James Taylor's aunties

I have written a little about my grandmother's grandfather here. His name was James Taylor and he lived forty years in Eldorado in the Ovens Valley, Victoria where he was a gold miner. He died there in 1916.

James was born in 1831 in the beautiful city of Durham in Durham county, England. His father, a woolcomber, was John Taylor and his mother Ann Coultman. By 1851 they were living in Back Lane, Durham. Quite a few family events, baptisms, marriages and burials, occurred in St Nicholas Church. We visited Durham, and had a coffee in the St Nicholas drop-in centre, several years ago and we thought this loop of the River Wear and the buildings it encloses very beautiful.

Old postcard of the beautiful Durham Cathedral

Back Lane, Durham, England. A loop of the River Wear encloses the cathedral and the
castle as well as the market square and the little St Nicholas church.
Many of the Taylor and Coultman families lived in the St Nicholas parish. 

Durham market square and St Nicholas parish church

Community Coffee Centre, St Nicholas Church, Durham in 2010.

James, aged 20, was working as a hand loom weaver but about that time gold was discovered in Australia and he decided to join in the goldrush. His death certificate states that he arrived in Victoria about 1852 but I haven't been able to confirm that because there are so many 'James Taylor' arrivals about that time.

The next ten years of James' life are a blank but I assume he was mining gold somewhere in Victoria. In 1864 he was mining at Beaufort when he married Ann Chellew (nee Chaundy) there. She was widowed when her husband was suffocated by bad air in a mine. Ann's sister Leah (Raby) was living in the Ovens Valley in northern Victoria and three of her sisters also moved into that area - Emily (Young), Alice (Cameron) and Ann (and James) who were at Eldorado in 1869. James and Ann never had any children (although James had a son with Ann's sister Emily but that's another story).

James Taylor's mother was Ann Coultman, daughter of Richard Coultman and Elizabeth Shafto  I had done some research on her family, who also lived in Durham city, but one day recently I was searching the name on the public family trees on Ancestry and discovered that two of Ann's sisters, James' aunties, had also migrated to Victoria. Well, stone the crows!!!

As we all know, the public family trees on the web are notoriously inaccurate, so I was cautious in accepting the information. Several of the trees claim that Elizabeth's surname was Weaver rather than Shafto but I'm convinced that Shafto is correct. I checked the sources and attached documents and will continue to check as well as try to contact living descendants, but on the whole I think it's probably right.

The two aunts who came to Victoria are Camilla and Elizabeth.

Camilla Coultman was born in 1809 in Leeds and married William Close at Durham city in June 1840. They had six children in Durham before migrating to Australia some time after 1852. They lived at Williamstown across the river from Melbourne. Camilla Close died at Douglas Parade, Williamstown in 1889 and William died there the following year.

Elizabeth Coultman was born at Durham in 1815, married James Thompson at Durham in July 1840 and had four children. They migrated to Victoria about 1852. Elizabeth was widowed in November 1853 when James Thompson died at Maribynong near Williamstown. She remarried the following year, in Melbourne in June 1854, to John Petty. They were living at Sandridge (now called Port Melbourne) across the river from Williamstown when Elizabeth Petty died in 1868.

So, I have a lot of questions.

• Did James know his two aunts and his cousins were in Victoria? I think he must have done because his parents, his Coultman grandparents, his uncle William Coultman and his family, and his other aunt, Hannah (Baker) and her family were living in the same lane, Back Lane, in Durham in 1851. (Back Lane is called Back Silver Lane on Google Maps.) 
• They all arrived in Victoria in about 1852 so did they all emigrate on the same ship? 
• Was he in touch with them or did they ever visit each other? 

I have some work to do.

Eldorado

El Dorado (Spanish for 'the gilded one') was a fabled city in South America, rich in treasure and sought by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. 'Reid's Creek' (now called Reedy Creek), in north-eastern Victoria, was named after David Reid who held a station in the area in the 1840s but when gold was discovered there in the 1850s an influx of miners arrived. By the 1870s there were 4000 people living along the creek, including several members of my family. The name Eldorado was applied to the town that developed but previously it had been the name of another station in the area - in 1842 the prescient Furey Baker subdivided his 'Barambogie' station and the western section was named 'El Dorado'. The gold mining district became known as 'the Ovens' because of the main river that flows through the valley.

I'm not sure of the chronological sequence of events but generally it looks something like this. In July 1863 Annie Chellew (nee Chaundy) was living at Beaufort near Ballarat with her husband Arthur who was a goldminer. One day Arthur and his mate went down their mine and both died as a result of suffocating in the foul air. Annie was a widow at the age of 23. James Taylor must have been also mining in the area because he married Annie at Beaufort in April 1864.

Some time in the next few years Annie and James Taylor moved to Eldorado, and so did Annie's sisters, Emily Rachel Chaundy  (who married a miner, Thomas Young at Eldorado in 1874), Leah (who married a miner, Gregory Raby, at nearby Beechworth in May 1864) and Alice Julia Chaundy (who married Peter Cameron in 1883). I don't know which of the four sisters arrived first but their children all grew up in the area between Wangaratta and Beechworth, including my great-grandfather Henry Taylor who was born at Eldorado in 1869. It was 'Kelly country', and Henry would have known of several members of the Kelly Gang who also lived near the town and hid from authorities in the surrounding hills.

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Eldorado, Victoria 1909
Source: Museum Victoria Reg. No. MM6166

Today the vegetation around the town and along the creek has regrown after the devastation that goldmining creates and when we visited last week it was looking very pretty - the wattle was flowering and the first of the spring wildflowers emerging. The population is about 300 now but with modern transport it is close to Beechworth, Chiltern and Wangaratta so isn't as isolated and distant as it must have once been.

We went out to the cemetery where James Taylor, my direct ancestor, is buried. (None of the Chaundy sisters are buried there.) I already knew there wasn't a headstone but it was good to visit, to pay respect and get a feel for the place. He's a long way from Durham in England where he was raised in a small back lane right next to the magnificent Durham Cathedral.

Durham Cathedral, Durham. Old postcard.

Postcript: On a lighter note, while at the cemetery we found this stone with a plaque attached.

"Plot 12 & 13, Reserved for M & M, one day"
Eldorado Cemetery, Victoria