According to Australian actor Jack Thompson, having a convict in your ancestral family means you are a descendant of ‘Australian Royalty‘.

This is the story of my Australian Royalty heritage, so kick back, and join me on the journey.

My Ancestral Journey

Somewhere back in the 1990s, I waded into a very shallow pool of family history. I accompanied a friend to a church hall a couple of times to look at microfiche films because she was researching her family history. My friend knew what she was doing and what she was looking for, but I had no idea. Rather than sit and wait, I thought about family names I’d heard as a youngster, and started searching.

To my surprise, I found familiar names and places, and a tiny spark was lit, only to be snuffed out a few days later. In a phone call to my father, I excitedly told him about my family history discoveries.

Silence reigned supreme…

There was no response for what seemed like minutes, and then Dad shattered my hopes with:

“What do you want to go messing around with that stuff for?”

I quickly changed the subject, and given Dad’s reaction, I didn’t bother sharing the news with Mum.

My hopes may have been shattered, but with due respect to my parents, the torch of curiosity had been ignited. I figured there must be a few skeletons in our family history closet, and I wanted to find them.

Work, work, and study

I was working a full-time job and studying part-time, which meant there was very little time to search for family history secrets. The closet door stayed well and truly locked until 2011. With post-grad study completed and the demands of my full-time job having eased a little, I finally had time to think about my ancestors.

For the next five years I plodded around the Ancestry website, but didn’t find anything that even remotely resembled a family secret. However, I did find a family tree that had my maternal great-grandmother’s husband as someone I’d never heard of. I dismissed the fact as quickly as I’d found it. But that dismissal came back to bite me a few years later because that tree was right, mine was wrong. My great-grandfather wasn’t the person any of us thought he was.

Fast forward to 2016

Retirement kind of snuck (sneaked?) up on me. I hadn’t planned to retire for a few more years, but by 2016, the pace of my working life was unsustainable. My formal retirement age had passed me by, but I loved my job and thought I could keep going for a few more years. But I hated the excessive paperwork that had crept into the role, adding hours onto an already long day.

I resigned just before Easter.

Travel consumed me for a couple of years, then I settled down to do what most retirees do. I found a hobby. And those skeletons in the family closet started shaking in their boots, knowing the day was coming when the door would be flung open, and their secrets exposed.

Unless Dad was worried about the skeletons on my mum’s side, he had nothing to worry about, because if there are any deep, dark secrets from Dad’s side, I haven’t found them – yet.

And the skeletons on Mum’s side?

Perhaps they were secret-worthy back in their day, but through the lens of today’s society, there is nothing about the lives of my maternal ancestors that would even raise an eyebrow in today’s world.

Unless, of course, we talk about the skeletons whose flesh carried the scars of shackles. Australia’s colonisation, in 1788, left scars from more than just leg irons. Families were torn apart as convicts from England were transported to the new colony. And for the families that followed a convict to Australia, their lives were changed forever. And it was all in the name of building and populating the new colony, while easing the overcrowding in England’s gaols.

And those English gaols had become rather full, since the 1775 American War of Independence had stretched the friendship with England, and America no longer wanted to accommodate England’s leftover criminals.

From convicts, to ……

My mother’s family married into Australian Royalty, thereby giving us a claim to a convict. But it wasn’t just any old ordinary convict; our convict gained notoriety of the good kind for his service to education in the new colony.

Thomas Tabor¹ (Taber) was sentenced to transportation to the new colony for life, for (supposedly) breaking into a shop in London. The Old Bailey account of the trial and the crime, hints at the arrest being a ‘set-up’. Even the judge questioned the motives, asking the arresting constable if he had known there was a reward for a break and enter conviction.

Q. Perhaps you know there is a reward given by the parish of Islington, for the convictions of those men? – A. Yes. (The Proceedings of the Old Bailey)

Sentenced

Thomas earned a one-way ticket to the colony for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thomas boarded the convict ship, Ganges, as a convict. Thomas’ wife, Frances Sarah (Medhurst) Taber and their three children arrived on the same ship, as free settlers in 1797. Thomas and Sarah had more children after their arrival, thereby contributing to an increase in the colony’s population.

Although I haven’t found any formal supporting documents, it seems Thomas Taber was ‘acquired’ on his arrival by Reverend Richard Johnson, the chaplain from the First Fleet.

Thomas was appointed as a teacher in the school Johnson had started in Sydney. Thomas went on to teach in the Parramatta school for a few years, and then became the Master at the Sydney school until his retirement. Thomas Taber was one of the first teachers in the new colony. Thomas’ son, Thomas Taber junior, followed in his father’s footsteps, also teaching at the Sydney school.

Thomas Taber and his son, George, were granted land at Menangle, where George Tabor built an inn that still stands today (Menangle House).

Further marriages of Taber daughters widened our family’s connection with convicts. Thomas and Frances Taber’s daughter, Frances Sarah Taber, married James Proctor Harrex² in 1807, a convict who had arrived on the same ship (Ganges) as the Taber family in 1797. Frances was seventeen, and James was forty years old when they married.

Milbah Charlotte Harrex³ was the daughter of James and Frances Sarah (Taber) Harrex, and therefore the granddaughter of Thomas Taber. Milbah married Nicholas Cavillon⁴ in 1829. Nicholas arrived in the colony when he was thirteen years old, having sailed from England as a free settler. Nicholas’ mother, Mary Cavillon, was on the same ship (Broxbornebury) as Nicholas, but seemingly under a different name. The name Isabella Phillips is noted by historians as a possible alias used by Mary Cavillon, at least before and during her passage to Australia.

Now might be a good time to mention that there are two sides to our ancestral notoriety: the convict side and the First Fleet side.

HMS Sirius was the flagship of the First Fleet that arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788, and on board the Sirius was Corporal Marine, John Gowen, my fourth great-grandfather.

John Gowen married a convict, Ordery Appleyard, in 1805. John died in Kiama, NSW, in 1837.

John and Ordery’s daughter, Ann, married George Taber, son of Thomas and Frances Sarah (Medhurst)Taber, in 1824.

Ann and George’s daughter, Emma Louise Taber, married David Sneesby, my maternal great-great-grandfather, in 1865.

David and Emma Louise Sneesby’s son, John George Sneesby, married Emily Beatrice Virtue⁵ in 1892.

John George and Emily Beatrice’s union produced my grandfather, Claude Ernest Claise Sneesby, born in 1895.

Claude Sneesby married Ruby McDiarmid⁶. My mother, Betty Elaine Sneesby, was born in 1924. Colin Douglas Sneesby, Betty’s brother, was born in 1926. A sister, Hazel, was born in 1925 and died in 1929.

And just to be fair, family folklore suggests that my father’s maternal side may be closely linked to John (Red) Kelly, the father of the man in the iron suit we all know as Ned Kelly. John (Red) Kelly came to Australia as a convict. Apart from Red Kelly having been born in the same town in Tipperary, Ireland, as my paternal great-great-grandfather, John Spencer, nothing substantial has been found until recently. A little creative DNA search on Ancestry connected me to a few DNA matches who feature Red Kelly’s mother, Mary Cody, in their Family Trees.

One of John Spencer’s daughters reported that John Spencer⁷ had notified authorities of the familial relationship to the Kellys (cousins), but disclaimed any association with the notorious Kelly member. No documents have been found to substantiate the claim, but that, as they say, is a work in progress.

I’ve added relevant links to the information above so that future family historians can piece together the story of our convict ancestors. With ongoing advancements in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), hopefully, the gaps will be filled by future generations that will cement our family’s journey, and perhaps find more convict ancestors in our family tree.

And therein lies the story of my convict family history, and I’m proud to have descended from those who came to our shores under such stressful circumstances. They didn’t just survive, they thrived, and I’m very glad they did.

1. Variations in spelling of Tabor/Taber are noted in relevant documents. ↩︎
2. Variations in the spelling of Harrex are noted in relevant documents. ↩︎
3. Milbah is an Aboriginal name, used by Richard Johnson as early as 1790, and then by Frances Taber and James Harrex. The name was subsequently used by future generations of Taber descendants. ↩︎
4. Variations in the spelling of Cavillon are noted in relevant documents. ↩︎
5. Birth names are used predominantly in this text, despite some having used their middle name, such as Emily, known to family as Beatrice. ↩︎
6. Ruby’s birth name was Ruby Pleasance; her parents separated not long after she was born, and she was raised by her mother, Annie, and Charles McDiarmid, whose name she took. ↩︎
7. John Spencer migrated to South Australia from Tipperary, where he lived during the Kelly Gang era. ↩︎