A Reluctant Emigrant
by
Dennis Taylor
© Copyright 2001 to Dennis Taylor
First Serial Rights Reserved

Foreword

My mother's uncle, Joseph Outram and his wife Elsie emigrated to New Zealand  in 1952 to join their son Clive and his new wife, Jean. Clive had emigrated to Australia in 1948, his first port of call being Fremantle. He started his new life in South Australia and while he was there his mother sent him a newspaper cutting about a lawyer looking for the descendants of William Sykes. 

Fremantle Harbour in 1859 (by WS Halton)
The three white buildings in the foreground were
the first temporary prison

Being only a young twenty two year old he wasn't much interested so he never followed it up although it always stuck in his memory.  On a visit to New Zealand to find out what life was like there, Clive met a young girl called Jean Halliday who was returning to New Zealand on the old motor vessel 'M.V.Wanganella' from a holiday in Sydney. She invited him to her parents home and he lived there for about nine months. He then returned to his home in Australia but they had fallen in love and Jean followed him in the January of 1951. They were married on 20th January 1951 in Sydney, returning to New Zealand later that year where they were joined by Clive's mother and father from England and who lived with them until they had built their own house just around the corner.
Having raised a family and now in his late years, Clive realised that he had forgotten his family roots and really only had very vague memories of the family in England. Jean wrote a letter to my mother Ida, to ask if she could send any information to Clive to help him to remember. My mother showed me the letter and over the previous few months I had, in fact, been questioning my mother, now in her mid eighties, about the family history. I was interested mainly in the Outram branch since my mother could tell me more about these than any of the other branches.

I found it difficult to draw the charts and decided to purchase some ‘Family Tree’ software. This made the job so much easier. Now it was just a case of entering the information and the software program did the rest. Descendant trees, Ascendant trees – all the information at my fingertips. My research, however ended when my mother’s memory was badly affected by a mild stroke and so the furthest I went back was to my Great Grandparents, Joseph and Thirza Outram, both born in the 1850’s and who were married in 1879. Without consulting other references and records I had now come to a standstill.

However, I printed all the information and duly sent it off to Clive and Jean in New Zealand. Within a few weeks I received a letter from Clive and Jean thanking me for the information but also containing a reference to a man called Bernard Yorke Baker who, some ten years earlier, whilst in the process of researching the Ching family, had contacted Jean who had relatives of that name. When he realised that her husband Clive was an Outram and was born in Rawmarsh he, living in the area, checked the available Census records and local church records and traced the Outram family back to about 1690.  What was surprising was that he only lived five miles away from me. I found his surname and address in the telephone directory and rang the number. Unfortunately, his wife told me that he had passed away about five years earlier. He had been the Church Organist and Choirmaster at Rawmarsh Parish Church and had been a music teacher at Maltby Comprehensive School where two of my own children had been taught.

Jean also informed me that they were in the process of purchasing a personal Computer. Being in their seventies I considered them to be quite adventurous although I knew that their son, Stephen was going to help them set up. At that time I was already browsing the Internet and sending email messages around the world and I so encouraged Jean to get onto the Internet and then we could communicate more often. Within a few weeks they were up and running and emails between us were flashing round cyberspace with increasing regularity. All the information could now be sent this way and they were soon in possession of all the knowledge that I had gleaned from my mother plus the extra information researched by Mr. Baker.

One question that Jean kept asking was “What happened to old Bill Sykes?” He was the father of Thirza Sykes who had married Joseph Outram. I had not researched the Sykes family at all and consequently knew absolutely nothing about Bill Sykes. I asked my mother but she had no memory of him whatsoever.

Then suddenly, out of cyberspace, Jean was contacted by a lady in Western Australia called Laurin Lang. Laurin was in the process of tracing twenty five Outram families in the hope of finding her own roots in England. She had found the New Zealand Outrams doing email searches and she was soon contacting me to send her information and photographs. How or why, I may never know, but Jean received an email from Laurin to say that she knew what had happened to my great great Grandfather, William Sykes.

It seemed that William Sykes was pretty famous. There was even a book which had been written about him by Alexandra Hasluck titled ‘Unwilling Emigrants’. William Sykes was a murderer, had been sentenced to life imprisonment and transported to serve his sentence in Western Australia. This is his story.

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