Off and on I’ve been puzzling over Henry Thomas Hill, who was J’s great^{^n} grand parent who appeared with his wife Anne in Castlemaine in 1848. His history prior to then has been a puzzle to me and is hopelessly muddled due to there being another Henry Thomas Hill who was married to a lady known as Charlotte Elizabeth Salt.

Today, I did something different.

I’d been avoiding researching Anne Hill as it was such a common name, but today I bit the bullet and came up with some circumstantial evidence

It turns out that there were not that many people called  Anne Hill who were born in 1820 (ish) and married to someone called Henry in the 1841 English census. In fact the only instance that looks a possibility is this one from the census in Walton in what is now West Yorkshire.

It’s a bit problematical – Henry should have been 30 or 31, but we actually don’t know his date of birth, the birth year of 1810 comes from the record of his death, which doesn’t record his date of birth, only his age – it’s just possible that at some point he added five years to his age ie he may not actually have been 72 when he died in 1882.

The other bit of circumstantial evidence was that an Anne Hill, accompanied by her husband, arrived into New South Wales on the Emperor in 1848, 1848 being the year they appear in Castlemaine. Unfortunately the online record for Anne Hill, which is only an index to the microfilmed records, does not list her husband’s name

This is of course complete hand waving, I might be utterly and completely wrong, but it’s worth a punt …

[Update 28 July 2022]

Well, a little more digging, and while there’s no Henry Thomas Hill taking passage on the Emperor in 1848, there’s a Thomas Hill.

Unfortunately, the records have not yet been digitised and are on microfilm, which means I can’t take this further at the moment, but circumstantially it looks likely …