User:Pascoevale

I grew up in Pascoe Vale. Now I live in Airport West.

My interests are popular music up to 1964 and detective fiction especially by John Dickson Carr.

Richard Morgan

One of my ancestors was a convict who was transported to Australia, arriving in 1788 on the First Fleet.

He was born around 1758 to 1762. Richard discovered that his wife was having an affair with her employer. He surprised them in bed one afternoon and the employer panicked and ran off leaving his watch. Richard decided that the watch would serve as partial compensation for the adulterous affair.

Richard was tried at Gloucester, Gloucestershire on 23 March 1785 for assault and stealing a metal watch with a value of 163 shillings. He was sentenced to transportation to Africa for 7 years.

Richard sailed to New South Wales on the Alexander in May 1787 and a convict named Elizabeth Lock, whom he had met in prison in Bristol, sailed on the Lady Penrhyn. They were married in the new colony on 30 March 1788.

The marriage did not last and Richard formed a relationship with Catherine Clarke who arrived from England on the Lady Juliana in 1790. Richard and Catherine were moved to Norfolk Island in 1790 and, when that colony failed, they were evacuated to Hobart, Tasmania. They arrived on 7 October 1806.

Catherine died in 1828 aged around 58. Richard died in Tasmania on 26 September 1837.

I am descended from Richard and Catherine's daughter Sophia who was born on Norfolk Island in 1801.

In 1821 Sophia married Robert Graves who had arrived in Hobart on the Regalia on 30 November 1819. Sophia and Robert had four children, Richard (1825), twins Georgiana and George (born Georgetown, 18 December 1827) and John (1829). Robert died in late 1829 and Sophia remarried in 1833. She died on 15 January 1844.

George married Rebecca Gaylor on 6 October 1852. Rebecca was the daughter of Charles Gaylor (d. 1855 aged 56) and Phillis Blythe (d. 1869 aged 65). Charles was a convict and Phillis was a free settler. Charles and Phillis married at New Norfolk on 1 April 1833. Rebecca was born in New Norfolk, Tasmania on 8 January 1834.

George and Rebecca's daughter Emma was born in Clarence Gardens, Tasmania on 15 July 1853. She was raised by her father's cousin Catherine Watson (nee Wade) and Catherine's husband Brereton and was known as Emma Graves Watson. Emma married Thomas Lesley Rogers, a farm labourer on 1 June 1876 and they subsequently settled in Melbourne, Victoria. Emma died in 1917 and Thomas in 1924.

Richard Morgan is the subject of the novel Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough. McCullough's husband Ric Robinson is also a descendant of Morgan and Clarke, as is singer Helen Reddy.