Family Matters - 11. John and Elizabeth Goninan
I had been looking again on the internet at the fascinating passenger lists for assisted passage to South Australia from 1847 - http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/australia/ and by chance I hit lucky. The ship Omega left Plymouth on the 13th August 1857 with 311 passengers and arrived in Port Adelaide, South Australia on the 14th November 1857. There were quite a number of Cornish miners and their families on board from such places as Redruth, St Ives, Truro, St Austell, Helston and Illogan. One of the families from Redruth was:-
John and Elizabeth Goninan and their three children, Elizabeth Mary (3), John (1) and Amelia Martha (infant).
John was one of the children of Richard Goninan and Mary Ann Tellam and he was baptised at Gwinear Parish Church on the 18th June 1826. One of his brothers, Henry, went on to settle in Tasmania and another, Matthew, settled in Wisconsin. One of his sisters, Jennifer, went to the Upper Michigan. At the time of the 1851 census John was in lodgings in Calstock (which is in the far east of Cornwall on the Tamar River) and he was a copper miner. He married Elizabeth Thomas at Gwithian ParishChurch on the 15th Feb. 1853. Four years later they were off to Australia.
I already had an inkling that John may have gone to Australia because amongst other information that had been sent to me by a family member in Australia was an unverified reference to the death of a John Goninan on the 6th June 1858 at Kooringa, South Australia. (Kooringa along with other adjacent mining settlements was later renamed Burra). It had never occurred to me though that he had taken his family with him since I knew that Elizabeth was in Cornwall in 1859. It looks now that John having died, Elizabeth, already again with child, must have returned home. A son Richard was born in Camborne on the 25th January 1859. Oddly the birth certificate does not say that John was deceased. Their daughter Amelia was to die at the age of two. It is hard to imagine the trauma that Elizabeth must have gone through. Their eldest child, Elizabeth Mary, never married and this is the same Elizabeth Mary who featured in the item on Ellis Island ship manifests. This was in 1907 when she visited (or planned to visit) her brother John who was then living in Butte, Montana
I have not been able to find Elizabeth and her family on the 1861 census but Elizabeth remarried in 1861 to Edward Richards and in 1871 she was living in the Parish of Gwinear with her three children although Edward was not at home. By 1881 Elizabeth was widowed again and living in Camborne with her daughter. Her son Richard had married Ann Selina Williams in 1879 and in 1881 they were also living in Camborne and had then one child. There is no sign of her other son, John. Perhaps he was already overseas. Richard and Ann went on to have eleven children although I think only eight survived. Richard was a gold miner and travelled to South Africa several times.