Breaking Brick Walls - Finding Dennis Clarke's real birth certificate

 Hi Guys!

            It has been a couple of years since I posted on my blog, but things have been so exciting that I had to let everyone know.  Our family brick wall has tumbled down. I found DENNIS CLARKE's birth certificate!

            Dennis Clarke had 10 children, and therefore has many descendants, and we of the Clarke family have been bugged by not being able to find his birth certificate for many years now. The Clarke  parents were JOHN CLARKE and MARY McNAMARA.

            My search for answers started in about 2014. I was intrigued when I searched Trove and found a notice in the Geelong Advertiser in the Missing Friends column from a John Clarke to a James Edmonds, saying :

                                        "JAMES EDMONDS, of Bellerine, is earnestly requested to return and take charge of his two children, as the undersigned is not in a position to maintain them any longer. If he does not do so, they will be handed over to the authorities.  JOHN CLARKE  April 28th 1859."

            I wondered if this was my John Clarke, and so I researched as widely as I could at the time, but due to multiple JOHN CLARKEs and JAMES EDMONDS in Geelong, I abandoned the search. 

            Then in 2016, another family historian Lynette emailed me, telling me a family story that I did not know.  Apparently Dennis Clarke had spent time in an orphanage, along with another boy. There were two. This didn't seem to make sense. Again I chased the Edmonds angle. I researched for hours and couldn't pin anything down.

            In 2017 I contacted someone on Ancestry at that time who I thought was likely to be another Edmonds descendant. Again my research was stymied by the commonality of the name James Edmonds. I resolved that I needed clarifying information, something I could pin down as definite. Occasionally over the years, I looked again and found nothing.

            That brings me to a month ago. With the virus shutting me down and leaving me bored, I decided to revisit Trove and search the Edmonds angle another time. Bingo! I found a similar notice to John Clarke's in the Geelong Advertiser in the Missing friends column later that same year. This time it was to James EDMUNDS (different spelling) from his wife:

                                    "JAMES EDMUNDS.- You are earnestly requested to communicate with your wife, who has returned home quite well."

            The new and more accurate spelling gave me something to go on. From that I found a James Edmunds marrying a MARY HILLARY. Mary was from Co. Clare in Ireland, which is also where Mary McNamara hailed from. I found the couple had three children at Indented Head near Geelong:

• Thomas EDMUNDS b. 1856 d. 1857 - 5 months old.
• John EDMUNDS  b. 5th August 1857
• James EDMUNDS Jnr. b. 1858.

              This means that when John and Mary Clarke put the notice in the Geelong Advertiser in 1859, John was 2 1/2 years old and James was about one. Their own daughter was only 14 months old, so they had three under three.

         

                 Sadly, I discovered that James Jnr. died in St. Augustine's Orphanage in Geelong in 1865, aged only 7 years old. So two of the Edmunds children had died, which left JOHN EDMUNDS as the potential Dennis Clarke. I contacted Mac Killop Family Services and they responded the next day by phone. Their brief look at their records confirmed the two Edmunds boys, staying multiple times at St. Augustine's. But I would have to wait my turn to get details and copies of the documents. 

                Weeks dragged by and I filled my time by researching more about the Edmunds family. I found that Mary Edmunds had a warrant out for James for abandoning her and the children.  Mary obviously had a breakdown after the death of her baby only 5 months old and being abandoned by her husband.  She struggled with mental illness which seemed to spiral increasingly. She had been in and out of care. It explained her "returned home quite well" notice.  Eventually I found her records in PROV - she had been taken to Yarra Bend Asylum, spent 30 years there, and died there in 1900, aged 73. I've found no further trace of James Edmunds Snr.

           Yesterday, McKillop Family Services contacted me back, and sent me their records of the two boys. Unfortunately the admittance papers have been lost in time, but their registry records remain. Only two weeks after his brother James' death in 1865, JOHN EDMUNDS was discharged. The terse registry entry only says "Returned to his friends."

            Indeed, John and Mary Clarke were his friends.  John Edmunds became an integral part of the Clarke family. As the Clarkes already had a son called John Clarke, John Edmunds changed his name to Dennis, who was his biological maternal grandfather's name. I think this is a story of love. Dennis embraces John and Mary as his parents absolutely, and they in turn embrace him.  Dennis was a pillar of the Terang community where he settled as DENNIS CLARKE, and he achieved innumerable good deeds for his community.

            So now all the Clarke family historians need to adjust their records. Dennis Clarke, birth name John EDMUNDS, born 5th August 1857 at Indented Head, Victoria. Father: James EDMUNDS. Mother: Mary HILLARY (or HILLERY).  Adoptive Parents: John and Mary Clarke. Lots of work to do now!

1857 - James Edmunds' signature from John Edmunds/Dennis Clarke's birth certificate.

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Searching in Bendigo - a visit to the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre

The photo I took yesterday morning of
Bendigo Magistrates' Court,
 a short walk away from the
 Bendigo Library in Hargreaves Street.

Yesterday was full of the highs and lows that make up the life of a passionate genealogist.

Off I went to Bendigo, only a couple of hours drive from Melbourne.  I had booked into a course at the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre (BRAC) for a brief run down of their resources.

 BRAC is located on the first floor of the Bendigo Library, located in Hargreaves Street.  It is a regional branch of the Public Records Office, (PROV) which is located in North Melbourne.  If you are a family historian in Victoria,  Australia, you will, or probably already have, visited PROV in North Melbourne.  I went there a few months ago and got some copies of inquests for my family. I was super impressed with PROV's professionalism and wondered how BRAC would compare.

Very well as it happens.  The course was interesting and informative, and we were presented with information packs that would assist us later,  As each available record was described, we got shown an example of that record, which was passed around the table. Some of the volumes were enormous and some of us were unable to lift them at all.

It was so exciting to see these documents, often leather-bound with colourful marbled endpapers.  Some of the handwriting was so fine and meticulous, I don't think I have ever seen its equal.  Books varied in size depending on age and what it contained.  As I said before, the Land Title volumes were so large that they were easily the length of my arm, and three inches thick including the heavy leather bindings.  Some of the Bendigo City Council pay books I went through were only 20cm square, but they contained each employee's signature, information about their occupation, even sometimes the area they worked in during that pay period. Gold for someone with that ancestor! Other pay books contained stamp duty stamps attached to the page and cancelled out.  Others contained handwritten notes such as "Please pay Mrs. X my wages as I am too sick with influenza. Kind and oblige, Mr. X."  Another note gave me pause: "Please pay Mrs. X my wages until such and such a date. (Months in advance).  I imagined the man owed back rent to his landlady.  Or something like that. Just think, I handled those books and papers and they were at least 80 years old.

Others were even older and some were in downright bad condition.  One particular volume from 1877 had very thick linen covered cardboard covers, with two perfect shoe shapes cut out of them.  The shoe lining thief stole them a long long time ago, perhaps during the depression. The front page has dark patches in perfect shoe shapes where the cover is missing.

The BRAC volunteers work hard and are friendly too.  I gleaned lots of local knowledge without which I would have been truly stuck.  Local knowledge is gold, and highly undervalued in this day of "everything's on computer" because that's not true.

You should go to BRAC if your ancestor lived in the area. If you, like me, are from out of town and plan to visit the Bendigo Library and BRAC for longer than an hour, park in the multi-storey carpark directly across the road.  It only costs $7 for the whole day, and saves moving your car periodically. The Bendigo Library also has food and drink available downstairs. More about Bendigo Library tomorrow.

Historically yours,
Valerius Copernicus.