D’Arcy
A soldier who guarded a convict ship, a surveyor who helped draw the map of Melbourne, and a parrot that shouted “Come in!”
D’Arcy was invented twice, and the two have nothing to do with each other. In France, d’Arcy means “from the town of Arcy.” In Ireland it comes from dorcha, which means “dark.”
From you, all the way back
Start at the bottom. Every step up is one more generation into the past — a real person, in a real place, written down in a real book.
What do the numbers mean? “2× great-grandpa” is just a short way of writing great-great-grandpa. Once you get past three or four greats it is quicker to count them than to say them. So your grandpa’s grandpa is your 2× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 4× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 6× great-grandpa.
Nobody to look at — yet
📷 No pictures. Not one.
We have not found a single photograph of this side of the family yet — not of the Major, not of the surveyor, not even of Great-grandpa Kenneth and his talking parrot. They are the one line with no faces. That is the next thing to go looking for.
Things they actually did
A soldier brought the family to Australia in 1826.
Major George Pitt D’Arcy belonged to the 39th Regiment of Foot. His job on the long voyage south was to guard the convicts being sent to New South Wales.
His children tell us exactly when the family crossed the world.
One child was born at Chatham in England in 1825. The next was born at Parramatta in Australia in 1827. So the crossing happened in between — and the army’s own records agree, without ever having heard of this family.
One of them helped draw the map of Melbourne.
In 1836 the Governor picked three surveyors to go and chart Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River. One of them was Frederick Robert D’Arcy. The city of Melbourne stands there now.
Great-grandpa had a parrot that answered the door.
Kenneth’s family kept an African Grey parrot, and it had learned to call out “Come in!” whenever somebody knocked. Visitors would let themselves into a completely empty house, because none of the family was even home.
He fell out of a mango tree into a bucket of manure.
His dad was a very keen gardener and kept liquid manure for the garden. Kenneth fell out of the mango tree straight into it. His dad was extremely upset — not about the injuries, but about the manure that had been spilt.
His job was whacking mosquitoes off his father’s back.
Every child in the house had garden chores. His was the strangest one: standing behind his dad and swatting the mosquitoes off his bare back while he watered the garden in the late afternoon — sometimes for hours. He always said the good part was all the chats they had.
He threw his lunch in the incinerator every single day.
He was not allowed a bike, because his dad thought bikes were dangerous, and he was not allowed to kick a football in the yard in case it hurt the garden. But at school he was mad for sport — so every morning he binned his carefully made lunch in the school incinerator on the way past, just to buy himself extra minutes of cricket and footy.
He beat a champion at table tennis and made him cry.
He grew up to be an A-grade table tennis player in Brisbane. One day he beat a teenager who had not lost a match in three whole seasons. The boy cried. He got over it — he went on to win the Australian Championship.
The carpet went up and down in waves.
In 1971 Cyclone Althea hit Townsville, where the family were living. Everybody had always said cyclones missed Townsville. This one did not. At the height of it somebody went upstairs and found the carpet rising and falling in waves two feet high, because the wind was getting in underneath it. They came straight back down.
There might be a castle. Or there might not.
Above the General, the old family papers climb up to the Earls of Holderness at Hornby Castle in Yorkshire. But the papers argue with themselves — they give one man two birthdays sixty-nine years apart. So: maybe a castle. Nobody has proved it.
🔎 The bit we still can't solve
Above the General the trail turns into a story instead of a record. Earls, a castle, a rumour that somebody was somebody’s secret son. Lovely — but not yet true.