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LOL!!!!
Mary Emily's son William RICHARDSON joined the British Admiralty and was part of what was known as The Australia Station (before Oz or NZ had a navy of their own). At one stage he did a runner... but returned to ship 4 days later, and four years after that he returned to England where he took his discharge in 1865.
Three years later he pops up in NZ again... getting married and heading for The Thames Goldfields under the name Robert COLLINS. He lived (as a gold miner) and died here, with that name, and formed a small dynasty of COLLINSes downunder. However... he did disclose the truth of his real name to his family, and he told them he'd changed his name when he jumped ship.
I now suspect he joined the Merchant Navy to get back to NZ and abandoned her, rather than it relating to his Admiralty "run".
He had 8 sons, but 3 died in infancy, and no daughters.
William>Robert's elder sister, Susannah RICHARDSON, is responsible for the large Australian family, when she married a Private in the British Army who was subsequently posted to both NZ and Oz. After her first husband died she remarried a ticket~of~leave convict. She raised a brood of his, hers and theirs, of 10 children or so.
Tell ya.... we colonials usually have some very interesting characters on our family trees! Just being intrepid travellers (voluntarily or not) being one of the hallmarks of most of our ancestry!!
Interestingly William>Robert's daughter~in~law's father was another of three of my known ancestors to date... who also changed his name, and led me on a wild goose chase for many years to discover his parentage! (Have never found out WHY, in his case though). He just added on an extra surname, (SMITH... of all things!!!) keeping his original one as a middle name. He did that sometime between leaving Lincolnshire and arriving in South Africa.
The third did the reverse. Dropping his surname to use his middle name as such when he joined the British Army. Again... no reason yet discovered. I've been a "New Zealander" from earliest time, when his elder daughter was born here, at the Auckland Barracks in 1848. (her elder siblings were born in the UK and Australia).
I suspect I have at least two other ancestors who've changed their names, as the trail has run completely cold on locating their ancestry. I hope John Rivers COLLINGS isn't another one of them. I have done some looking for RIVERS, being wary of the possibility that it may have gained importance in his UK descendants as some similar association... but it just may have been his mother's maiden name, or such.
One of the reasons I've not much research in recent years has been that I'm waiting for more records to become readily available, having pretty much exhausted the normal avenues of what was available up until four years or so ago. In 2003 I spent ten weeks in England trying to get back as far as I could, but such things as Ipswich baptisms not being indexed... defeated me on some lines. It was a wonderful trip. I commuted to Ipswich (SRO) for a couple of days from a friends' place in Acle, Norfolk. Long days! On five trips to the UK, however, I have managed to visit nearly every village, town and city associated with my known ancestry, to date!
Otgher people go to the beach on holiday. I go to repositories, drink in ancient pubs, and visit ancient grave~yards!! Far more interesting to me!!!
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