A wild goose chase for National Family History Month

Twelve years ago I started researching my family tree in earnest, referring to a typed history one of  my mother’s cousins started. When the cousin put the history together, there was no digitisation of newspapers, no Google, no online access to births, deaths and marriages, or shipping lists. However, he did a very good job, and I used his information as my starting point. BUT, BUT, BUT, his records were incorrect for one of the ancestors, and I only discovered this today!!!!!!!

So for twelve years or more, I’ve believed my 2x great grandfather, John Proctor, arrived as a 12 year old in September 1852 with his cousin John, and John’s wife. NO, NO, NO. For some reason unbeknown to me, today I decided to search Trove AGAIN for John Proctor, and found an obituary in a Ballarat newspaper for John Proctor who died in the Ballarat Base Hospital in 1874. Alarm bells rang because the obit said he lived in Ballarat and worked for a printer there. I had purchased this death certificate a few years ago, believing this to be my 2x great grandfather. But my John Proctor never lived in Ballarat. (It wasn’t unusual for people to be sent to regional hospitals away from Melbourne when they were sick, where they often died, so dying in Ballarat wasn’t out of the ordinary.) More digging ensued.

Turns out my John Proctor arrived in Melbourne in June 1860 – when he was 21. According to the rates notices he was a labourer/drayman NOT a printer. He married in 1862. Sadly, he died in 1872 when he was thirty-two years old, of “Gastric Fever”. I looked this up and it was a form of typhoid ☹ At the time of his death his wife Louisa had four children to look after from the ages of eight years to three months.

What is so awful about this mistake I hear you ask? I’ve written 5,000 words in my current family saga, about John Proctor being an orphan and coming to Melbourne with his cousin. The delete button is worn out.

The pic is my great grandfather, John's youngest son. John and his wife had five children: a boy died in infancy and the two girls died, one when she was fourteen, and the other when she was eight.