Following his wife’s death in Hobart in 1819, Thomas Peters and his family lived in the Southern Midlands of Tasmania. Four of Thomas’s daughters married men who became well respected and established in the region.

1818 Elizabeth Peters married George (Jnr) Armytage 

1828 Louisa Peters married John Hayes 

1829 Charlotte Peters married Francis (Jnr) Flexmore 

1836 Sophia Peters married James Pillenger 

During our brief visit to Tasmania we meet several people who are descended from these four families. We spoke to many more who immediately recognised the surnames. Some were aware that the Peters’s only son, Richard, had married Rebecca Cuffe. Several knew that ‘one of the Peters girls was killed in the Black Wars.’ We didn’t meet anybody who had any knowledge of  my 3rd great-grandmother, Mary Ann Peters who married William Holt in the parish of Bagdad in 1832.

When the patriarch Thomas Peters died on 26th July 1839 his family honoured him by erecting an altar tomb. When I visited his grave at St. Mary’s Church of England, Kempton, I found that the inscription was so covered by lichen that it could only be read if you knew what to look for. Even then, finding the right angle of viewing with the right amount of  light was crucial. There is no additional plaque to indicate that the grave belongs to one of Hobart’s first settlers. I hope that through this website the details of his life, and the location of his grave, are preserved and become more widely known.

Elizabeth Armytage of The Hermitage by Batchelder & O'Neill, Melbourne.

Image via University of Melbourne Archives. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/71390