How they got here
Seven lines reached Australia seven different ways — a garrison posting, a convict ship, a free passage, a paid one, and three nobody has dated. The differences are not incidental; they are the class structure of the family.
Every family in this archive crossed the same ocean, and almost none of them crossed it the same way. Until this week only one of those crossings was documented. Now three are, and the pattern they make is worth looking at directly.
Samuel Charles Sneyd
Arrived in New South Wales with the 4th (King's Own) Regiment of Foot, doing convict-guard duty — the same work that had brought Major George Pitt D'Arcy out six years earlier.
documented He is correctly absent from the assisted-immigration index: a soldier's passage is not an emigrant's. →
Major George Pitt D'Arcy and family
The England sailed 8 April 1826 and reached Port Jackson on 18 September. The surgeon's journal records the detachment of the 39th Foot he commanded — 39 men, 6 women, 7 children — and Mrs D'Arcy and family as cabin passengers.
documented Their daughter Charlotte was christened at Chatham eight days before they embarked. →
The Wakefields — eight of them
The General Hewitt, Brisbane, 16 December 1854, 394 souls. James a mason of 48, Hannah 48, and six children — Hiram 16 a plumber, Aaron 14, Marion 14 a domestic, Jabez 11, Zillah 8, Ephraim 5.
documented The only family in this archive that took a free passage — and three adult daughters stayed behind. →
Paul Cole Atkinson and Jane Creech
An organist from Limerick who arrived with his wife and the children already born, and who two years later installed the first organ at All Saints' Wickham Terrace and played it.
inferred Not in the assisted index at all — which is itself the finding. A professional man paid his own way. →
Eliza Keeling
Married George Lindsay D'Arcy in Queensland in 1863, the year he arrived in the colony. How and when she reached it is not recorded anywhere this archive has read.
not established Not in the assisted index. →
The Murdochs of St Quivox
Out of Ayrshire to Queensland at a date nobody has established. The DNA says this branch is a quarter of the family; the archive has half its ancestor slots empty and no arrival for any of them.
not established No Murdoch of the right age appears in the assisted index. →
John Blum
Born in Germany, and by the 1870s at Rockhampton. He accounts for the entire German component the DNA reports.
not established Not in the assisted index. →
What the manner of arrival says
The organist paid. The soldier was carried by his regiment. The major travelled in the cabin of a convict transport with his wife and children while thirty-nine of his men and a hold full of prisoners went below. And the mason of Drivers Fields, with six children and three grown daughters he was leaving behind, took the free berth.