Beverley Jacobson, who at present is the Honorary Secretary of the Port Phillip Pioneers Group, claimed membership of the group by supplying relevant proof of descendancy from her great great grandfather, Nicholas Emellen, his wife, and parents-in-law. Nicholas Emellen arrived in the Port Phillip District in June 1851 and in the book “Australians and Greeks Volume1: The early Years”, Hugh Gilchrist suggests that Nicholas Emellen was the first officially recorded Greek in Victoria.
Bev was not told about the convicts in her ancestry as that was hushed up, but she grew up with the understanding that she had a great grandfather who was Italian, a great grandmother who was Greek, and she was related to the ‘hanging judge’ in Melbourne. She was also told that she was related to Albert Schweitzer.
Having proved that her Greek forbears were Port Phillip Pioneers, Bev turned her attention to the ‘hanging judge’ story. Her 4 x great grandparents, James Hood and Margaret Hood (nee O’Neil) arrived in the Port Phillip District in 1841 with six of their children. Their other two children, Bev’s three x great grandmother, Mary, and her brother, John, a chemist, arrived the year before.
John’s son, Joseph Henry Hood (1846-1922), later Sir Joseph Henry Hood, became a judge, but was he the ‘hanging judge’ Bev had been told about? A search in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, 1983, revealed that he was ‘an able and sound lawyer, he was a very rapid worker’ with a reputation which earned him the nickname ‘Lightning Judge’. So, he was not the ‘Hanging Judge’.
Undaunted by that family story being not quite right, for Bev to have her Hood relatives recognised as Port Phillips Pioneers, she required documentation, including shipping records, and birth, death, and marriage registrations to demonstrate the link between herself and her ancestors.
For a start, finding their names in the shipping indexes was complicated as the name Hood was, in both the ship’s manifest, and the transcriptions, written as Wood or Woods. That was just the start of her problems.
Mary Hood, who as I have mentioned, arrived in 1840, married William Sievers in 1843 and their son Albert Ernest Sievers is Bev’s great great grandfather. Albert had a daughter, Margaret Sievers, who was Bev’s great grandmother, but proving that wasn’t easy.
The birth registration for Margaret Sievers, did not give her father’s name. That of course is not uncommon, but her mother, Lizzie, had the surname O’Hagan, not Sievers.
As we all know, if you can’t find details about the person you are interested in, you should turn your attention to other people in the same family. By searching for the siblings of Margaret Sievers, Bev eventually found the father’s name was Albert Sievers, as it had been recorded on his third child’s birth registration. Lizzie and Albert stated that they had married in 1876 but finding the marriage record proved to be tricky as the name Sievers had been transcribed as ‘Scivers’ and they had in fact married in 1888, well after their three children had been born.
Lizzie was not listed on the marriage registration as Lizzie O’Hagan, but as Elizabeth Parker, and she was said to have been a widow since 1873. That is well before the children were born, and a marriage record indicates Lizzie married Arthur Hollingsworth Parker in 1876.
Parker didn’t die until much later. He left Lizzie very soon after their marriage and went to Adelaide where he married again. A charlatan and a con artist, he was to become insolvent and charged with fraud, and in fact Lizzie divorced him. When she had married Albert Sievers she was a divorcee not a widow.
Like the Hood family, Lizzie O’Hagan was from Belfast in Ireland. From divorce papers re the marriage to Arthur Hollingworth Parker, Lizzie stated that before her marriage to Parker, she had worked with John Hood the chemist. When her marriage proved to be a fiasco, it is possible that John’s son, the ‘lightning judge’ helped her get the divorce. A family source also suggested that Lizzie was a governess to the judge’s children. And of course, Albert Sievers was his cousin.
Albert was a labourer and a seaman, who fished for gummy shark off St Leonards. He had also been insolvent and spent a short time in gaol. Mostly he was a model citizen. He supported his daughter, Margaret Sievers, when she married William Gay in 1897. Well, she was 6 months pregnant and under the age of 17, so on her marriage certificate it was stated “with the written consent of Albert Sievers father of the bride”. Whilst his name may not be on her birth registration, he claimed her as his daughter when she married and that was sufficient for Bev to be able to claim him as a Port Phillip Pioneer.
Was he really Margaret’s father however? Bev and her mother decided to have DNA tests and that has shown a strong connection to a cousin who Bev knows is a descendent of Albert Sievers and Lizzie O’Hagan.
Further DNA connections and Thrulines suggested by Ancestry confirm that Bev is connected to Sir Joseph Henry Hood, the ‘lightning judge’ and so she can claim the Hood family as Port Philip Pioneers.
A very complicated story. Surely trying to prove Albert Schweitzer is a relation won’t be so difficult. As Bev commented ‘there are others in the family with the name Albert’.
Contributed by Jan Hanslow, PPPG member No 1057