Skip to main content

The Letters of Charles and Emma Atkin

The posts have slowed to a crawl on the blog and I thought I better explain why. I have decided to pause on the reconstruction of the family tree and concentrate my efforts on writing up a readable (and hopefully going some way towards publishable) collection of what I refer to as the 'Charles and Emma' letters. Charles was Charles Alfred Atkin, my 2x great uncle (Samuel Atkin's youngest son, and 8th of his 9 children), the chart below makes this clearer! To recap how this all came about:

In 2013 while researching my family history I was contacted by a very distant cousin on my maternal side, Jean Harrison, who had wanted to correct me about the captioning of a photograph I had on my ancestry online family tree. After a few messages back and forth it was clear that Jean had a wealth of information and I organized a visit to her home in St Leonards to see what discoveries I might be able to make. One of the most precious of her collections was a folder of over one hundred original hand written letters between her grandparents, Charles Alfred Atkin and Emma Elizabeth Atkin. The correspondence begins as Charles was leaving for the Western Australian goldfields in 1894, the couple having just professed mutual feelings for one another. Adding extra ‘spice’ was the fact that Charles and Emma were actually first cousins once removed! Little did I realise that by the end of the visit, having initially refused my rather wishful request to borrow the collection, Jean would allow me to take these home with me. So I set to work scanning every page of every letter, then also reading through and putting them into chronological order so that the story could be followed (most but not all were dated, and some had been reduced to fragments, so there were a few challenges). The collection is not complete, in that while letters from Charles date from 1894, there are no letters from Emma until 1896. But they do provide a wonderful insight into all the ups and downs of a new 'long-distance' relationship, not to mention a vivid account of life on the dusty goldfields near Coolgardie, and later in mining operations back in Victoria at Rutherglen. A lot can be learnt about Charles in particular, obviously a smart and driven individual. The collection ends in 1899, after which Charles returns to be with his Emma, the couple marrying in 1900.
A few years later, in 2017 I, together with the help of several generous volunteers, transcribed the scans of all these letters so that I could more easily glean the most useful information to put into ‘Two Brothers from Timberland,’ my history of the Atkin family in Australia that I was writing for the Diploma in Family Historical Studies run by the Society of Australian Genealogists. Given the aforementioned insights the letters provide, and the fact that more than one person expressed interest in reading them in full, I thought I should make it available to all - but not before adding some background and explanatory notes to give context to who and what is being described by Charles and Emma: the friends, relatives, places and events of the time. Which is what I am currently in the process of doing!


                                                
Charles and Emma Atkin at their wedding in 1900, and (below) one of Charles' letters



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tommy Roundhead: The Most Lawless Lawless of All

With the number of Lawlesses in my family tree, it was only a matter of time until I found one that truly lived up to the name. At first, I was incredulous at the discovery of this man's litany of 'drunk and disorderly' and obscene language charges, incurred far and wide. But upon closer reading of a handful of his convictions, I realised there was a darker and more disturbing side, and that this was perhaps a very troubled individual. Mugshot of Thomas Lawless from the records of the Bathurst Gaol Thomas Lawless was the second child of Patrick and Catherine (Kitty) Lawless. He was born about 1844 in Macedon, Victoria, but currently we know little about his early life. However, the Ancestry website revealed several 'hints' to NSW Gaol Description and Entrance Book records for a Thomas Lawless born about 1846 in Victoria, so thought I might be onto something. I had to be careful though, as there was more than one Thomas Lawless in the colonies around this time. A sea...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Wreck of the Nashwauk

Back in October, I wrote about my Italian ancestor Antony Gasperino 'jumping ship' from the General Hewitt at Portland, Victoria in 1856. A little over a year before Gasperino's unconventional arrival, his future wife Hannah Hourigan (sometimes known as Hannah Hogan) had her own eventful introduction to Australia. Hannah was born about 1837 in Cork, Ireland; her father Matthew was a blacksmith but we do not know the name of her mother. Possibly Hannah was orphaned at a young age and with Ireland reeling from the devastation of the potato famine, was one of many single girls enticed to improve her lot by emigrating to Australia. And so on 14 February 1855 at Liverpool, 18-year old Hannah was one of 130 single Irish servant girls boarding the Nashwauk : an 18-month old, three-masted wooden-rigged sailing ship carrying  300 emigrants   bound for South Australia.*  Captained by Archibald McIntyre, the Nashwauk had an uneventful 89-day voyage to reach Gulf St Vincent. Having...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Sacrifice, By Any Name

Prologue Before launching into today's story, I thought I might give an update on how my research is going. I started this blog back in 2019 as a way of communicating some of the more interesting stories about past family members, as I embarked on a 'redo' of all my original research. Having completed my Family History Diploma the year before, I'd learnt the importance of verifying information, and my family tree had plenty of information with no proven sources.  Across the last four years I have completed the 'redo' of seven lines of the family: Phelan, Gasperino, Cowan and Davenport on Dad's side, and Atkin, Collins and Kenny on Mum's. I have also done a lot of work on the remaining maternal line, Lawless. But this line's Australian history goes back an extra generation, and has not just one but five brothers who emigrated here, so it represents by far the largest chunk of work to get through. As of now, I estimate that I've completed about 85%...
Post a Comment
Read more