Putting it all together

My great great grandmother, Rhoda, featured twice on the 1841 census in Cornwall, in consecutive houses (you would think that the census collector would have noticed) in a street of shoemakers.  Four days later she set sail for Australia on a bride ship, The Lady Kennaway and disembarked in Sydney where she settled down to earn her living as a milliner.


Five years later she suddenly upped and took a ship to Adelaide.  She was documented as she passed through the Port of Melbourne and again when she disembarked in Adelaide.  Three weeks later she was married in the Wesleyan Chapel in Gawler Place to a man who claimed to be John Sexton, Mariner.  As the couple were both “of full age” there is no record of their fathers’ names and I think that they may have lied about their ages.


I cannot find John Sexton and I have searched diligently for him; he is the one stumbling block in my genealogy research and I have formed certain ideas about his origins.


Having searched the census records and done numerous searches through Ancestry.com I decided that if he actually was a mariner that there must be a record so I contacted the Royal Archives in Kew, London.  They helpfully suggested which bus I needed to catch to go to Kew and do my own search and it was only when I told them that I was in Western Australia that they grudgingly looked for him.


Yes, there had been one John Sexton on record but he had spent his whole life in the navy and at no stage went anywhere near Adelaide  -  or Australia.

And here it all comes together for me.  Escaped convicts headed for South Australia, the one non-penal colony.  I searched the convict records and there were several John Sextons but they were either too old or were deceased.  New name and an occupation which could explain where he had been prior to his marriage.  I think that he reinvented himself but must have known Rhoda in Cornwall or why did she leave and move to Australia? 


Did she travel to Australia because he had been transported and did she move to Adelaide to marry him when he managed to make it there?  I’ll probably never know.

And the Limerick:-

Saddam Hussein, I dare say,
Has no fear of spiders today.
But he was like Miss Muffet
There on her tuffet
For both had some curds in their whey.