Genealogy page
Skerman family histories
Judy's maiden name is Skerman. Her ancestors arrived in Australia with wet feet when their ship Netherby was wrecked on King Island in 1866, while on their way to Brisbane. Fortunately, all passengers and crew survived. Also fortunately, Judy's grandfather Percy and father Graham wrote extensive family histories which provide much detail on family life starting with living in Enfield, England and working in the small arms factory there, and ending with Graham's schooldays in Queensland in 1927. For those who don't have paper copies, I have put together the current 3 parts in .rtf format and the first part with pictures in Word format.
Part 1 (PJ Skerman), written in 1953, covers the departure from England, the Netherby wreck and the early days at Rockangle, 1860-1908. The original contains photos and is rather large in Word97 format (>1.3 Mb).
Download large version with pictures part 1 pics.doc
Part 2 (PJ Skerman), written in 1958, covers the purchase and development of the farm Waverley near Kaimkillenbun and Percy's latter years, 1908-1951. I don't have an original version, so this .rtf file follows the text and pagination of the version as retyped by Graham Skerman.
Download part 2.rtf
Part 3 (RG Skerman), written in 1964, covers Graham's early life at Waverley and has extensive descriptions of farm and school life, 1913-1927. It stops at the time he enters Toowoomba Grammar School as a schoolboy.
Download part 3.rtf
I have put together an edited collection of anecdotes of memories of the early family life of the current generation of (now) senior Skermans, which has become draft Part 4 of the Skerman history. Copies were distributed to the seven senior siblings for comment at Christmas '04. It has a lot of gaps in the early years and needs to be expanded. Only minor additions and corrections have been made in the intervening time. Hopefully it will be finished some day soon!
I'm currently working on a combined Challenger-Skerman genealogy, using Personal Ancestral File (PAF) 5.2. There are currently over 4000 persons in the file! If you are interested in details, email me.
Below are some photos and scans forming part of the PAF file.
Challenger:
Parish register, Brinsop, Hereford, extracted in 1875, showing Thomas Challenger died 1838 age 78. Thomas was my great great great grandfather, his wife Sarah was not included in the extract (but see below). John and Ellen were my great great grandparents. My great grandmother Amelia brought the document to Australia when she and her six children emigrated to Rockhampton in the Carnatic, arriving 5 Feb 1879, following the death of her husband George in London in 1876. I have collected some information on the Carnatic, including the passenger list, a photo of a sister ship and details of voyages.
Download carnatic.doc
On a trip in 2007 we visited Brinsop, consisting of the 11th century church of St George and two farm houses at the end of a private gravel road. The gravestones for Thomas, d 5 Apr 1838, and his wife Sarah (nee Howels), d 17 Apr 1846, and for Ellen Challenger (nee Phillips), d 13 Jan 1861, were just near the church door and quite readable. John was nowhere to be found.
Passport for a trip to Portugal for George Challenger (my great grandfather), his wife Amelia, daughter Amelia (who was born in Paris) and others in 1861. Signed by Lord Russell, former and later British PM.
George Challenger worked on the track construction of the first railway in Uruguay which opened in 1868. Here is locomotive No 3, a sister of the original Nos 1 and 2. Source: http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/trains/urug4.htm
From Uruguay, George moved to Peru where he operated a business with a local partner, barging stone from the island of San Lorenzo to Callao. In about 1874 he had a family photo taken in Lima where he lived. Back row Charlotte, Amelia; front Elizabeth, Georgina, Amelia, Rose, George, William (my grandfather, born Montevideo, Uruguay, 1867). My thanks to Halwyn for the scan of the photo. The photographer's name was Richardson, possibly Villroy L Richardson, an American known to have worked in Lima about that time. See http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dbuck/
Plan of the goldrush town of Talbot, Vic, in 1861. My great great grandfather on my mother's side, Joseph Smith, mine surveyor, lived at Lot 4H-1, Scandanavian Crescent (circled).
William Henry Smith and Elizabeth nee Devine, my great grandparents on my father's side. They were married in St Francis' Church, Melbourne 23 Jan 1856. He came from Co. Cavan and she from Co. Derry, Ireland. Their marriage cert states that he was a labourer and she signed with an X, unable to write. They had three children (one of whom died) in the Victorian goldrush locality of Woolshed, near Beechworth. Did they find gold? Their fourth to eighth children were born in Rockhampton, Qld. On my grandmother Sophia's birth cert. he is lasted as a stonemason. The picture above is a composite of two photos, with Elizabeth reversed left to right, cropped, and with a lot of hand retouching, on a glass-like plate. Probably produced about 1870.
My maternal grandfather Bernard Joseph (BJ) Beirne was the first Australian-born mayor of Toowoomba, in 1905.
His father, also BJ, was a prominent Toowoomba businessman. On a recent trip to Ireland we found the parish register entry for the marriage of BJ snr and Maria Moran in St Joseph's, Castlerea, Co Roscommon. The image above is a merge of four close-up photos taken at St Patrick's, which replaced St Joseph's in 1898. The names have been Latinised to Bernardus and Mariam and the date was 30 Dec 1858; unfortunately I can't read the last part of the entry, possibly listing the witnesses. BJ snr built Beirne's Chambers at 188-194 Margaret St in 1889. He was secretary of the Toowoomba Permanent (now the Heritage) Building Society in 1875 which later used Beirne's Chambers as its head office. I do not have a photo of BJ snr, who arrived in Queensland with his wife Maria and his first two children, Mary 1y and Cecilia infant, from Co. Roscommon, Ireland, on the Black Ball Line ship Queen of the Colonies on 8 April 1863.
Queen of the Colonies © Don Braben
My thanks to the Brisbane maritime artist Don Braben, http://www.donbraben.com/ the copyright holder, for permission to use the above image of his painting of the Queen of the Colonies. The ship was formerly the US clipper Wizard which was sold to the Black Ball Line during the American Civil War. At the start of this, its first Black Ball voyage, she had been fired upon by the Confederate raider Alabama shortly after departing the port of Cobh (then called Queenstown), Cork, Ireland on 6 Jan 1863. http://www.bruzelius.info/Nautica/Ships/Clippers/Wizard(1853).html There is a memorial at Queen of the Colonies Parade, Caloundra, to thirteen crew and passengers, three of whom drowned, who were washed ashore after becoming separated from the ship after a burial on Cape Moreton. http://www.merriottfamiliesgenealogy.net/queen_of_the_colonies.htm One of the passengers, 19 year old Henry John Ford kept a diary of the voyage which was later published. Strangely he does not mention the Alabama incident. I have a transcript of the 7page typescript document:
Download the voyage of henry john ford.doc
A later captain of this ship was Daniel Owen, brother of Owen Owens, captain of the Netherby on its final voyage. Daniel brought the Queen of the Colonies to Brisbane on its fourth trip, arriving 14 October 1866.
Skerman:
Born 1807, Judy's great great grandfather John emigrated to Brisbane, Australia from England with his wife Maria and most of their children. The family was shipwrecked in Bass Strait on King Island, 7:15 pm, 14 July 1866 (see Netherby page for details). They travelled on to Brisbane and established a farm Woodlands, now submerged by North Pine Dam. Maria died in 1868 and John in 1875.
Jude's great grandfather Frederick, John and Maria's fourth child, b 1842 d 1890, and his wife Alice nee Darlington, b 1847 d 1935, were on board Netherby together with their daughter Alice, b Jan 1866. Alice (right) was only six months old when the Netherby was wrecked. Frederick and Alice established a farm Rockangle, now submerged by North Pine Dam, Qld. In 1867, while he was living in Curlew St, Toowong less than a year after arrival in Brisbane, Fred wrote to his older brother Joseph in England, describing their situation. In general he seemed pleased. Stans Skerman, who had the original, which he has now donated to the Qld State Library (John Oxley Library), deciphered (most of) the dense writing and produced a transcription with paragraph breaks. I have made some minor corrections and added footnotes in the Word97 transcription. Here is a scan of the start of the letter.
Download the transcription fj skerman letter.doc
William, the seventh child, was an 18 year old on the Netherby. He remained in Melbourne with his older sister Caroline and her husband William Skerman while the rest of the family travelled on to Brisbane in the City of Melbourne. After a world trip as a bandsman on the Duke of Edinburgh's ship HMS Galatea, he jumped ship, visited his sister Caroline in Melbourne (who reputedly hid him from those searching for him), worked two and a half years in country Victoria including on the gold diggings and finished up in Qld, ultimately becoming a schoolteacher and (possibly) farmer. In 1899 William wrote to Joseph in England, for the first time since he had departed in 1866. The letter describes his adventures in Victoria and talks about his children. Rita provided this Word transcription:
Download william skerman letter.doc
After farming with and near his father John and older brother Frederick on the banks of the North Pine River, Walter, the ninth and youngest child, took up a property at Warwick, Qld.
We have no photos of the other members of the family who came out on the Netherby:
Oldest child Caroline Skerman, with her first husband William Skerman (her second cousin), remained for some years in Melbourne, William working as a bootmaker. Their second daughter Lucy had died on the voyage aged 4 years (their first daughter Alice had died before Lucy's birth). Caroline and William came to Queensland (when?) and after William died in 1876, she remarried (to Archibald McCallum) in 1877 and died in 1879.
Sixth child Maria nee Skerman and her husband Hope Martin (who acted as Netherby's schoolteacher) left Brisbane after a short time and went to Sydney where they lived in Balmain.
Eighth child Anne Skerman lived with her parents at Woodlands farm, then for a time with her sister Caroline, before marrying Frederick Michael in 1878. They farmed at Samson Vale.
Three of John and Maria's children were married or (presumably) engaged at the time of the emigration and they remained in England with their spouses:
Second child Lucy, b 1836, married George Coaffee in 1859, moved through Kent and Surrey and settled in George's hometown Bath, Somerset. She died in about 1891.
My thanks to Rita, a descendant of Joseph, for the photos.
This is the steerage-class ticket for the journey issued to John, Maria, Ann and Walter. The others, adults, must have had their own tickets. Note the description "railway artisans". The Queensland Government provided free passage to assisted immigrants via a £15 Land Order, which the emigrant surrendered to the shipping company, the Black Ball Line, in exchange for the ticket. The Black Ball Line got its money by selling the land via its agent in Queensland.
In 2007 we visited Hertingfordbury, Herts., and the photo on the left shows St Mary's church (with Judy in the foreground). John Skerman and Maria Chesher were married there in 1833, and Maria's father Joseph and her grandfather John Chesher were buried there. The photo on the right is of John Chesher's gravestone. They were both readable, but unfortunately, apart from the names, the photos are not. I should have taken a notebook! My thanks to Roger, Judy's 4th cousin, who in 2009 provided the headstone texts. John's read: John CHESHER, 55 years Clerk of this parish, d. 17 April 1820 aged 77. Also Jane, wife of the above, d. 5 July 1828 aged 85.
John Skerman's father James and John's brother William were known as James Skerman & Son, clockmakers. They made and installed the clock in St Mary's tower, 1853-54. They were also involved in the making of the Hertford Shire Hall clock when they worked for John Briant, a noted clockmaker and bell founder.
© 2004-11 Barry Challenger. Last updated 17/8/2011