In the early days of white settlement as everyone knows, Van Diemen’s Land was a penal colony.  England was in charge, records were maintained and if we had an ancestor in Hobart Town we would probably find them on a muster record, a census or a prison report.  Churches were few and far between but most people preferred a formal ceremony for marriages and baptisms so a genealogist has a fair chance of finding a record, particularly if their ancestor lived in Hobart or Launceston.  Convicts who married had no choice but to take the formal route, if marriage was approved.

New Norfolk records start pretty early too, though the spelling was quite variable in those early days.  The first church services in the town were held under a tree, and the first marriages too.  Then a church was built.  All those Norfolk Islanders gave the town a hefty population from the start, so they didn’t worry about little chapels.  They built proper stone churches for a big congregation with stained glass windows, a large rectory and a close.  The Anglican, Catholic and Independent churches were soon there.

A proper, civilised, respectable town did not suit many of the Norfolk Islanders.  They were used to running their own show and had become successful farmers.  They were granted land outside the town which became little villages of their own, often filled with members of the same family.  New Norfolk had its troublemakers and problems, but on the whole it was a very pleasant and thriving town, and a popular day’s outing from the bigger town of Hobart.

The misfits moved further west.

Not only misfits headed west.  There was good country out there, for sheep, horses, cattle and hops.  Hops were big all round the New Norfolk district and there was good money in selling beer.  But there were also escaped convicts, bushrangers, people with mental problems and drinking disorders, aggressive natives and squatters.  There was a lot of frost and rain, steep wooded terrain, flooding rivers and mud.  People built their houses with and without skill, anything to keep a roof over them.  There were few shops, fewer churches and definitely no schools.

What they did have was Community, with a capital C.  These people were somewhat wild and kept to themselves, but in their own way they were close.  For the younger ones, it was the only life they knew.  On the map above, the towns of Hamilton and Bothwell can be seen.  To the west is the River Ouse and further west again is the River Dee.  The people who lived here walked or rode horses and travelled long distances to visit each other.  We don’t really know what they did. They were shepherds employed by wealthier folk, and bushmen and sawyers.

My father in law’s ancestor James Triffitt was born in Yorkshire in 1769.  He was arrested and transported on the third fleet in 1791.  He was sent to Norfolk Island where he married Mary Whiston aka Higgins.  Three children are known to have been born to them there but one died as a baby.  James, Mary and their two sons were then relocated to New Norfolk.  In 1812 in New Norfolk, James and Mary were married, which seems to indicate that there had been no formal ceremony on Norfolk Island.  In the register they are recorded as James Griffiths and Mary Higgins.

Many researchers have examined the life of this man so I won’t go over old ground.  My favourite presentation is Nigel Triffitt’s Tribes https://triffitt.wordpress.com/james-triffitt-1769/  .  It’s a colourful account, but he conducted some good research and he was an excellent writer.   In summary, the two sons grew up and found wives.  In his old age James met a young lady and took off with her, leaving his wife Mary behind.  There was a bit of a stir in town, something even ended up in the papers.  James and his young Sophia settled in Hamilton and five children were born to them there …  maybe more. The records were scanty out there and we once believed there were three children.  The count is currently at five.

Given the awkward circumstances, we don’t know if the new five ever met their much older brothers.  We do know that most of them headed for the mainland where they went forth and multiplied in true Triffitt fashion.  Van Diemen’s Land was left to James Junior and his brother Thomas.

James was aged 20 when he married Elizabeth Barnes in 1815.  She was fifteen.  Thomas, at eighteen, was married three weeks later to sixteen year old Mary Scattergood.  All four of them had been born on Norfolk Island and had known each other their whole lives.  The families began in Hobart Town but eventually settled in a locality called Back River, not far from New Norfolk.  Thomas and Mary are my father in law’s ancestors.

Nine children were born to Thomas and Mary.   Their youngest child was born in 1830.  Mary passed away in 1857 after seeing them all grow up.  A year later, at the age of 61, Thomas married 18 year old Mary Carroll.  A further six children were born.  The Triffitt men never had trouble finding a new bride.

Thomas’s fifteen children plus his brother James’ twelve children, plus his father James’ second batch of five children, would be quite enough to cause confusion for researchers.  Many of the children moved out into the woods where no one kept track of anything.   Triffitts are everywhere in the records.  The ones in New Norfolk and in the township of Hamilton are nicely recorded.  The ones in the bush are not so easy.

All the children had large families.   I’m not sure if anyone has produced a total of known grandchildren for James Senior, but it would be a big number.  The one I have been examining today is Susan, daughter of Thomas and Mary.

Born in 1822 in Hobart, Susan Triffitt was just a child when the family moved back to New Norfolk.  She made no appearance in the records until her marriage to Owen Daley in 1859.  Both Susan and Owen were aged thirty.  They married in Hamilton.

For many years, Owen Daley was a brick wall. There were at least three by that name, possibly more.  I have now identified him as an ex-convict, free by servitude at the time of his marriage.  He was born in Cork and we know he had a brother who emigrated to the United States.  He was recorded on the marriage record as a labourer and he could sign his name. Susan signed with her mark.  The witnesses were George and Matilda Young.  Matilda was Susan’s married sister, and George was Matilda’s husband.

By my reckoning, at the time of marriage Susan had a toddler named Johanna who was born around 1857.  Later, Owen referred to her as ‘my daughter Johanna’ but whether she was actually his daughter is not known.  Also at the time of marriage, Susan was very pregnant.  She married on 9th July 1859 and Isaac Daley was born 26th August 1859.  They were just in time.   There is no way to be sure that Isaac was really Owen’s son which is a shame because he is my father in law’s ancestor.   Emily was born in 1863 and Edward in 1866.  Those two are more certain.  Finally, George William Daley was born in 1875.  Did Susan really have a son when she was 53, after an eleven year gap?  It’s not impossible, but perhaps unlikely.

Johanna, the eldest, became the mother of two daughters.  Mary Jane was born in 1867 and lived for fifteen days.  No father’s name was provided in the register and Johanna was listed as Johanna Triffitt.  Two years later she had another daughter, Susan.  The father of this child was John Burris.  John Burris’s parents were the best friends of my own ancestor from River Dee.  It was a small world out there!

John Burris married Sarah Ann Squires a few years after his daughter was born.  No further record has been found of Johanna Triffitt or her daughter Susan.  Maybe George Daley was actually her child, maybe she left the state, maybe her death was recorded under another name.

Isaac Daley married Maria Triffitt.  The surname may seem familiar.  Maria was the daughter of John Frederick Triffitt and Elizabeth Hay.  John Frederick was Susan’s brother, another child of Thomas and Mary.  A cousin match always does interesting things to DNA matches.  At the time of the marriage, Maria Triffitt was the mother of one year old twins. The twins have gone down in the records as Isaac’s children, but once again I do not know for sure.

Emily, third child in the family, married Frederick Edwin Triffitt.  Frederick Edwin was Maria’s brother.

Edward married Elizabeth Pearce.  The Pearce family are another tangled tree of the Ouse region and I am not sure just where Elizabeth fits.  A daughter of Edward and Elizabeth then married a son of Frederick Edwin and Emily.  That son was already the result of a cousin match so after the next cousin match, I’m not sure how easy it would be to work with their DNA.   The matches would throw back several generations.

Twins are a Triffitt inheritance so a fair indication that Maria really was the daughter of John Frederick, and that John Frederick really was the son of Thomas.   Four months into their marriage, Maria died of syncope caused by internal haemorrhage.  She was probably pregnant.  At the age of eighteen, Isaac found himself a widower with two very young sons.   Six years later he found consolation in two young ladies, each of whom gave him a child within weeks of each other. This may well indicate the improvement in record keeping rather than new activity on Isaac’s part.

One was Isaac’s new partners was Maria’s sister Anne, his cousin. Isaac and Anne were married.  No doubt the family saw to that.  The other was Harriet Pearce, daughter of John and Sarah Pearce.  Harriet was undoubtedly related to Elizabeth who married Edward, but they weren’t sisters because Harriet already had a sister Elizabeth, who married my 3xgreat grandmother’s brother.  So there are complicated connections between my family and my father in law’s, but luckily it’s by marriage. I have not discovered what became of Harriet or of her son.

The post is getting long and confusing so I’ll leave it there.  It’s very hard to know if the marriages occurred because the men were the father, or because the girl needed a husband and the family put pressure on whichever of their members were still a bachelor.

Yes, this is doing the family tree is really about.  These guys had a tough life with few resources, they looked after each other very well and I’m proud to learn about their lives and include them in the tree.  But what a puzzle!

Tasmania, the southern-most state of Australia, is an island.  This made it a perfect location for a penal colony, and having a good sea port it quickly became an economic centre in very early Australian history.  In its Van Diemen’s Land days, Hobart Town was bustling and active and full of diverse characters.  It nearly didn’t get there, but after a very early period of starvation and desperation the settlers rallied, learned to farm in the new climate and didn’t look back.

Initially settlers were not allowed to come in without a letter of introduction, but soon enough the borders were opened and the areas of white settlement spread up the Derwent River, through Glenorchy, Austin’s Ferry and all the way to foggy, damp Bridgewater.  On the map above, Bridgewater is on the Derwent below Brighton.

The whole area is steeped in history and up until twenty years ago no one could take ten steps without coming across something from the past.  Ancient pathways, stairs cut into the riverbanks, sagging huts still known locally by the names of their early occupants, convict symbols in bricks, milestones showing the distance to places which no longer bore those names but were still known to residents.   Change did not occur fast in Tasmania.  It didn’t have to in the minds of most residents.

Things have changed.  I visited the state last year for the first time since leaving in the 1990s and much has gone.  Administration for much infrastructure has shifted to Victoria, to people who lacked the local’s sense of connection with their past.  Cutting costs and the requirement for legal compliance has led to the concreting over of ancient paths and riverbanks, the bulldozing of ancient huts and the fencing off of rambling riverside walks.  It’s a shame, but perhaps was necessary for progress.

Settlements formed where the land was good, sometimes by design but just as often by chance.  New Norfolk and Hamilton, both north west of Hobart Town, were early settlements (see map above).  On the north coast were Port Dalrymple at the mouth of the Tamar River, and Circular Head in the west.  The town of Launceston sprang up on the Tamar to service the port.  Very early on, a highway was forged from Launceston through the midlands to Hobart Town.  The Midlands Highway is still there today with only a few route alterations, and the original road can be seen at many points.

Inevitably, the Midlands area became a community of its own with settlers centred around the townships of Perth, Campbelltown, Oatlands and Kempton, with Bothwell established in the highlands.

To the north east of Hobart Town were the communities of Richmond and Sorell, along the land route to the Port Arthur penal settlement.  To the south was the Huon Valley where the foliage is dense and only the toughest and most hardworking settlers could make a start.  It was the land of sawyers and bushmen but the townships of Lightwood Bottom and Port Cygnet eventually established themselves.

In a nutshell this is the history of Van Diemen’s Land, without the stories of the people who lived there and what they did. The state is very hilly and the rains can be heavy.  Unsealed roads were regularly washed out and the ocean swell became heavy. The whole state experiences seasonal gales.  The climatic conditions led to isolation in the towns away from the sheltered east coast.  While the villages on the Derwent – Glenorchy, Austin’s Ferry and Bridgewater – slowly expanded to become cities in their own right as well as suburbs of Hobart, the more distant communities remained small and insular.

Between 1800 and 1900, most members of a community married other members of that same community.  They were born within five miles of each other and the whole population lived within that range.  Even if they avoided cousin marriages – which were perfectly acceptable – after a hundred years everyone shared two or three sets of great grandparents.

It only changed in Tasmania after Federation, as the rail networks were established, and better roads and better policing came in.  My own grandparents’ generation was the first one to move out of their towns and take the chance of marrying into completely unknown families.  Their children were the baby boomers who moved off the land, or bought farms of their own choosing and grew crops of their own choosing.  They moved to the cities of Hobart, Launceston or Devonport.  Even into the 1970s, very few moved away from the state.

Around the small towns there developed even smaller villages, many of them formed through worker’s cottages on large farms.  Van Diemen’s Land did not have the squatters and cattle stations which are famous in New South Wales and Queensland, but it still had affluent farms which employed whole families.  As well as the farms there were wayfarer inns and landing docks on the riversides which became community centres.

In a small and isolated town further segregation was easy.  Thus it was that if you lived in Back River, you were not considered to be living in New Norfolk though the distance was an easy three miles.  If you lived in Nicholl’s Rivulet you were not living in Cygnet, if you lived in Black Bobs you were not living in Ouse.  For a while there, people living in Back River tended to marry other people living in Back River.  I have not picked these small communities at random.  Any Tasmanian reading this will know what those tiny outlying places have in common, at least by repute.

Tasmania has an unfortunate reputation on mainland Australia for its inter-family marriages.  I’d heard nothing of this until at the age of 18 I took the apparently risky move of accepting an interstate job.  I moved to Melbourne and the first thing my new coworkers did was count my fingers.  Yes, it was a joke but it absolutely shows how entrenched the reputation is. Close marriages did occur on occasion, but the reputation is mostly unfounded.

My father in law comes from New Norfolk.  My mother in law comes from Circular Head.  My father’s paternal line comes from Port Cygnet and his maternal line comes from Kempton.  These four very distinct Tasmanian communities are ones I have studied in some detail.

It has been a very busy week.  My final Family Finder test came through after an unexplained delay.  I now have the lot.  I still have one spare kit and have a subject in mind, but that one will have to wait.

The final test was my daughter’s.  She was very keen to see it, and a little disappointed that I would learn nothing momentous since I have her brother, myself and all four of her grandparents.  In a way that’s true, but there were many things her test would tell me that I couldn’t be sure of.

For one thing, she was not switched at birth.  She really is my daughter.  To be honest I was in no doubt at all, but you read of hospital mixups and it’s always an outside chance.  All four expected grandparents are definitely the correct ones.  It checks out as it should.

I was pleased to see that she has an X Match with my mother.  Unlike my son who got my father’s whole X chromosome, my daughter has a mix from my father and my mother.

My daughter received most DNA from her two grandfathers.  My son received most from his maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather.   One day I’ll test my other two sons.  The stat comparison will be very interesting.

Having all tests through gave me a lot of housekeeping tasks.  I uploaded all kits to dnagedcom.com, redoing the ones already there.  I’ve started using Genome Mate so went through the kits there, importing new match data.  I’m finally free to look at the details.

Total Matches:

This was an interesting exercise for me, since it helps me assess my chances of finding matches.  I’ve done the ‘Are Your Parents Related’ analysis on Gedmatch for all kits and there is no indication of a family connection.  The four members of the oldest generation here are all from completely distinct family groups.   Can it really be that simple?

It isn’t, of course.  One of my daughter’s 2nd-4th cousin matches is the same person as one of my son’s 3rd-5th cousin matches.  This person shows as a 4th-Remote cousin match for their paternal grandfather who is my father in law.  He matches this lady for a total 31cM.  My son matches her for 42cM, my daughter for 47cM.  Yet no other grandparent has her in their match list.

One of the other grandparents clearly is a match with her, but the total cM is too small for her to appear in their match list.  If this data was on Gedmatch it would be easy.  I have spoken to her via email and I’m not sure she could do it without assistance.  She struggles with emails.  Computers are a complete mystery to her.  I’ve never asked why she tested but I suspect she did it to help someone else, who has for some reason not helped her with other matches.

What else can I tell from this data?  Well,I could surmise that my mother and my aunt have some relatives who settled in the United States, probably in the Colonial era. Their match numbers outstrip everyone else’s by a long way and the US is where the bulk of tests are done.

Finally, the X chromosome:

How, one might ask, has my daughter ended up with such a high number?  I had only six matches to pass down, and myself makes a seventh. My mother in law had only 1 plus herself.  My daughter, I’m thinking, should have a total of nine matches.  The extra matches are probably genuine and have appeared due to DNA from two sides adding up to enough for a cousin match in my daughter. Those people also share an X segment, probably from a long way back.

Now, it’s time to go see what ancestors I can confirm, and what new cousins I might have found.