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Welcome to the collected history of Australian Boge families! This project began after many years of researching my own Boge family history and incidentally picking up information on other families that had made the long voyage from the old country to Australia and flourished in our wide, brown land. The aim of this site is to collect and share histories, stories, photographs and other media of all Boge families that emigrated to Australia in the 19th century.
Welcome to the collected history of Australian Boge families! This project began after many years of researching my own Boge family history and incidentally picking up information on other families that had made the long voyage from the old country to Australia and flourished in our wide, brown land. The aim of this site is to collect and share histories, stories, photographs and other media of all Boge families that emigrated to Australia in the 19th century.
Boge family immigration routes to Australia
There were six families that emigrated to and settled in Australia. Most were Germans coming through the port of Hamburg and settling in the then British colony of Queensland in the 25 years from 1865 and 1890.
At this time Australia was not yet a federated nor independent country and Queensland had only recently separated from New South Wales to become a colony of its own.
These Boge's were pioneers of the fledgling state and would have overcome many hardships and battled a harsh country, very different to the one they had known, to help build what would become the country of Australia.
The six families have been organised by the place where they mainly settled. Click on the links below to be taken to their family page, or use the menu at the top.
This family sailed into Morton Bay from Germany in 1866 and were related to the first arrivals - Claus and Johann being half-brothers. They lived initially at One Mile Swamp (Woolloongabba) in Brisbane before moving to a German community at Mt Gravatt to take up farming. These are my own ancestors.
This large family was headed by Claus and Anna and were the first Boge's to emmigrate to Australia, arriving in 1865 from Germany. They docked at Moreton Bay before heading south to settle around Maclean, a small town on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales.
This family were very prominent community leaders and businessmen in the northern town of Maryborough. Arriving separately in 1866, 1870 and 1873 from Germany, at it's core was 57 year old widower Katrine and three of her sons. They were very proliferate - when Katrine passed away she left no less than 56 grandchildren and 52 great-grandchildren!
After arriving in 1885 from Germany (via London), this family settled in the northern suburbs of Brisbane.
This family seemed to have materialised from nowhere! Although there is no record of their arrival, they made a living farming near Machine Creek, Mt Larcom, a locality 35km west of Gladstone. Fritz and Anna would have 8 children together.
This Boge is an oddity. Bucking the German theme, Hjalmar arrived from Denmark and settled at Goomalling, a small locality 130km north-east of Perth. He married a local girl and earned a crust farming the picturesque Avon valley.
Relationships Between Families
Relationships Between Families
Of the six families, relationships has been established as existing between four of them. Further research is needed to understand these links further and whether there is a common ancestor somewhere along the line.
Name Meaning
Name Meaning
Helpfully Boge is an unusual surname, so trawling through birth, death and marriage records, newspaper articles, church records, town histories, genealogy databases and ships passenger lists to find lost ancestors is a little easier than the poor Smith's and Jones's. Though where did it come from and what does it mean? To answer the question we have to go back to where the Boge's came from, Germany, and have a rummage through the old records for a start. The spelling of surnames was fairly arbitrary back in the day and were often written down how they were heard by an official. Boge, for example, is listed variously in early German records as Böe, Bögge, Boyen, Böjen, Buoys, Böye, Böje, Böie, Boege and Böge. During the 19th Century however, the spelling of Böge (note the umlauts over the o) gradually becomes the norm and the name is not uncommon in the Holstein region of northern Germany today. Us Australians Anglicised the name, gradually dropping the umlauts, as they weren't commonly used in English. So we know that surnames can change.
According to the Dictionary of American Family Names (Oxford University Press), which at least provides some authoritative guidance, Boge is Frisian and a varient of Böe. This fits with research of early Boge's in Germany. For example, the cottager Dierk Böe, aged 40, was buried on 4 October 1800 in Kaltenkirchen (Church Register Kaltenkirchen, Deaths, No. 70) and he is also listed on a 1770 map of landowners as Diercks Boye. So we might be on to something.
Frisia or Friesland is an old region straddling the modern Dutch and north German border. It has been divided since 1815 into Friesland, a province of the Netherlands, and the Ostfriesland and Nordfriesland regions of northwestern Germany. It's the traditional homeland of the Frisians, a Germanic people who speak a language closely related to English, and is probably most famous for it's cows - Holstein Friesians (shortened to Holsteins in North America, and Friesians in the UK) the world's highest-production dairy animals. Back to the dictionary, and the entry then for Boe states that the name is of Frisian origin from the personal name Boye. According to Ostfriesische Vornamen von Aafke bis Zwaantje (East Frisian First Names from Aafke to Zwaantje, Manno Peters Tammena, 2007), this name is possibly a younger form of the Old Frisian name Bôio meaning 'dweller' from the Old Saxon bûan and Old Frisian bōgia meaning 'to live, to dwell'.
So, after all that, it seems that Boge is of Frisian origin and probably means a 'dweller' - not the most exciting name meaning!
Relevant dictionary entries
Map showing Frisian areas in Europe
Pronunciation
Pronunciation
Unfortunately researching the pronunciation of the name is a bit more tricky. So this is a theory based on snippits of unsourced info, gut feel, a hint of logic and as much research as an English speaker can do into the pronunciation of an obscure German surname.
The possible origin and early variations of the name provide a hint at why Boge is pronounced (by those of us in Australia) with a ‘soft G’ (almost a J sound) rather than ‘hard G’. In the dominant Mooring dialect of the Frisian language, G is pronounced as a W, or a J, or is dropped between vowels.
The pronunciation in the old Low German (Plattdeutsch) language of Northern Germany is also instructive. When a G is within a word or at the end of it, it is pronounced as a kind of mild 'sh' (after e, i, ä, ö and ü). These pronunciations would account for many of the historical spelling variants as well as the ‘soft G’ pronunciation.
The pronunciation in modern Germany however is different. The current modern pronunciation in Holstein is with a ‘hard G’ - close to B-OER-GEH. So why the difference? It’s possible that the name has changed pronunciation in Germany (from when the Boge’s left in 1866) to a hard G to reflect the introduction and spread of Standardised German (which originated in the south of the country) to the north of the country where Plattdeutsch was previously prominent.
Thus the Australian Boge’s retained the original pronunciation while the German Boge’s updated theirs to fit with Standardised German.
Source: Assisted immigration 1848 to 1912 (https://data.qld.gov.au/dataset/assisted-immigration-1848-to-1912)
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