I’ve been spending a bit of time lately looking into my family history, and have come across an interesting story. As a writer, piecing the story together from sparse official records has been an enjoyable challenge.

Originally, I was trying to find more information about my mysterious great-great-grandfather, John Channon. According to family legend (which may well be inaccurate; this is my memory of what my father, who died nearly 30 years ago, told me, which he in turn must have heard from his mother in his childhood), when Old Man Channon was on his deathbed, he told his children, “You think my name’s Channon, don’t you? Well, that’s all you know.” A separate but connected family story claims that he ran away to sea at the age of 9 and changed his name so he couldn’t be traced.

We know, or think we know, his date and place of birth: 25 September 1829, Torquay, Torbay, Devon, England. Unfortunately, there isn’t a free online source of parish records for Torquay in 1829, so I can’t just check all male infants born on that day and see if there was a John Channon or someone else who could be him. Interestingly, while trying to research him, I did come across a John Channon born in Torquay in 1830, though I can’t find him again. The birth date could be wrong (and the name-change story apocryphal, or just the old man messing with his kids), or he could have taken the name of someone he knew, in an early example of identity theft.

As at the first English census, 1841, when he was 12, there are three John Channons recorded as having been born in Devon in 1829. One is in Farway, 43 miles from Torquay, living with multiple people also surnamed Channon. One is in Lympstone, 41 miles from Torquay, and he is living with a couple named Llewellin, presumably as a servant or labourer of some kind on their farm, Pitt Farm. The third is at Cheriton Fitzpaine, 34 miles inland (the other two are near the coast), and appears to be living in a lodging house of some kind, or possibly a large household in which multiple people working in a business are also housed; they have a range of ages, and different surnames from each other and from the head of the household, whose name is Melhuish, and several of them (not John) are described as “apprentice”. Any of these theoretically could be him; the “ran away to sea at nine years old” story could be apocryphal and he could have been living with his family, or with either of the other families. Or perhaps he actually was at sea at the time.

The next we know of him for certain is from his obituary, which states that he came to New Zealand as third mate on the ship William Miles in 1862.

Now, in 1862 the William Miles carried over 300 colonists intended for the last settlement in New Zealand, Albertland (later known as Port Albert), and I happen to know from my father that my ancestors settled there. So I went in search of the ship’s passenger list.

John Channon isn’t on it – not too surprisingly, since he was crew, not a passenger. But, I wondered, what about my great-grandmother, Jane Masefield, who married John? Sure enough.

So it seems they almost certainly met on the ship, and he left the ship in order to marry her – which he did about six months after landing.

The ship landed on 12 November 1862, after a voyage of more than three months, starting on 25 July from Gravesend in Kent (near the mouth of the Thames). A diary of one of the other passengers has been preserved, typed up, scanned, and put online, and is well worth the read, not only for the vividly-described vicissitudes of the voyage (a cabin 10 feet by 5 for a family of four; not touching land even to resupply, or even being in sight of land most of the time; battered by storms; several deaths on board, including, sadly, two children of the chaplain, but also three births) but for the writer’s humourous observations and erratic spelling.

So, who was Jane Masefield? She was born 18 November 1826, almost three years before John, in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. Her baptismal record describes her father as a “labourer,” though he’s later described on the census as a “market gardener”. She probably would have received, at best, a basic primary education.

She appears on the first three English censuses, 1841, 1851 and 1861. (Unfortunately, unlike Britain, New Zealand did not retain the original census documents from the early censuses, so we don’t have census records of her here.) In 1841 she’s a 14-year-old girl living with her parents and seven siblings, aged 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Ten years later, she is still living at home, along with three siblings, aged 7 (John), 12 (Angela, the second youngest as at the previous census) and 15 (William); let’s note that the youngest was born since the previous census, meaning nine children in all, and there could be others who were born and died in between censuses for all we know. Maria, the youngest child in 1841, is missing, probably deceased.

By 1861, the year before Jane emigrated, she is keeping house for William, now 25, a grocer, and their youngest brother John, now 17, his assistant, in Birmingham. Her age is given as 33, which is a slight understatement; whose, we have no way to tell.

So why would she take the drastic step of emigrating to New Zealand? The answer, or as much of it as I’ll probably ever learn, is back in the passenger list for the William Miles. Her five-years-younger brother Joseph, born 1831 (he’s the 9-year-old in the 1841 census), along with his wife Mary or May (formerly McGeach or McGooch – spelling seems to have been a bit optional) and their daughter Grace, the survivor of a pair of twins born in 1859, are on that list too. So she didn’t come out here alone, as I at first thought she might have, but accompanied her married brother and his family. Probably in another of those 5×10 cabins.

And on the ship, she meets the third mate. Remember, by the time they land she’s a single woman a week short of her 37th birthday, which in 1862 was definite old-maid territory. She probably had planned to live with her brother and his wife and be maiden aunt to their children, who eventually numbered ten, counting the already-deceased twin. But somehow or other, she ended up marrying the sailor, and they had two children, the younger being my great-grandfather, William Masefield Channon.

Now, when I was born, my mother was a few months short of 40, and my grandmother – Jane and John’s granddaughter – apparently expressed the concern that I would be mentally challenged because of being born to an older mother. She was either unaware of, or, knowing my grandmother, deliberately chose to ignore her own family history; Jane’s first child was born when she was about 38, and her second, my grandmother’s father, the year she turned 40. (His birth date was given as “1875” on the family tree on FamilySearch, but that’s obviously unlikely, given that his mother would have been close to 50; his obituary at his death in 1959 says he was born in 1866, and I’ve amended the record accordingly.)

William Masefield Channon married Alice Mabel Wadham Llewellyn Wangford, who operated a boarding house in the town of Helensville in the early years of the 20th century. That’s how her daughter Hazel Jane met my grandfather, William Colin Archibald McMillan (known as “Arch”); he was an engine driver for the railways, which ended at Helensville in those days, and used to stay in the boarding house overnight before taking the train back to Auckland. But all of that is material for further posts.