“My feelings are that in each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors,

 to put flesh on their bones and make them live again,

 to tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. 

To me, doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but,

 instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. 

We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one or two.

 We have been called as it were by our genes. 

Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story! 

So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.”

from: The Story Tellers. Written by Della M. Cummings Wright  

(re-written by her grand daughter, Della JoAnn McGinnis Johnson).

Until recently I’d never thought about undertaking the project of recording the stories of my ancestors’ journeys in narrative form. I have spent my life on a quest for ‘the basics’: names, dates, and countries of origin, in order to form the structure of my family tree. I’ve also had a particular desire to locate the names of the ships that my ancestors immigrated to Australia on.

I didn’t foresee the possibility that one day I might reach a point where data gathering was no longer my primary focus. I never gave a thought to how it might feel to be a ‘keeper of the family stories’ as apposed to being ‘the person who is  tracing the family tree’. I realize now as I sit down to write, that the desire to find a way to share the stories that I have ‘jigsawed’ together has ‘crept upon me’ with an increasing intensity over the last couple of years.

 An individual fact cannot tell the personal story. However as I researched, I slowly amassed diverse facts that together sketched something of the life story of each ancestor in my mind. I harnessed the potential of the online family tree to structure how I linked all these personal stories. I have come to a point now where the family stories that have emerged from decades of this process are strong enough, and clear enough, to stand free of the tree. They are clamouring within me to be told.

I’m quite sure that the facts I’ve assembled could be fairly easily ‘storied’ by anybody who is even a little familiar with family trees. However it would be a time consuming process that would require access to the multitudinous data that is attached to the pages of my private family tree. What I am setting out to do here, is to provide a collection of  brief narratives that will allow the reader to learn about our family’s history without having to acquire that information via a family tree format.

As some of the results of my research do not appear to be recorded elsewhere I intend to make this website publicly accessible. I am neither an accredited genealogist nor a historian, but I have taken considerable care to verify facts as much as possible. Perhaps a few of the details that I have recorded here may assist the research of another ‘storyteller’.

I’m writing with my relatives as the audience in my mind. I want to share these stories with the family that I know, and with those who are yet to be born. These stories are strands of an account of how we each came to be among those who are lucky enough to be born in, or have parents or grandparents born in Australia. They are the stories that have slowly formed in my mind as for decades I spent happy hours gleaning snippets of information from here and there. They are stories that weave their way into and through the old photos and memorabilia that I have collected since childhood. They are the untold stories that belong with fragments of conversations held in my earliest memories. They are the stories whose dangling threads snared me up in childhood, and tugged me into what became a lifelong quest for answers. 

I realise that these are MY stories of our ancestors stories, the fibres of their creation have moved back and forward through the warp of the decades of my life, as does a shuttle on a loom. The stories I’ve presented here are as factual as I could make them. Over many years of research I have gathered together information from: census records, passenger lists, police gazettes, newspaper articles and headstone inscriptions that were created in Australia and overseas since the close of the 18th century. I have also drawn upon historical information sourced from countless wonderful books and generous people. These are My stories nonetheless. Unlike a family tree, where I can continue to add as many dates and facts as I can find, this collection needed to have a clear framework and some content limits. I have had to select what to include and what to omit, and that process itself has shaped the very stories that I share. For this reason I would urge you to treat these stories as brief ‘introductions’ to your ancestors, rather than to think that they attempt to define who they actually were.

My complete family tree now holds some records that extend back several centuries. However the stories that I so much want to share with you, are those of the paternal ancestors who journeyed out to Australia and made new lives here. The earliest arrival that I’ve traced is that of Thomas Peters who was born in York in about 1776. He and his wife Mary Ann (nee Hews) and their two year old daughter  Elizabeth were aboard the convict ship ‘Calcutta’ when it arrived in October 1803 as part of the first settlement of the Port Phillip District at Sorrento, Sullivans Bay. They were among those who, shortly afterwards in 1804, were relocated by Lieutenant Collins to Van Diemen’s land - they became Hobart first settlers.

Ah, but I am jumping ahead and going back in time far too soon. I must first tell you the story of how it is that I have come to believe that Thomas and Mary Ann Peters are our ancestors, - and that story too must wait its turn to be told!

Jane Frazer Cosgrove.  July 2016.