sister Agnes was still looking after the old Crocket aunts at Castlewood Cottage, and their other sisters (including Margaret's twin Jessie) were moving out of the farm one by one to work as seamstresses in Dumfries. Two of them eventually took up lodgings above the Union Bank in English Street, an address that played an important part in the life of the family. It still stands today.

After Harry was born in Scotland, Eleanora settled down to life in Liverpool. By the time she was 33 she had completed her family. Living conditions would have been good. The new double-walled brick houses being built apace in the suburbs had three bedrooms (no bathroom yet), two living rooms and a separate kitchen. They had running water, gas lamps, a privy in the yard, and space for drying washing in the alley between the rear yards of the houses. The houses had large windows, so were light, and fireplaces in each room. The streets were paved, and on the main thoroughfares horse-drawn buses operated.

Liverpool was a booming city, with museums, libraries, one of the earlier provincial universities (built in 1881), a cathedral church, big shopping areas, and suburbs that stretched for miles. It was the main embarkation point for America: 60% of people leaving Britain set sail from Liverpool and its twin port across the Mersey, Birkenhead. The railways were in a high state of development, and in the 1890s electric trams arrived.

As Thomas prospered, the family moved to progressively larger and smarter houses until by 1881 they were living in Island Road at Garston. This was towards the southern end of the Mersey channel, a relatively rural area. Island Road had several advantages. On the same lane was a grammar school which Harry probably attended up to the age of 16. There was also a new Methodist church a few doors down. The houses were large and well-spaced. Most families had live-in servants and were professional-class people.

Down the hill was the new Garston harbour where Harry developed his passion for sailing ships. From Garston docks, schooners sailed to Scotland and Ireland, as well as up and down the English coast. Ferries plied west across the Mersey to Birkenhead, and north to Liverpool city. Within short walking distance was a new railway line that Thomas used for commuting to work. It carried Eleanora to the shops in central Liverpool, or to visit her sister Annabella in Cheshire, or to see Margaret in Bootle on the other side of Liverpool.

After Harry left for Tasmania, followed by his brother George, the family spent their last years on the Wirral, then moved on Thomas's retirement to Ludlow. Ludlow, though, was not a happy place: they had to deal with losing two of their children.

In 1914, Edith died at home, still unmarried. Then George, ever a bachelor at 47 in 1918, was killed at Rouen while serving with the New Zealand Rifle Brigade.

Sometime in the 1920s, Thomas and Eleanora moved on to Cheltenham to live with Blanche and her family. After seven years of widowhood, Eleanora died at Blanche's house on 20 March 1939.

She was 93, and left twenty-five living descendants. Since then, this total has risen beyond 225.

***

Harry's maternal grandparents, James Johnstone Crocket and Janet Martine McKill, would have known each other for years before they married. Local families, whether over the border into Kirkcudbright, or along the lowlands of the Nith valley in Dumfriesshire, intermingled and intermarried for generations, and stayed within a close area.

James Johnstone Crocket, one of at least 8 children and probably the youngest, was born around 1790 to John Crocket and Agnes Smith. The Crockets were a very old Lowland family. They had no clan, and the name itself means stranger from the lowlands'. Crockets can be traced back centuries in this area, as well as over the sea in northern Ireland: they were essentially the same stock. (The family rumour persists, as yet without proof, that Davy Crocket of American fame was one of the family.) As far as we know, James Johnstone Crocket was the only one of his siblings to marry, a pattern repeated around the family. They seemed affluent enough, owning houses, cottages and farms, scattered either side of the Dumfries-Kirkcudbright border. Sadly, we know nothing at all about James, other than one delightful detail from a newspaper of the time: he was a gifted fiddler, specialising in the folk technique of up-bow dance music. He played regularly in Dumfries with the local Strathspey Violin Band. We now know that his brother Robert also played the violin an instrument if played daily, tuned properly and oiled weekly, would now be very valuable, as old fiddles can be. It is thought this fiddle has now passed down the family, but is sadly no longer in use.

James Crocket married a woman half his age, then set about having children, the last born when he was about 60. Throughout this time he went on farming, probably mixed agriculture at Seeside Farm, perhaps an old family home.

It must have been hard for James to see his large family grow to adulthood, scatter and provide no heirs to the Crocket name. His unmarried girls went to Dumfries and worked as seamstresses, one son (John) died in Ceylon from sunstroke, the other (William) has not been traced. James's second youngest daughter, Annabella, died leaving four young children, after giving birth to twins who also died. His youngest, Robina, spent almost her whole adult life caring for her sister Annabella's orphans, even when their father died and they were adults in work.

James died on 6 September 1875 when his grandson Harry was 7, one of only 5 grandchildren at that point. Seeside Farm passed out of family hands, and the Crockets of this line vanished from the area within one more generation. James's immediate descendants bore the names Lello, Hallott, and Dutton. The Hallott and Dutton branches have long been out of touch.

***

Harry's paternal grandmother was Eliza Pidgeon, a Shropshire girl born sometime in 1807 in Shifnal. Pidgeon was a very common Midlands name by then, although it originated in the Hampshire area.

We have no conclusive record of where and when Eliza was born, except that she told the census enumerators she came from Shifnal and gave her age. As there was only one Pidgeon family in the town, we can safely assume she was the baby of the family born to Robert Pidgeon and Jane Alsop.

Ahead of her were nine others, five of them girls. Her sister Sarah Jemima married John Lello, Eliza's brother-in-law. Together these two women founded a little enclave of Shifnal Pidgeon-Lellos: between them they had sixteen children.

Since her father, grandfather and great-grandfather, were all born in Shifnal, Eliza had countless cousins of her own, most of whom have not been traced. But to judge by census material, on the whole Eliza's own generation moved out of Shifnal and did well for themselves in Cheshire, Wolverhampton and further afield. Some of the family were maltsters and millers, others tanners. Some were described in wills and church registers as gentlemen', a sign of reasonable affluence.

Going further back up Eliza's line are old Shropshire and Worcestershire families: Alsop, Evans, Feild, Hickman, Masefield, Pitt, Wedge and Woolley.

Eliza had her last children, Robert and Sarah, around her fortieth birthday. She died in Ludlow 7 December 1872 after William retired there, perhaps to be near his brother George to help with the Ludlow tannery. The register gives her cause of death as 'A desenterie disease Fatty degeneration of Heart'. William out-lived Eliza for another four years.

***

William Lello, Harry's paternal grandfather, was a currier like his brothers and his father.

Baptised on 5 August 1801 at St Leonards, Bridgnorth, he was the second of twelve children born to John Lello and Mary Townshend.

Bridgnorth is an exceptionally beautiful town in Shropshire, built on a huge rock, looking out across the Severn valley. The High Street, where most of Harry Lello's ancestors lived and traded, is medieval, with a corn hall and town chambers above, where some of Harry's Lello and Townshend ancestors officiated at local business.

Curing and tanning is a malodorous business. The Lellos did it so well they could leave the most objectionable aspects of the process to their workers. But to own one's own business, the usual 7 years apprenticeship was vital, learning the skills from the lowest to the highest. So William had to dirty his hands, and learn the trade the hard way.

He made the grade, and was sent to Shifnal by his father who was in an expansionist mood. John bought properties there, some on the High Street, others in Church Street, probably in Tanners Lane as well, where the only source of water ran. William's brother John also moved there and set up as a maltster, marrying another Pidgeon girl, Sarah Jemima.

Two other younger brothers, Thomas and George, went to Ludlow to set up tannery works down by the river on Corve Street, among several others working in the business.

William was over thirty when he married Eliza, producing ten healthy children. When his father retired from Bridgnorth to Shifnal, William, as oldest son, returned there to take over. He inherited, by default, the High Street business, along with the family pew in St Leonard's church (left formally to him in his father's will.) When his father died, William was free to do as he pleased. He left Bridgnorth and moved to Ludlow with Eliza and his youngest children. There he died of Decay of nature' on 16 March 1876, four years after Eliza.

***

Janet (Jessie) Martine McKill, Harry's maternal grandmother, came from an old Dumfriesshire family who lived in farms up and down the Nith valley where the McKill clan had lived for centuries. So far as we can tell from the patchy local records, Jessie was the oldest of at least four, born in a croft on the banks of the Nith near Kenneth Bank. This line of crofts still stands. [For an account of a trip to this area click here.]

She was baptised at Caerlaverock, a walk up the hill, at the Palladian sandstone church where many McKills and Crockets lie. The Kirk has an astounding churchyard with huge red headstones staring east across the countryside.

The area is an old rock promontory, smoothed by time, between the Nith that runs up to Dumfries and the meandering inlet of Lochar Water. Jutting out into the Solway Firth, it houses a number of notable historic buildings, including Caerlaverock Kirk itself, the Jacobean Bankend Academy, Caerlaverock Castle (the old Maxwell stronghold) and Bankend village, once a thriving working community with watermill and large Victorian school.

Jessie Martine McKill's parents were Thomas McKill and Janet Martin. Janet's own parents were John Martin and Agnes Dickson, about whom we know nothing. Her father, we have discovered, was descended from the Coulters and McKills, skilled people such as shoemakers, joiners, and teachers, as well as farmers, fishermen and labourers. We can trace others in her direct line back to the 1600s.

Jessie was widowed when she was 67 after losing her daughter Annabella who left an orphaned family. Jessie spent some time in Walton on the Hill in Bootle near Liverpool, where her daughter Margaret lived with little Helen Jessie. Margaret, whose husband Thomas Dutton was a master mariner and ship's captain, would have appreciated her mother's company.

But Jessie's true home was in Dumfriesshire. She returned there to live, first at Castlewood Cottage after her sisters-in-law died, then later with her spinster daughters above the Union Bank in English Street. Jessie died in the bank house on the 2nd June 1888, of pneumonia' and senile debility'. She was 79 years old, and at the last count has 242 descendants. She was buried with her husband in Holywood churchyard, further north along the Nith valley, the resting place of many Crockets.

She and James have a headstone still standing there, alongside Robina's: someone put her to rest there in 1928. We know more about Harry's paternal line than any others. Shropshire records were on the whole well preserved and have been largely transcribed for the Internet.

Returning to Harry's paternal grandfather, William Lello was born in 1801 in Bridgnorth to John Lello and Mary Townshend. Taking John Lello first, we have no record of where he was born or of his parents, merely that he came from outside' Shropshire, as he told the 1841 census enumerator. This was most unusual for the Lellos of Bridgnorth, all of whom were otherwise traceable back to an original couple, Thomas Lello from Clun, who married a Bridgnorth girl.

There is, though, an old family story about a Paul Lello, a Quartermaster, who stabled his horses in the ruined church at St Leonards in Bridgnorth. The name 'Paul' goes down the family, so perhaps he provides the answer.

Paul was the seventh of nine children (most died young), born in January 1737 to John Lello and Mary Hewse (or Hughes) He served as Quartermaster in the King's First Foot Dragoon Guards, moving around the country before retiring back to Bridgnorth and becoming a Burgess, like his father.

Somewhere on his travels he married 'Betty' and had one son, Thomas, born in 1780 in Devon. Once back in Bridgnorth, two girls, Betty and Sarah, and perhaps another, Elizabeth, arrived. It seems fair to assume that Paul had other children outside Shropshire. It is also highly probable too that our own John was his oldest son, named after Paul's father.

Paul's father John, who married Mary Hewse, was born in 1703 in the border fortress town of Clun. He was a blacksmith. We can go no further than one more generation back, Paul's own grandfather being lost in the mists of time. We do know, though, that this grandfather's name was John and that he married Sarah.

Clun had an interesting reputation: whether Royalist, Republican, Welsh or English, if anyone threatened the town, the citizens took up arms to repel them, a wonderfully spirited bid for independence.

As a measure of how local and how old the Lello family is, the Public Record Office in Hereford has Lello wills on huge hides, dating back to before fifteenth century. The legacies, modest by contemporary standards leather boots, platters, knives and cattle suggest a small degree of affluence. Not everyone could afford to write a will. The Lellos would have been good old English yeomen farmers. Elizabeth Onions, Paul Lello's grandmother, was also a Bridgnorth girl. Born in 1671, she descended from another set of old local families. Her own mother was Jane Reinolds, baptised in Quatford on the opposite side of the Severn valley. (The church no longer exists. Perhaps it was washed away in one of the many floods.) Other ancestors were from the Glover, Smallman, Toogood, Hughes and Bishop families, also from Bridgnorth and villages close by, including Bitterly.

As for Harry's great-grandmother, Mary Townshend, born in 1778 in Bridgnorth and married to John Lello, again we are talking about an old Bridgnorth family going back as far as records exist. The Townshends were Burgesses and electors and owned property. Some were town Chamberlains, one a town cryer. Others were blacksmiths and butchers.

The Townshends, like the Lellos, have now all left Bridgnorth. Many went to London. Most of their descendants, Harry's remote cousins, have not been traced. Mary, his great-grandmother, was the daughter of John Townshend and Rachel Mantle. Beyond this were the Webb and Williams families. Again they came from nearby villages like Bitterly and Wheathill. We have nothing other than their names and where they were baptised or married, and sometimes where they were buried.

And so we are brought back time and again in the English ancestry of Harry Lello to the same cluster of villages around Bridgnorth, just as we found his Scots ancestry rooted in a similar scattering of hamlets and villages either side of the border between Kirkcudbright and Dumfries.

***

When Harry Lello's father, Thomas Henry, moved from Shifnal, and his mother Eleanora Crocket quit Terregles, they were part of a mass movement from countryside to city, from one country to another, sometimes across oceans. A major social transformation was taking place that re-shaped the nations of the world. All of this was not long after Joseph Johnstone and Jane Ferguson left Scotland for Tasmania.

***

Harry and Bessie married in the Methodist Church in Sidmouth, West Tamar, north Tasmania, uniting two separate Scottish bloodlines from villages almost next door to each other. They probably had no idea that had their ancestors stayed in their home areas, this might have happened anyway. The church burned along with the village. Only the church where Bessie's parents were married, the Presbyterian Auld Kirk, still stands, and even this was gutted, although it is now fully restored. All parish records were lost.

APPENDIX I FAMILY LAND IN TASMANIA

The following references, provided by the Recorder of Titles and the Lands Office are incomplete. Details are awaited for Thomas and John Johnston, and John Brown in Sidmouth. Some clarification is needed on possible confusion between various Josephs and Williams Johnston, for example over land south of the Launceston area. Full documentation relating to each title can be purchased for $20 per document set (as at January 2005) With respect to the South Esk, Blackstone Heights block for Samuel Baker marked *, the Title Deed can be viewed at the Tasmania Archive Office. The plans are at the Land Office.

Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment Central Plan Offfice, and Land Data Registration Branch, Recorder of Titles GPO Box 541, Hobart, Tasmania 70001, Australia. Tel: counter enquiries (03) 62 33 6467.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gwyneth Rosemary Daniel is a granddaughter of Tasmanian-born Bessie Johnston and Anglo-Scot immigrant Harry Lello. Her mother was Eleanora Lello, their oldest daughter, born in Frankford, West Tamar, Tasmania. Eleanora died in Melbourne in 1991.

A published author, after a lifetime of work in commerce, industry, teaching, the public sector and the health profession, Gwyneth is now retired. She shares her time between Tasmania and England, where she was born in 1938. She has dual nationality.

Gwyneth has four children from her first marriage, and is now married to Roy Cheeseman. At the last count, there have been eleven natural grandchildren (five in Australia).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. The author takes no responsibility for the accuracy of supposed factual information in this publication. Family history records are as much subject to mis-remembering, error, misinterpretation, mis-filing, mistranscription, and falsification as any historic information. She has, though, endeavoured to render as fair a picture as possible of what she believes to be the ancestry of her family. As new information is constantly emerging this account may be revised at any point in the future.