I posted my first family history blog (‘web log’) journal entry on 25 April 2012. In the eleven years since, I have written another 726 posts, nearly 200 of them about the forebear families of my grandmother Kathleen Cavenagh Symes nee Cudmore (shown here with her elder sister Rosemary).
Four months ago my cousin Diana Beckett, a fellow family historian, suggested that I publish my research diary as a printed book to supplement The Mainwarings of Whitmoreby James Gordon Cavenagh-Mainwaring, The First Years of my Married Life by Rowland Mainwaring, and related family histories.
I followed her suggestion; this volume is the result.
It includes all my blog posts that concern the Cudmore, Budge, Cavenagh and Mainwaring families. Most of the posts grew out of my research into my family history; occasionally they were written in response to themes suggested elsewhere. For example, every week the Sepia Saturday blogging group publishes an historical image and invites its members to write an item connected with it. The image has been the starting point for many interesting journeys. A second example: since 2014 I have taken part in the annual A to Z Blogging Challenge. Every day in April except Sunday, I write a post prompted by that day’s letter of the alphabet, A for 1 April, B for 2 April, and so on.
Turning a web site into a paper journal comes at a cost: hyperlinks and navigational aids are lost, and the ability to perform casual text searches disappears. In an attempt to compensate, for each branch of the family I have provided an index that leads to the posts that mentions its members.
The book is a growing log of my family history explorations, not a continuous historical narrative. Where a later entry expands and corrects earlier material I have left the earlier entry in the form it was posted.
I have not included all my references and citations. These may be found in the online posts and at Wikitree, a collaborative family history project.
Researching our family history has been a great pleasure. I am most grateful for the guidance, assistance, and personal help I have received from everyone who has contributed, and I owe a great debt to the writings of the family historians who have gone before me:
• Rafe de Crespigny, my father, “Champions from Normandy”, and many other family notes and pedigrees
• My cousins, especially, Fleur Strong and Tara Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Diana Beckett, and Gay Doggart.
I look forward to continuing my research into our families’ history, for me an ever-expanding project, inexhaustibly fascinating.
The book, Cavenagh, Mainwaring, and Cudmore: A journal of family history, is available as an ebook through the National Library of Australia at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3263020521/view
A paperback version (ISBN 9780648191780) of all 714 pages will be available through booksellers including Amazon:
The second cousin of my grandfather Geoff de Crespigny was Vida Clift née Hopper-Cuthbert (1913 – 2007). She was my second cousin twice removed; our most recent common ancestors were Samuel Proudfoot Hawkins (1819 -1867) and Jeanie Hutcheson (1824 – 1864). Vida’s grandfather was David Hawkins (1858 – 1922). Geoff de Crespigny’s grandmother was Jeanie Hughes née Hawkins (1862 – 1942).
David Hawkins and his family lived in New South Wales. Jeanie Hughes lived in Victoria. I do not know whether my grandfather Geoff ever met his second cousin Vida.
In 1974 Vida Clift compiled a family history, which she called “Pink Hats on Gentle Ladies”. Copies of the manuscript were deposited in the State Library of New South Wales and State Library Victoria.
In the Introduction she wrote:
History requires a considerable amount of time and investigation. As I had neither the time, nor the resources for this research, and had to depend on my very unreliable memory for much of the material, this record is, I considered to be neither complete, nor strictly accurate.
Some of the dates included, are open to question and apologies are made for any errors.
However, material was obtained from old Parish records, Family Bibles and Birthday Books, old headstones, and printed records in the Public and Mitchell Libraries, Sydney; the National Library, Canberra; and the Archives Office of Tasmania.
Many people, relatives, friends, and even complete strangers assisted me by supplying relevant notes and reminiscences. To all who helped in any way, may I express my sincere gratitude.
Should you feel your family has been overlooked, or scantily recorded, it has not been done so intentionally. It is because the requested information has not been sent to me. In some instances, my requests for information were completely ignored, and I have included only those names and dates which, I believe to be accurate.
Although we appear to have had many distinguished ancestors, we ourselves, are who we are neither better nor worse for those ancestors. Although there may have been an odd scallywag here and there in the many families, I have not found any to include in this record, which I have endeavoured to keep accurate as far as possible. Nor is there anything in this book intended to hurt anyone.
This record has been compiled in the hope that future members of the families will keep it up to date. Some may perhaps research more deeply into the families who came from the Old Country.
Younger members of the families will have a better opportunity than I will ever have, to go to England, Scotland or Ireland and delve into the past there, where the information should be available.
In 2017 Vida’s son Daniel wrote to me:
I have just been searching through the internet checking on some Hawkins Family history and I came across your details.
I too am a relative of Samuel Proudfoot Hawkins. (A great, great Grandson.)
My mother, (Vida Clift), was a daughter of Jessie Hawkins, whose father was David Hawkins, whose father was Samuel Proudfoot Hawkins.
Mother wrote a very incomplete family history, (Pink Hats on Gentle Ladies), and I am now endeavoring to continue the task, which is a very onerous one!
However, just thought I would drop a line and introduce myself.
We have been in correspondence over the last five years.
Daniel has now produced a second edition of his mother’s book, with corrections and additions. A digital copy is being made available on this website.
Introducing the second edition Daniel writes:
Some additional information and photographs have been added, including scallywags, due to the wonders of the Internet.
Way back in 1973, mother told us she was going to write a book on our Family and all those individuals associated with our family.
To be honest, we had no interest at all at the time, and as is often the case, we now wish we had paid more attention to her efforts. My mother, (Vida), and my elder sister Barbara, could remember dates and names of relatives where they lived, who they married, where they were born and died. I do wish I had recorded all that information.
Now, I am the last one standing, (to quoin a phrase), and as such I am now engrossed in updating the original book and the information mother had gained.
As is stated in the original edition of her book – ‘Pink Hats on Gentle Ladies’, most of the information was gathered by ‘badgering’ family members and those ‘non’ family members into sharing their knowledge and recollections, searching manually through the Mitchel Library, State Archives, Cemetery and Church records.
Mother painstakingly proceeded to put all the information into some sort of chronological order and then typed the whole document using an old Remington typewriter and foolscap size paper!
I still have that original document.
After the book was printed, not published in the true sense of the word, copies were sold, mainly to the family and copies found their way into both the Mitchell Library and the State Library in Sydney. A copy has also found its way into the State Library of Victoria!
It is fortunate, one of the family members, a cousin, Barbara Hopper-Cuthbert, retyped the entire document into electronic format, thus enabling me to add information, photographs, and to correct information and explore the internet for much needed dates, particularly on Births, Deaths, and Marriages.
Original photographs were scanned, some were enhanced and have been included in this second edition.
There is, a lot of information that is incorrect, missing, and difficult to find.
An extensive source of information was gained from the Internet via a ‘web’ of sites dedicated to Family History, and the ability to explore the families of relatives, but, as Mother found, as have I, some questions asked seeking more information, have gone unanswered.
Reformatting the book proved to be far more difficult than I had imagined, asking myself should I change the format, or leave it alone?
I did however where possible, remove a lot of duplicate information and combine it into a single family with reference to the relevant families. Some information is duplicated because it refers to both sides of a family.
A lot of photographs became available from both my mother’s archives and other sources and where appropriate, have been included. I still have a Sea Chest and two filing cabinets full of family history!
Some information has also been included which may, or may not be applicable to the actual family history, but it is included for historical interest.
I undertook a DNA test through Ancestry, and that has brought the relatives ‘out of the woodwork’, which is much appreciated!
Through Ancestry, I have started a Family Tree, (Daniel Clift Family Tree), hopefully this will be available to anyone looking for information on the Clift side of the family, although it does include quite a few other families, some going back 12 generations.
As some family information is vague, I have removed it altogether.
Family history is an engrossing hobby, a fascinating challenge to trace relationships, and an opportunity to discover how a family has experienced historical events.
I am fortunate that quite a few of my forebears and their relatives were also interested in family history, sufficiently interested to write it down. Several of them published books, for example:
Philip Chauncy, my 3rd great grandfather, wrote about his sister and wife in his “Memoirs of Mrs Poole and Mrs Chauncy” 1873 republished in 1976
J G Cavenagh-Mainwaring, brother of my great grandmother Kathleen Cudmore, formerly Cavenagh-Mainwaring nee Cavenagh, in 1935 published “Mainwarings of Whitmore and Biddulph in the County of Stafford : an account of the family, and its connections by marriage and descent; with special reference to the manor of Whitmore”. His book has now been digitised and is available at archive.org https://archive.org/details/mainwaringsofwhi00main/page/n5/mode/2up
In 1985 Helen Hudson nee Hughes, first cousin of my paternal grandfather, published “Cherry stones : adventures in genealogy of Taylor, Hutcheson, Hawkins of Scotland, Plaisted, Green, Hughes of England and Wales … who immigrated to Australia between 1822 and 1850”.
James Kenneth Cudmore (1926 – 2013), my second cousin once removed, of Quirindi New South Wales, commissioned Elsie Ritchie to compile a family history of the Cudmore family in Australia: “For the love of the land: the history of the Cudmore family”. This was published in 2000.
I have been able to confirm the family history in these books through access to records such as birth, marriage and death certificates, baptism and burial records, censuses, wills, military records, and other primary records.
I organise my family history in a family tree database, with the most complete database at Ancestry.com. I can attach documents to it, both of records held by Ancestry and also those I upload. My Ancestry tree is a “public” tree, that is, anyone with a subscription to Ancestry.com can view it and the records I have attached. Currently my tree at ancestry.com has 11,533 people with 18,823 records, 2,480 photographs and images, and 357 stories.
I back up that tree to my own computer using Family Tree Maker, which includes software that synchronises Family Tree Maker with Ancestry.com. I also have a copy of the tree at MyHeritage and at FindMyPast.
I also upload my genealogy to WikiTree, a collaborative project intended to produce a ‘singular worldwide family tree’. I hope the research that I have contributed to WikiTree it will be there as a resource for my cousins to use now and in the future, safe, I hope, from accidental and malicious damage. There are several single worldwide trees, including FamilySearch and Geni. In my experience I have found Wikitree the most accurate and carefully compiled. As I add each person I cite sources to show how I know the facts and relationships. Adding my family tree slowly to Wikitree is an excellent way to review my family history research.
This online research journal is archived by the PANDORA archive, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996. Its stated mission was: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia (hence the acronym PANDORA). The National Library states it is committed to ensuring long-term access to all its digital collections, including the PANDORA Archive.
However, I am a great believer in the durable qualities of paper, and I regularly print copies of this blog using an instant print service called Blog2Print (https://www.blog2print.com). I find it easier to read the paper version. So far there are five volumes. My father has a copy.
Many years ago my daughter asked me to compile a family history photo book. I included a family tree up to her great grandparents, including her aunts, uncles and cousins. Photos were briefly captioned.
More recently I used the company MyCanvas to generate a book about the family of my husband Greg. It wasn’t just a matter of pressing a button. I added many photos and also relevant entries from this online research journal to compile the family history, which I later shared with Greg’s brother and sister and their families. The MyCanvas system of compiling books has since changed. It no longer uses Adobe Flash.
Late last year my father and I published a biography and family history of Charlotte Frances nee Dana (1820-1904), my third great grandmother. She emigrated to Australia at the time of the gold rushes with her second husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny (1817-1889). We wrote about her forebears, her father’s bankruptcy, her first marriage and scandalous divorce, living in the relatively new colony of Victoria amidst the goldrushes, and her grandchildren who lived into the twentieth century.
Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny née Dana (1820 – 1904) photographed probably in the late 1850s
Publishing a family history is a good way to preserve the research but it is certainly challenging. There are so many facts to be compiled and checked. This online journal is an efficient way to share my research with those of my cousins who are interested in our family history. I have been writing for nearly ten years and have published 584 posts, a considerable body of research.
The best organising tool I have is to attach documents and photographs to my online family tree database. If I am looking for a document there is a good chance that I will find it there.
My online research journal has been a terrific tool to write and record my family history.
I recently learned that the extensive genealogical research of one of my cousins had been substantially destroyed. After he died, his wife, suffering from dementia of some type, would go through the “papers, time after time, weeding out the bits she thought irrelevant and re-arranging them all. So they are now a lot less substantial and a lot less organised.” Fortunately his conclusions were incorporated into the published research of another cousin but the original sources were unfortunately not noted.
As for passing on the research to the next generation, I talk to my children about our family history but I feel publishing it and sharing it more widely on the web will help to make sure our family history is passed on.
The papers of several of my forebears have been archived:
My 3rd great grandfather Philip Chauncy’s papers are in the state libraries of Victoria and New South Wales
The Royal Historical Society of Victoria has a transcription of the Journal of Philip’s sister, Theresa Chauncy, from 1836-37. Her Journal of a residence of three months in the British province of South Australia describes the early settlement in South Australia and the physical, social, economic and cultural aspects of pioneering life. Descriptions of flora and fauna, exploration, cost of living and general observations of life in the colony from a woman’s point of view.
The deeds and documents J G (Gordon) Cavenagh-Mainwaring used to compile his Mainwaring and Whitmore family history were deposited in the Staffordshire archives. One relative who could not find them thought my great aunt Rosemary had destroyed them as she took over Gordon’s study as her sitting room after his death and perhaps consigned Gordon’s papers to the boiler room. Fortunately the important papers in fact survived:
Description: Staffs (Whitmore, Biddulph, etc) deeds, family and estate papers Date: 13th cent-20th cent Reference: D 1743
D(W)1743 includes early deeds from c.1275, manorial court records, family settlements, leases, personal papers including appointments to public office and military or naval commissions, legal documents, estate papers including surveys, field books, survey of coal mine, maps (Whitmore, Acton in Swynnerton, Biddulph), rentals, and some later estate administration papers.
D5376: Papers of the Mainwaring Family of Whitmore, particularly of Edward Mainwaring (the eighth Edward of a consecutive line). The collection consists of inventories of goods on the death of several family members (1604-1694), land tax assessments for Clayton and Seabridge and Swynnerton (1735), several wills (1756-1770), legal correspondence (1616-1825) and leases particularly in relation to lands in Lancashire (1744-1768).
Extent D(W)1743 is 9 box equivalents and 7 maps D5376 is 2.5 boxes, 2 vols
Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana (1820 – 1904) : and her family in Australia by Rafe de Crespigny and Anne Young
The paperback edition of the history of the Dana and Champion de Crespigny families in Australia is now available. The ebook was published 30 December 2020 and a PDF can be downloaded for free.
This biography of Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana (1820 – 1904), also includes her forebears, siblings and descendants.
Charlotte Frances Dana, of middling gentry background, was married to a county solicitor when she met her second husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny. After a scandalous divorce and a brief exile in France, they came to Australia in 1852 where Philip Robert became a Warden and Magistrate in the goldfields.
Viewed through the life of Charlotte Frances, this is an account of a migrant Victorian family of the nineteenth century.
Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny née Dana (1820 – 1904) photographed probably in the late 1850s
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION vii
CHRONOLOGY ix
CHAPTER ONE Prologue: The family background of Charlotte Frances nee Dana The Dana family in America 1 Edmund Dana in England and Scotland 3 The children of Edmund Dana and Helen nee Kinnaird 14 William Pulteney Dana, father of Charlotte Frances 31
CHAPTER TWO The Road to Divorce The Bible and the census 43 Breakdown 53 Divorce 59 France to Australia 67 A note on the Crespigny surname 77
CHAPTER THREE Victoria in the Gold Rush The Dana brothers and the native police 79 Family in Victoria 95 Commissioner, Magistrate and Warden of the Goldfields 105 Letters from home 113
CHAPTER FOUR Amherst and Talbot 1855-1871 Settlements at Daisy Hill 121 Public and private life 128 Farewell to Talbot 142 In search of Daisy Hill Farm: a note 145 Tragic cousins: George and Augustus, the sons of Henry Dana 149
CHAPTER FIVE Ararat to St Kilda 1871-1889 Bairnsdale, Bendigo and Bright, with a brief return to Talbot 157 Magistrate at Ararat 163 Constantine Trent in Australia 1875-1881 173 Rose Crespigny and Frank Beggs 182 Philip Crespigny and Annie Frances Chauncy 191
CHAPTER SIX Eurambeen 1889-1904 The second marriage of Philip Champion Crespigny 207 The letters of Constantine Trent Champion Crespigny 1889-1896 207 Banks and the land: the crisis of the 1890s 216 The Eurambeen Letters 1898-1904 218
CHAPTER SEVEN Epilogue: The immediate descendants of Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana Philip Champion de Crespigny 1850-1927 253 Philip Champion de Crespigny 1879-1918 256 Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny 1882-1952 259 Francis George Travers Champion de Crespigny 1892-1968 261 Hugh Vivian Champion de Crespigny 1897-1969 262 Royalieu Dana [Roy] Champion de Crespigny 1905-1985 263 Claude Montgomery Champion de Crespigny 1908-1991 264 Rose (1858-1937) and Frank Beggs (1850-1921) 265 Postscript: Ada, Viola and Rose 266 John Neptune Blood 1869-1942 267