Climbing from Boughs

Helen became a researcher — determined and methodical in a way that the internet age has made almost unimaginable. She spent long hours at library microfiche readers, scrolling through birth, death and marriage notices frame by frame, looking for names she recognised. She called strangers to ask if they were related.

Many of them were. And many of them talked.

Helen’s contribution covered ALL of her family lines. She contributed to both volumes of the Linford family history books, and the final fifty pages of ahnentafel family tree in those volumes have proved invaluable for identifying DNA matches across the Linford line. She fed information to Ron Jones as he compiled his Richards and Ryan research. She contributed to Claire Hinton’s work on the Steinhauser and Joiner lines. She was, in the truest sense, a connector — someone who understood that family history lives in the spaces between families, and that generosity with what you know helps everyone find what they are looking for.

Much of what is documented on this site flows, at some remove, through Helen’s hands. This page exists, in no small part, because she made those phone calls.

Before genealogy databases existed, before digitised records were accessible from a desk, before DNA testing had been imagined as a family history tool, Dorothy was building this family’s archive one document at a time. She wrote to record offices in England and waited — sometimes a year — for a single certificate to come back by post. When certificates arrived, she paid researchers on the ground in England to look further. She assembled what she found into an archive that has since proved indispensable.

That archive includes original certificates for multiple family lines; maps of Dorset that place the Toomer family in their landscape; river boat records that reference Frederick Toomer on the Murray River; newspaper clippings carefully preserved; family photographs identified and labelled in plastic sleeves; and a copy of the Berry and Stott family Bible — recording births with times as well as dates — a document of extraordinary intimacy and historical value.

The photographs especially have proved irreplaceable. Some show people whose faces were previously unknown even to their own descendants. Dorothy knew who they were and wrote their names down. That act of labelling — so easy to overlook, so impossible to replicate once memory fades — has given this research gifts it could not have found any other way.

Dorothy’s material has been digitised and is held by the researcher. Her contribution is woven through every chapter that touches the lines she worked on. This page is, among other things, a thank you.

Ron Jones conducted the foundational documentary research into the Richards family and the Mary Ryan line, published through the First Families 2001 project and archived by the National Library of Australia on Trove. His work documented the failure to find any Thomas Richards and Louisa Hardy family with a son named Charles in Staffordshire records — a negative finding that proved as important as any positive one, pointing toward the subsequent DNA-based identification of Charles Richards as Richard Cobb of Sussex.

Ron also recorded family oral history about the Richards children after Charles’s death — the older children working in Melbourne factories, the younger boys’ fate uncertain — that has since been incorporated, properly attributed, into the narrative for this line. Helen was a contributor to Ron’s research.

Ron’s work is preserved in the National Library’s Pandora web archive and is accessible via the links below.

Claire Hinton spent years researching and writing Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties, a self-published family history completed in 2004 that documents the Steinhauser and Joiner lines with care and detail. Her work drew on personal memory, family documents, and research conversations, and captures a world that no longer exists in any other written form.

Claire passed away in late 2025. Her children have kindly approved sharing her research on Ancestry, and a link to this site has been sent to them for their consideration. Subject to their confirmation, Claire’s work will be presented here with gratitude and with full acknowledgement of her authorship. It will not be altered.

Claire also contributed to the one-name family study for the Joiner family line, and her research intersects with the documentary record at several points that have since been independently verified.

Adrien is a French cousin researching the Steinhauser line from the European side. He located and shared two sources that proved foundational to understanding the German origins of the family.

The first was Hessisches Geschlechterbuch, Volume 11 (Starke Verlag, Limburg an der Lahn, 1937) — a 21-volume series of Hessian family histories, of which Volume 11 was compiled by Reverend Hermann Knodt (1880–1969) of Bad Nauheim, in collaboration with Bernhard Koerner and Otfried Praetorius. The Steinhauser family history spans pages 431–471, tracing the family from its origins in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz through multiple branches across Germany and to North America. Without Adrien’s copy, this source would have been inaccessible. It has since been translated in full and provides the documentary backbone for the Steinhauser chapter on this site.

The second was Claire Hinton’s Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties (self-published, 2004) — the Australian family history that documents the Steinhauser and Joiner lines from the colonial side. Following Claire’s passing in late 2025, Adrien shared his copy of her book, ensuring that her research was preserved and could be used in this project.

The two sources complement each other across two continents and more than a century. That they are both available to this research is entirely due to Adrien’s generosity.

The Bomford family tree has a history almost as long as the research itself. It was started by Frances Emily Bomford (1873–1959), who passed it to her nephew Christopher Heming Bomford (b. 1911). In 2001 Christopher gave it to his son Peter Heming Bomford (b. 1941), who maintained it until his death in 2014. In the 1970s, approximately seventy copies were circulated in printed form — a diagram totalling about three metres wide by 0.8 metres high. Many members of the family have contributed over the decades.

The tree now lives online at bomford.net as an annotated resource covering the Worcestershire Bomford line, including the branch connecting to this research through Thomas Bomford (1802–1856) of Feckenham, Worcestershire.

Research into the Linford and Pain family was commenced by Bob Linford in Canberra in the 1970s. Bob, a descendant of Samuel Linford born 1849, researched the Linfords in England. Heather MacQueen, a descendant of George Linford born 1867, joined Bob in the early 1980s. Heather passed away in 1993 and the work was set aside for a time. In about 1996 interest was again revived, and Irene, Helen and Louie Barber continued the research until publication of The Linford Family History in 2001 and The Linford Family History Companion Book in 2003.

These books document the Norfolk origins of William Barlee Linford and Sarah Elizabeth Pain and their emigration to Australia, and represent decades of careful documentary research. The final fifty pages of ahnentafel family tree in those books have proved particularly valuable for identifying DNA matches across the Linford line. Irene has kindly given permission to reproduce the relevant sections of this work on Seventeen Ships.

The Martham Norfolk website documents the history of Martham, a village in Norfolk, England, and has proved an unexpected and valuable resource for this research. The site holds photographs of burial sites as well as records from the 1812 Inclosure Act that are being progressively digitised — documents previously held only at the Norfolk Records Office and not otherwise accessible to researchers at a distance. The Inclosure Act records include entries for this researcher’s Linford line, providing a new window into the family’s presence in Norfolk before their emigration to Australia. Further research is needed to fully establish the connections, but the documentary foundation looks promising.

Catherine Wherry, born around 1833 in Ballycassidy, County Fermanagh, came to Australia not as a free settler but as one of the young Irish orphan women transported under the Earl Grey Scheme of around 1850 — a government programme that brought approximately 4,000 young women from Irish workhouses to the Australian colonies during the post-Famine years. The scheme was controversial at the time and remains a significant chapter in both Irish and Australian history.

Two online resources have documented Catherine Wherry’s story. The Cunninghams Way website has researched Fermanagh families and the Earl Grey Scheme, providing valuable context and specific detail about Catherine’s origins and passage to Australia. The Irish Famine Memorial maintains an orphan database recording the women who came under the scheme, and Catherine Wherry’s record is held there as part of that broader memorial and research resource. The memorial itself is a physical monument in Sydney, dedicated to the young Irish women who became mothers to a significant proportion of Australians born in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ian Berry’s research focused on his own direct ancestors — the younger brothers of James Wilson Berry — rather than on James and Isabella themselves. But in documenting their shared Yorkshire origins, the conditions of the time, and the connections back to the Berry family network in Yorkshire, his work has proved invaluable for building a fuller picture of the family. Ian mentions James Wilson Berry, Isabella Jane Stott, and their son Ronald Pohlman Berry at various points, providing details that have helped confirm relationships and extend the family tree.

His records about the historical and social conditions facing the Berry family in rural Victoria and New South Wales are particularly valuable as context — the reality of making a farm from scrubland, the financial pressures of making it work, and what daily life looked like for the women and girls in the family. It is striking to contrast the Australian branch with their English cousins, where servants did the household work, while the girls in Australia were washing dishes for a large part of the day. That kind of detail transforms a list of names and dates into a story of real people navigating real circumstances.

Ian’s document is held by the researcher. Permission to reproduce relevant sections on this site is being discussed.

Reg Butler researched and documented the Cox and Lloyd family lines, and his work provided the crucial starting points for this research — most importantly, the details that led to locating the marriage certificate for John Cox and Elizabeth Lloyd, and the knowledge that three children had been born to Thomas Cox. Those were the threads that made the rest possible.

Reg’s research suggested that John, Annie and Elizabeth Cox were born in Acton, Middlesex. Subsequent documentary research has established that they were in fact born in the Cotswolds and were subject to a removal order — likely moving to Acton afterwards, which may explain why Acton persisted as a family memory of birthplace. Annie’s own census returns place her birth in the Cotswolds, which proved the more reliable record. This is noted not as a criticism — Reg was working with the sources available to him — but as an honest account of how his research was used and where it was extended.

Reg’s work is published through the Adelaide Hills Local Wiki, freely accessible to researchers and descendants.

BanyanDNA applies Bayesian statistical methodology and standard deviation modelling to validate proposed family tree relationships against tested DNA matches. Rather than simply listing shared centimorgans, it models the expected DNA sharing for every position in a proposed tree and compares that against what tested descendants actually share — producing a statistical assessment of whether the proposed relationships are consistent with the genetic evidence.

In several of the research reports on this site, BanyanDNA’s analysis has been not just supportive but central — the mechanism by which a hypothesis becomes a demonstrated conclusion. The identification of Charles Richards as Richard Cobb of Linchmere, Sussex, and the establishment of James Bomford as the biological father of Emily Macauley, both rely on BanyanDNA validation as a key element of the evidence.

The Press and Hawkins methodology underpins the standard deviation framework used in this project.

This website was designed and built using Claude (Anthropic) in collaboration with the researcher. All genealogical research — including source identification, evidence analysis, proof arguments, and conclusions — was conducted by the researcher. The website does not represent Claude’s conclusions about any genealogical question; it represents the researcher’s.

Claude assisted with narrative drafting, document review, and website construction. Claude was prompted using genealogical methodology frameworks to assist with document analysis. The specific proof arguments, research summaries, and formal GPS-standard documents reference Steve Little’s genealogical methodology frameworks in their construction.

All content drafted with Claude’s assistance has been carefully reviewed, corrected where necessary, and approved by the researcher before publication. Citations follow Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 2015). Proof arguments are compiled using the Genealogical Proof Standard as defined by the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

The narrative chapters are written to be readable and engaging. Where they present conclusions, those conclusions are supported by research reports for each family line. The narrative is the story; the research is the evidence. Both are part of this project.