This is my first post in genealogist Amy Johnston Crow’s 2018 52Ancestors challenge. The aim of this challenge is to encourage us to begin writing about, and sharing, the stories we uncover about our ancestors. Each week Amy emails a theme or a “prompt” to inspire us. This is a fantastic challenge that opens up so many doors and opportunities and I’d like to thank Amy for offering and co-ordinating it this year. The prompt for week 1 is “Start”.
There are a few ways I could interpret the theme “Start”. I’ve started this blog primarily as a place I can record and share stories both with my known family and with the new cousins I’m discovering
as I travel down this path of “family history”. As a New Years Resolution I’ve decided to re-start my research following the guidelines and suggestions of Thomas Ennis’s “Genealogy Do-Over”. My main resolution is to incorporate discipline into my research. That’s a subject for another post.
The way I’ve decided to interpret the theme “Start” is to relate the story of my great-great-grand-father Cornelius O’Brien who discovered gold in 1866 in what is now the town of Grenfell in New South Wales, Australia. His discovery lead to the “Start” of a gold rush in the area.
Cornelius (Con) O’Brien was born in Windsor, NSW 25th August, 1830 to parents Daniel O’Brien and Catherine Kelly. At present I don’t have any definite information about his parents aside from their names and the likelihood that both arrived in the colony as convicts (yet another future blog post). I do know that he spent his childhood in Parramatta NSW, and that as a young man he travelled west to an area that was at the time known as Emu Creek where he worked for John Wood , the first European settler in the area,as a shepherd. In 1866 he discovered a gold bearing quartz outcrop. Unfortunately Con didn’t have the necessary funds to secure a lease and instead marked out an ordinary 30 feet one man claim. A company was eventually formed to work the site known as O’Brien’s Reef with Cornelius O’Brien holding a one twelfth share. It proved the best line on the fields and produced sixty thousand pound of gold in the first 3 years. Within 6 months of Con’s gold find 10,000 people had flocked to the area., this area is the current town of Grenfell.
As a child, I knew the story of my ancestor that “found gold”. At the time I wondered what happened to the money ? I assumed a subsequent generation lost “the money”.Truth, it seems, is that while Cornelius O’Brien discovered the gold, he never had the capital in his own right exploit the discovery. This is certainly borne out by articles in Trove that suggest in his later years he was crippled with arthritis and seeking a reward from the government for his earlier gold find.
So ends the story of Cornelius O’Brien, his discovery of gold, the eventual establishment of the NSW town of Grenfell….
But in terms of my family history this is far from the end. In fact in many ways, in particular with respect to genetic genealogy this is yet another “Start”. Cornelius O’Brien married Mary Ann Memory and they went on to produce 8 children, one of whom was my great-grand-father John Daniel O’Brien. Mary Ann died, due to complications from a broken femur at the age of 31. Not long afterwards Cornelius remarried Maud Bryant and they went onto have another 8 children. So when my 2G-Grandfather Con died in 1901, he left behind a legacy of 16 children. Those 16 children went on to marry and reproduce as did their offspring and their offspring in turn. I would hate to estimate the total number of Cornelius O’Brien descendants in Australia today. What ever that total number is, I am one of many.
The Restall Gene 