Rosemary Campbell
Member
Hello fellow genealogists,
My name is Rosemary Campbell and I am a retired literary historian, with a lifelong love of family narratives and of history at the level of indiviual people – for example, I'm not so much interested in the Poor Laws of the 1830s as a whole, but in how they forced my Head family ancestors in Kent, a young couple with a toddler and a baby, to move from one small town to another some distance away (which may have been the reason why the baby died). As for my Kirkham ancestors in Lincolnshire, I want to know what exact economic or social circumstances pursuaded two of the young men to up and leave the tiny village of Old Leake for a new country across the Atlantic – surely a terrifying prospect! I know why their relatives by marriage, the Stewart family, made an even more daunting voyage with their young daughter – they came to Australia as Bounty immigrants, because the new colony of Van Diemans Land (later Tasmania) had need of bricklayers. Henry Stewart, the bricklayer's father, by the way, had himself travelled from the Isle of Skye to Lincolnshire as a cattle drover, and had married there. Obadiah Ikin (what a name!), from Shropshire, made his way to Australia in 1792 as a soldier on a ship full of convicts, and founded a dynasty of Ikins in his new country. But other contributors to my family story were more reluctant travellers to Tasmania, coming from Ireland and England in chains to the other end end of the world, sometimes followed by their wives and children, and in other cases founding families there. With such an ancestry, and such a profession – and being greatly given to imagination – can you wonder tht I am a most enthusiastic unraveller of genealogies? Not just my own, but I am always very willing and just as excited to help unravel the threads of other searchers' narratives.
My name is Rosemary Campbell and I am a retired literary historian, with a lifelong love of family narratives and of history at the level of indiviual people – for example, I'm not so much interested in the Poor Laws of the 1830s as a whole, but in how they forced my Head family ancestors in Kent, a young couple with a toddler and a baby, to move from one small town to another some distance away (which may have been the reason why the baby died). As for my Kirkham ancestors in Lincolnshire, I want to know what exact economic or social circumstances pursuaded two of the young men to up and leave the tiny village of Old Leake for a new country across the Atlantic – surely a terrifying prospect! I know why their relatives by marriage, the Stewart family, made an even more daunting voyage with their young daughter – they came to Australia as Bounty immigrants, because the new colony of Van Diemans Land (later Tasmania) had need of bricklayers. Henry Stewart, the bricklayer's father, by the way, had himself travelled from the Isle of Skye to Lincolnshire as a cattle drover, and had married there. Obadiah Ikin (what a name!), from Shropshire, made his way to Australia in 1792 as a soldier on a ship full of convicts, and founded a dynasty of Ikins in his new country. But other contributors to my family story were more reluctant travellers to Tasmania, coming from Ireland and England in chains to the other end end of the world, sometimes followed by their wives and children, and in other cases founding families there. With such an ancestry, and such a profession – and being greatly given to imagination – can you wonder tht I am a most enthusiastic unraveller of genealogies? Not just my own, but I am always very willing and just as excited to help unravel the threads of other searchers' narratives.
great to have you here. What a wonderful outlook on all thinks genealogical.
