Foundations - Week 1 #52ancestors

I've now finished my two year University course and felt a bit flat not having the challenge of assignments and peer connections until one of my peers posted about Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge.

By accepting the challenge you are sent a series of weekly prompts that help you reflect on ancestors and then share your writing with others. As Amy says the guesswork of "who should I write about" is taken care of.

Week 1 challenges us to think about the foundations of our family tree. 

By definition a foundation can be the base which everything stands on. In a family tree I'm at the base but I couldn't surely be what the family tree stands on. To think of where we came from as our foundations means we have many, many foundations and the idea of writing about those is my ongoing challenge and something I don't feel I could justify writing about in a week. 

I started to brainstorm and came upon the idea of the "founding fathers" which lead to the question:

Who were the first males in my direct line to come to Australia? 

Recently I was able to complete the vitals for all but one of my Great-Great Grandparents. Family whispers and DNA filled the gaps I had and have lead me to some interesting stories I may write up one day. For now these people feel like strangers, but perhaps over time I will feel a deeper connection to their bloodline. 

With my new found knowledge, and my already researched family tree I decided to create a timeline of when my "Founding Fathers" arrived in Australia. This was an interesting exercise and I encourage others to try it themselves.

I plotted my father's line in blue and my mother's in pink. Anchors represent those who came free and flags are those who came on ships. William Littlewood is my mystery man but I added him as he's known to me, just not all his details. 1843 is the first primary record I have for him, a marriage record.

So what did I discover?

As a kid I was always given the impression that my mother's side were free of convicts but my father had one. Until my DNA confirmations the balance was even, but yes we now have two more to add (I have to keep tracking this but we might actually have a First Fleeter on this line). With our new names though I can see that we do have many free settlers, something I had only seen through the wives of many of my father's "founding fathers". 

What I didn't see until I made the time line was the obvious line between those who came in chains and those that came free. Those that came free were great travellers. Most had come to Australia as seamen. In their records we find France, Canada, America and New Zealand records and many of them. For our convicts we have a range of convict records but these were the poor having come directly from Ireland and Scotland. 

The dates are interesting to see on the time line. There are 41 years separating the first and the last. It is almost symmetrical in the group of convicts arriving in those first 20 years and those free coming in the last 21 years. 

My final realisation is that I do have some Great-Great Grandparents from overseas. I don't have to dig back as far as I thought for some "migrants". Not surprisingly though they are the sons who came between 1857 and 1859.

Perhaps one day I'll take a look at our founding mothers and see if I can draw any comparisons between the two groups.