Don Roulston Buzzard

Prologue

About fifteen months ago, I started writing about the lives of various ancestors as circumstances lead me to have a lot of time on my hands and nothing important to do. I’d been interested in my ancestors for over 40 years but in those pre-internet days, information was hard to come by and you had to write letters to seek information. With family and work commitments the years passed by.

As I was born in 1953, information sources were invariably “The Encyclopedia Britannica” (which every second household possessed) and the local library. There was no internet and a telephone was in a red box down the street or on a table usually located in the main hallway leading from the front door. Piecing together a family history was just not possible without spending a lot of money to hire a professional genealogist. But by the time my interest was aroused again, I had many resources at hand.

The first steps in re-kindling the interest started by joining various Genealogical (Ancestry and others) or “record” websites such as ”Find My Past”. This progressed to a visit to the Historical Society at Moora to glean information on past family members and at that stage I became passionate about writing the life stories of as many ancestors as I could.

When I started researching and writing the “Life and Times of William Hunt”, a farmer from New Norcia, Western Australia (W.A.), it became apparent to me that my generation, and to some extent the generation before me, would be very difficult to research from a family history perspective. Just about all records are now covered by a “Privacy Act”, photographs are on mobile phones or in the ”cloud” (and future generations won’t have access to them when their owners pass away) and so on.

But back to William Hunt, the farmer at New Norcia, who was born in Tharston, Norfolk, England in on 30th August 1828. With the records available on the internet and maintaining close contact with his descendants, I was able to track him from the village he was born in, his criminal misdemeanors, his court appearances, his imprisonment in various prisons in England, his transportation to the Swan River Colony (now Perth) in Australia, to his farm in New Norcia and to his final resting place. The wealth of records available was astounding, and documents written in 19th and 20th centuries in England and Australia were readily available.

Here I will introduce a friend who helped me with his tireless work, designing and uploading the stories I have written onto his website. Nigel Peacock, who lives in Tharston, is a member of the Tharston Historical Society and with his efforts we can now view the stories of my ancestors on his website.

Millar Buzzard, my grandfather and his wife Margaret Mary (nee Sheridan), was my next project. Millar’s wife was the granddaughter of William Hunt, the convict, and I have many fond memories of her, as my much-loved Nanna.

Having completed the ”Life and Times of Millar Buzzard”, which can also be read on Nigel’s website, I began looking into William Slade Vincent Junior, the man buried with my grandfather. He led me on many a false trail but I finally completed his story recently. Again, it is told on Nigel’s website.

After considering who would be the subject of my next project, I settled on my father, Brian Sheridan Buzzard. He had written an autobiography entitled “A Gentleman and a Rascal” but it was written in some haste before his death in 1997 and left out a lot of family history. My project was to attempt to rectify that. But as I was writing, it became apparent that I was essentially correcting errors and inconsistencies in his book, and that was not the intention of my writing. Therefore, my father’s book will remain as it was written, and at 81 years of age when he died his family were delighted he had completed it. But that left me thinking about my next project.

As generally happens when a male is writing family histories, we tend to concentrate on the men of the family. The lives of the men of the 19th and 20th centuries were more interesting as they led their families on journeys across the world and, when they arrived at their destinations, raised their families in sometimes harsh conditions in the new land and often went to war. However, little is written and less recorded of the lives of the wives, mothers and grandmothers, as their lives were generally spent bringing up children.

My thoughts are now that it is time to right that wrong and to write the life story of one of those women. This story is of my mother, Don Roulston Dymock. Few official accessible records are available on Don as her life spanned the years 1921 to 1986. Many of the facts and anecdotes I am about to relate have been supplied by relatives, to whom I am truly indebted.