Great Great Grandparents

Alice and Marge in 1990, as they sat with their cassette recorder, told as much as they knew about their grandparents and great grandparents.
Like many Australian families, ours is a story of migration to a new country. All four of our maternal great great grandparents were European: English, German, Danish and Irish.
These four migration stories happened between the 1850s and 1870s. Three of the migrants were our great great grandparents, and one was a great grandparent.

short family tree



COATES, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1860s




Coates was an English engineer who travelled with his wife to Australia in the 1860s. Their first names are not known.
The Barwon River is the large river than flows through Geelong. In the new colony, there were no iron works: the worked iron had to be imported from England, along with the experts to do the work.

Barwon Bridge
Barwon Bridge then
Barwon River bridge today
Barwon Bridge now

We don’t know whether Mr and Mrs Coates planned to do this job and then return to England, but they would have found a thriving, wealthy colony. Gold had been discovered in central Victoria just ten years earlier.

DAU, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1860s



Dau was a German farmer who arrived in Australia in the 1860s. He married a fifteen year old girl, of whom we know very little. Wandong is 70 Kilometres north of Melbourne. In the years the Daus lived there, there was a thriving timber industry and some gold mining. By 1880 there was a railway line from Melbourne.

Wandong 1890s


1880 timber company near Wandong
Timber yard at Wandong, 1880

HOLM, ARRIVED ADELAIDE 1872



Roger Holm: this one is our great grandparent, a baker, who himself arrived in Australia from Denmark via England in 1872.
Roger had been born in a part of Denmark called Schleswig-Holstein, that had been disputed territory for centuries. At the time when he was a child, Germany did not yet exist. It was still a whole lot of little countries. When Roger was twelve, Otto Von Bismarck’s army invaded Schleswig-Holstein.

Map Schleswig-Holstein
Map of Schleswig-Holstein

Otto_Fürst_von_Bismarck
Otto Von Bismarck
S:H place in German history

Canvas, Bismark wresting S:H from the Danes
Painting: Bismarck Wresting Schleswig Holstein From The Danes

BELL, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1850s



David and Martha Bell was an Irish flax farmer, who arrived in Australia with his wife Martha (born Martha Elvidge) in the 1850s. Belfast was a prosperous modern city at that time.

Belfast history
Belfast about 1850


The area had become a specialist for farming and processing flax, which was woven into linen, used among other things for ships’ sails.

Flax farming Belfast
Flax Farmers

Processing Flax
Processing flax

blog comments powered by Disqus