By Rob Liddle
BBC News
Starting over Down Under is a dream for many.
As records detailing millions of Britons who left for Australia go online, one woman recounts how she finally solved the century-old mystery of her missing ancestor.
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A letter from Isobel Jenkins' great-granduncle George to his extended family in County Durham became a treasured family heirloom, as did his log of the arduous journey to Sydney in 1877.
He, his wife and children had left their mining community to start afresh in the colony, hoping to earn enough in the pits to buy their own land and build a house.
The journey log reveals George's sense of wonder - he remarks on seeing flying fish - tempered with details of children dying on board.
His letter home of March 1878 details how the family were laid low by a fever that lasted for weeks, but that the hoped-for four-roomed house was almost complete.
"We are living rite out in the bush nothing but trees all around us and for thousands of miles ahead of us and there is any amount of wild animals running about. Only the other week there was a snake coming into the house and took three of us to kill him - he was about four feet long," he wrote.
George and his brother James were among millions of settlers who left Britain in search of a better life in Australia, and whose names and details are now in an online archive by pay-to-view genealogy site Ancestry.
Included are three million "free settlers" - 2.2 million of them British - who arrived in New South Wales.
The company estimates that one in four Britons alive today have direct ancestors, or their siblings, who made the journey to the other side of the world.
Family mystery
Another member of Isobel Jenkins' family who left for the colony was her great-grandfather, also called George, who went out in 1886.
He intended to send for his young family once he became established near Sydney. After an initial letter in which he joked that the family in Durham would not recognise him as he had put on weight, nothing more was heard from him.
"This was a mystery that hung over my childhood and a mystery that had hung over the family for 100 years or more," says Isobel, a retired history teacher from Leeds.
Over the course of 10 years, she searched newly available records, including censuses and lists of ships' passengers and corresponded by e-mail with distant relatives to find out his fate.
Her hard work paid off when she discovered that he had in fact married and started another family, moving to Western Australia in a gold rush.
For 68-year-old Isobel it was a triumph and a relief to have solved the mystery while her mother was still alive. "We thought that he had either died or he had married. My mother was delighted to find out the solution."
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(BBC)
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