Thanks Annie,
Yes I do have those – plus the rest of the material I have gathered on him over fifteen years or so of researching him and mainly his descendants – of which there were at least thirty-four grandchildren (and probably more whose BDM details I cannot access – but will hopefully soon discover via proposed contact with rellies.) There have been at least five sets of descendants to Charles and his wife Jessie; I am unaware of a sixth – as of today.
We are lucky in Australia to be able to access most States’ BDM databanks without having to pay for the privilege; obtaining certificates is another matter and if one finds that this becomes burdensome there is always the opportunity to join one of the Heraldry and Genealogy Societies – as I did years ago, and they generally have microfilm or microfiche libraries of the original registers and entries. Also, our Australian National Library has a special Family History department where one can go to do deep research. The ANL is also forever bringing new data access sites on line and in the past week I have found a heap of newspaper articles and pars concerning Charles – many of his police items of note and other pertinent stuff.
Praise be to the Internet and to Email! From a start-point that was a shuffling of pencilled pieces of paper, bits of remembered family myth, and talks with a couple of uncles and aunts who avidly wrote I have been able to pad out such of that which can be verified (or refuted) with other research or written material that I’ve “Googled”. So much so that I have a narrative with images that runs to over forty A4 pages on Charles and his wife, alone. More is expected soon and maybe even a bit of those forty pages might have to be culled to negate the unsubstantiated or mythological.
My wife and I travelled to the UK two years ago and went to the PRO which we found less user-friendly than doing research via the Web – unfortunately we visited on a Sunday and the computer system was “down” and the staff basically unfussed towards helping newbies.
It’d be nice to think that some kind soul would devote a bit of lookup time to try to find an original post-charge muster roll so that we might better sort out the anomaly of whether he served using an assumed given name (starting with “H”) or whether that fact is incorrect and caused by who-knows-what. The various lists that were made up many years after the charge may well suffer errors of transposition that today are difficult to sort out. (As a classical example of this, my father, Dalton NEVILLE’s BDM entry is incorrect as the registry interpreted an “open-topped D” as a stylised “W” and he is therefore listed as “Walton NEVILLE.”
A second vexation concerning Charles is the apparent discrepancy with the date of his discharge. As best we know he was discharged from British Military in Calcutta on 8 Sept 1860 (1862/3? There is confusion relating to the actual date. We understand he was discharged "time expired" in Calcutta, India (12yrs 70 days) with Good Conduct badge. The records available give no indication of when, or how, or if he returned to England: and the shipping records in the Sydney Morning Herald for the day of Charles’s arrival in Australia (as best we know it) do not mention him by name among those passengers that the vessel started with when it sailed out from England, nor is he listed among those who were picked up along the way in India and at the Port of Galle (in the then) Ceylon – in fact the report of the Northam’s travel only mentions Bombay – Calcutta does not feature!
If, as it reasonably seems Charles and Jessie were somehow/somewhere caught up in the haste of Governor Young’s departure from London and travel to Sydney and were both acting as personal servants to His Lordship (and Charles was neither ADC, nor Escort to Sir John – as was believed by certain of his descendants) they quite likely were the unnamed “Man and Maid Servant(s)” shown in the arrival list of passengers of the “Northam” in March 1861.
The date of arrival in Australia that we have for Sir John Young and his entourage, including Charles and his (to be) wife Jessie was 22 March 1861 and of course, when you do the sums using Charles’s Service time, his enlistment date, and that supposed date of discharge, things just don’t add up.
Anybody with a bit of spare research time would receive mine and other descendants’ undying gratitude – and I’ll send them a copy of my history of Charles Dalton.
Best Regards - and Happy New Year (in 3 hrs here)
Another Great Grandson, Dalton Neville.