Quote:
Originally Posted by janwhin
I mentioned in my first post that my gt grandfather (Thomas Beverley) was one of the original trustees of the Mission. He and his family (but not my grandmother and her sister) emigrated to Australia in May 1913. The family memory is that they went with a significant number of the Mission families to take up a land grant in Western Australia. We certainly have a large group photo taken in the outback. The sons were soon felling timber for the building of the railroad but by 1917 they had moved to NSW (Weston) and back into the pits. My grandmother received a letter in 1944 about the funeral of another sister in Weston: "Lots of the old Broomhill folks were at the funeral....Alexander Sanderson, Will Slater, Jimmie Richardson, Lizzie Charlton, the Forster family (related to Beverleys), Will Beverley, Gil Percy, Mrs Cloud, Mrs Liddle, Mrs George Bell's daughter and others.."
I wonder if anybody has family memories about this group of people?
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I discovered this thread while researching my Great-Uncle, William Bell Slater, and believe that he is the Will Slater mentioned. I didn't realise that so many people from the Broomhill/Amble area emigrated to Australia.
Does anyone know if the Broomhill Christian Mission was actually instrumental in organising the emigrations? On the face of it, it doesn't seem likely as the families in Janwhin's thread, that I've been able to track down so far, appear to have moved anywhere between 1910 and 1925.
Undoubtedly, many of them will have known each other, probably working in the pits at Broomhill, Chevington, Radcliffe etc. and so if you were thinking of starting a new life somewhere else it was probably natural to go to a place where you knew there was a community of people that you already knew and that there was work for you to go to. Still, life must have been pretty hard at that time for so many of them to move to the other side of the world!
I distant relative in Australia suggested that I look at this site called TROVE
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/search?adv=y It is an Australian Government site, run by the National Library, with newspapers from throughout Australia all available online and for free - they are fully searchable. So if anyone is tracing Australian family members this is probably a good site for info on them.
It is being added to all the time and contains newspapers from around Australia - all for free.