Francis Rushbrook (my great-great-grandfather) was one of the Parkhurst Boys, arriving at Geelong in September 1847.
My great-grandfather, Alexander Frederick Matthews, met and married Eliza Rushbrook (Frank's daughter) while visiting Australia on behalf of the Vestey family, and all but one of their seven children were born in Queensland.
He returned to Scotland after inheriting an estate from his uncle, David Frederick, who died in 1899 - a condition of the inheritance was that he must change his surname to Frederick, so he became Alexander Frederick Matthews-Frederick, and his children took that name too. My grandmother came back to Scotland with him, and this branch of the family has remained in Scotland since then.
Alexander sparked my father's interest in genealogy, and he spent much of his spare time building a family tree, which I have been extending since his death in 2002. A subset of the tree, which consists of Francis Rushbrook's descendants and their spouses, has 170 individuals in it, and I know I'm missing recently-added twigs on the tree!
The story told in the family was that Francis was studying law at Cambridge, but his father ran up huge gambling debts, and couldn't pay the fees. The young Francis then decided to seek his fortune in Australia. On going to Cambridge to investigate this part of the family, my father discovered that Frank's connection with the law arose from the wrong direction! He had been convicted of larceny (£10) at Cambridge Borough Court in 1844 at the age of 16.
I only discovered the Parkhurst connection today, and am somewhat relieved to find I'm not descended from a hardened criminal, but from a young offender who was trained as a baker in Parkhurst and who was presumably a free man when he arrived at Geelong (subject to his not returning to the UK for the rest of his sentence).
I'd rather not publish the whole tree here, but the following surnames feature in it:
Rushbrook, Matthews-Frederick, McLaughlan, Barnewall, Lynch, Curley, Dickinson, Robinson, Cattanach.
