Curious beginnings

Emma (nee Burgoyne) after her wedding to Mr Wyly

It is only recently that I have developed a serious interest in my ancestor Thomas Burgoyne.  He was a Welshman, born near the border with England in 1827, and emigrated to the Colony of South Australia with his pregnant wife in 1849. 

Thomas Burgoyne was my maternal grandmother’s grandfather. He becomes more real and less remote when I think of him in that way. When I look at photographs of Thomas, and then at ones of my grandmother, Emma, I see a likeness. In one of her sons, my uncle, Gordon, I can also see a similarity, especially around the eyes, which has been passed down the generations. There is a more compelling reason to think about Thomas this way, which will become clear.

All families have stories and anecdotes about their family, which they pass on to their children, and the same happened in my family. That is, my father told many family stories. On the other hand, my mother was silent.

That began to change when I first went to high school in the 1950s, and my sister went to primary school. My mother finally had time for herself for the first time since her marriage 15 years earlier. She was in her thirties.  She trained as a teacher and later resumed her university education. She studied History and psychology. At the time, the oral interview was one of the most recent trends in historical research.  To practice this skill and to present her work for assessment, she interviewed her mother, then Emma Wyly, about her childhood.

It was a social history project.  She was most disappointed in how little her mother remembered of her upbringing, her family life, and what was happening in the wider world as she grew up in Adelaide in the late 1890s.  Her memories were fragmentary, her account of her family background sketchy and confusing.  My mother was keen to fill in all the missing blanks. Over the following years (in the time before Trove made life easier for researchers), she gradually began to piece together her family tree.  Emma confessed that she had been raised from about the age of 8, as the adopted daughter of her grandfather Thomas Burgoyne, and thought of him as her father and her Burgoyne aunts and uncles as brothers and sisters. My mother received this news with amazement. Why hadn’t her mother ever told her this important fact? 

When my mother died in 2000, she left a copy of the family tree, her notes and newspaper cuttings, and her precious volumes of early South Australian history.  But certain mysteries remained to be cleared up. 

There it was left until recently.