Phelan and Atkin Family History

Growing up, we didn't hear a lot of stories about Dad's side of the family. One I would have thought I would have heard more about was that of Leslie Joseph Phelan, my grandfather's older brother. Les was born in Benalla in 1891 and in 1910 went into the employ of the railways like his father Joseph (as would his brother, my grandfather Stan). That employment would see him posted to Seymour and Maryborough, where he spent the best part of his 20s and 30s. While in Maryborough Les was actively involved in the cricket and football clubs, serving as Secretary in both. He was heavily involved in getting a new Maryborough club up and running and entered into the Ballarat Football League, whose premiership it won in its first year!  Leslie Phelan, from his Maryborough days Returning to Melbourne around 1927, Les continued to work in the railways and in 1931 became the president of the Victorian branch of the Railways Union, and served as the Union rep on the Railways ...

It has been a long time since my last post here, but after a long period working on the letters of Charles and Emma Atkin, I have now returned to rebuilding the family tree and am currently looking at the Phelan side. I have just revisited possibly the saddest discovery I have made in my 8+ years of research - the tragic death of Ada Shearwood in Benalla in 1890. And it's a discovery I might not have made had I not been contacted back in 2011 by a third cousin through the ancestry.com website. Jackie Shearwood of Sydney was curious as to how the 5-year old Ada Mary Shearwood, buried in Horsham, had come to die accidentally in Benalla, as was written on her gravestone (see below). Grave of Ada Mary Shearwood in Horsham Cemetery Ada had been born to George and Margaret Shearwood (nee Gasperino) in Horsham. Some in the family will be familiar with the Gasperino name: Margaret was the older sister of Mary Agnes Gasperino, my great-grandmother. The Gasperino family were from ...

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...

Note: some of this has post been adapted from my thesis, 'Two Brothers from Timberland: the Atkin Family in Australia', but I have taken the opportunity to describe the grand final match in much more detail. Long before Tony Lockett made the nickname famous in AFL circles, the Atkin family had their very own 'Plugger'. While Mum's father Gloucester Atkin was generally known around Yarragon as 'Glos', on the football field he was 'Plugger', and by all accounts he was one of the Yarragon club's better players during the 1920s. He had of course grown up with a love of footy: in 1907, as a 12 year old he can be seen sitting at the feet of the front row of the footballers in the Yarragon Football Club team photograph, his father William the proud club president at the back holding a flag. By the time of his own playing career, he had a short and stocky build, which he used to his advantage as a 'nuggety' rover-type player. He was frequent...

My Grandpa Phillip Stanley Phelan was no longer around by the time I was born, but one thing I was occasionally reminded of by Mum was that he had been a prisoner of war in World War One. Strangely enough, given Stanley was Dad's dad, it was never Dad who mentioned it, always Mum. Dad didn't talk about the past, and I presume his father, like many men of his generation, would not have talked about it either. Fortunately through the National Archives of Australia, the record of every Australian who served in the Great War is freely available, so we can get some idea of what Stan's period of service looked like. Phillip Stanley Phelan was 23 years and 6 months old when he listed in the AIF on 22 February 1916. He was living with his parents at 55 Railway Place in Flemington, and was a clerk in the Transportation branch of the Victorian Railways. His medical examination reveals him to be 5'7 and 3/4", 139 pounds, with 'fresh' complexion, blue eyes and brown ...

When Dad was aged just 7 months, his own father Stanley would join a group of 'business men' (presumably friends) on a sailing adventure from Melbourne to Sydney. They sailed on the motor launch 'Bona', owned and captained by M Franklin, founder of the Motor Finance Company. Franklin had retired and was making the move to Sydney to take advantage of the greater sailing opportunities there. Leaving Melbourne on Christmas Day, the Bona was forced to remain inside Port Phillip Bay for several days on account of weather, and when finally leaving the heads on Thursday 30 December they only made it as far as Western Port. The next day they intended to sail as far as Wilsons Promontory but with favourable conditions decided to continue on, sailing through New Year's Eve all the way to Eden off the southern NSW coast, a total of 300 miles and 37 hours at sea. The party were however in no hurry to get to their destination, and spent Sunday 2 January fishing and relax...

Dad's mother, Bertha Victoria Cowan, was just 18 when she suffered an accident while on a visit to her uncle and aunt, as reported in the Mornington & Dromana Standard on 14 November 1908: George and Caroline Stone (nee Davenport) were prominent early residents of the town of Mornington. They had a large family, including sons Clive and Roy who were both killed in the Great War.