Skip to main content

Week 7: Outcast #52Ancestorsin52weeks

Following on from the last topic of ‘Social Media’, I am going to continue with the story from 1811 of James McAra, my 3 x great uncle. He was found guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh of the culpable homicide of his brother, Alexander, my 3 x great grandfather, and was’ banished for life’. In other words, he was deported to Australia. A real outcast.

You might think that would be the end of his story as far as my research was concerned. You would be wrong. There were a multitude of records kept on prisoners sent away. Here are a few of them:

  •  Australian Convict Transportation Registry
  • UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books
  • NSW and Tasmania, Australia, Convict Musters
  • NSW Australian Convict Indents
  • NSW Australian Colonial Secretarys' Papers
  • NSW Australian Convict Register of Conditional and Absolute Pardons
  • Tasmania, Australia, Deeds of Land Grants  

From those, a story started to emerge. Convicted in January 1811 to be sent to Van Dieman’s Land, James was imprisoned in Edinburgh, before being transferred to Woolwich, Kent in the July. It is the following summer, May 1812, before he is put on the convict transportation ship ‘Indefatigable’ to sail to Australia, a journey of some six months. He arrives in Hobart Town in October 1812.

A lot has been written about what sort of a life these convicts would have. Those with a trade were encouraged to follow it and settlers owning a 100 acres of land had to take on one convict as labour. James had worked in the iron mill in Cramond and we know he continued his metalwork as he is cited as a whitesmith.

He lived and worked in Sorell, one of Tasmania’s oldest towns, which had been settled as a farming community in 1808, four years before  James arrived. James died there in 1840, but not before he was pardoned for his crime by the Governor, been given a parcel of land for himself in 1836  and saved an important townsperson from being killed by outlaws!  A somewhat colourful life, but not one I think he expected or would have wanted to have. The demon drink that had led him to attack his brother was also given as his cause of death. Recent research found his will, leaving his land to be shared between two daughters of a friend.

All of this gives me a better understanding of the man who had been cast out, not just from his family – he left behind a wife and six children – but from society for his dreadful deed.  The trial report has witnesses saying he was normally a mild man, but one who had been pushed a bit too far. His tombstone is witness to the fact that, even if that may not be true, he seemed to have redeemed himself somewhat in his years as a convict.

(Source: shared by Ancestry member)



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...
4 comments
Read more

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar,  butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes.  She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f...
Post a Comment
Read more

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...
Post a Comment
Read more