Day of frustration at the archives yesterday. I have proved that one of the convicts that we thought was ours is not. So I now have to figure out who this person is. His name is William Russell, he is located in Bathurst and he had six children with his wife before she left him. It appears likely that she then came back and they had another child a few years later. Then she disappears from the records. He is around to approve his daughters marriage at the age of 17, as she was a minor she needed his permission to marry. After that he also disappears from the records.

He may be a convict as all of this takes place in Bathurst and this was a very big convict area but certainly by the time they are getting married he is no longer a convict, if he ever was one. His name was William Russell I don’t have a death certificate for either him or Mary and it seems that both of them have lived forever somewhere off in the Never Never. If I had a death certificate it may be possible to locate who was who.

I have now looked up and obtained all likely death certificates for his wife Mary Russell nee Gransden and checked them against all likely Wills. No dice! Now I need to try and do the same with William Russell, but of course William Russell’s are a dime a dozen so finding him that way is extremely difficult.

I have also found two potential convicts, one I am pretty sure is not correct because he has a middle name that is in half of the documentation but not in any of the documentation for his children, it makes it unlikely.

The other convict William Russell is a possibility but whoever did the transcriptions has of course got confused by the long s’s and so half of the transcriptions are under William or Wm Ruffell or Ruffel rather than Russell. This makes the searches even longer and more difficult and I could well be chasing a William Russell that has nothing to do with the Gransden family. Plus half of the information for him also seems to be missing.

Then on top of that I am also trying to research our block of land and finally connect some dots. But the packet of information that should inform me of who had what is missing. There was something in the archives in the correct position but it was logged as something else. We thought it may be relevant anyway but if it is it is in the middle of the chain of evidence somewhere and not at either of the ends that I have concrete information for. So I can’t confirm the link between the Bennets who held our land in the 1860’s and William Balmain who held our land in the 1790’s