Eureka Moment
Kenneth Atkinson was keen to uncover the descendants of a professor who had an illustrious career in Britain and Australia. Gail Dixon reveals how he tore down his brick walls and reconnected a family that had spread far across the world
Kenneth Atkinson explains how newspaper records helped him reconnect a family spread across the world
The turn of the 20th century was a time of increasing social mobility in Britain. Compulsory education was gifting academic children promising opportunities, and in adulthood their skills were in demand overseas.
Many of our ancestors continued the 19th-century trend of emigrating to Australia and the USA. However, the travelling time and distance often led to families losing contact with loved ones. Kenneth Atkinson was keen to discover what had happened to his globe-trotting ancestors.
My Brick Wall
I started my research 30 years ago with a great unknown. What happened to my dad’s uncle Prof Meredith Atkinson, who was born in 1883 and emigrated to Australia? We were in touch with all of Dad’s first cousins in northeast England, but Meredith’s descendants were a mystery.
I knew that Meredith was named after his father, who came to Hartlepool from Ireland and ran a grocer’s shop. He married Margaret Thompson in 1876 and they had four children, including my grandfather Robert.
The Atkinsons were bright, but could only afford to send one son to university. Meredith was considered to be the most academically gifted and attended Keble College, Oxford, where he studied education, economics and political science. After graduating, he lectured at Durham University. It was a marvellous achievement for a grocer’s son.
Meredith married Margaret
KENNETH ATKINSON is a retired engineer who lives in Seghill, Northumberland
Freeland in 1910 and they had three children: Meredith, Dorothy Margaret and Denis. Dad knew that the family had emigrated to Australia in 1914, and returned to live in London in 1926. He visited them there but lost contact after Prof Meredith died in 1929.
Thanks to his work as a published academic, Meredith left intriguing traces for me to follow.
Meredith was invited to be a lecturer in economic history at the University of Sydney. He was a dedicated member of the Workers’ Educational Association, and became the organisation’s president in New South Wales.
Margaret died in 1924 and a year later Meredith married his secretary Isobel Badham, who had a seven-year-old ‘niece’ called Felice. The family returned to London, where he died in 1929.
Passenger manifests revealed that Isobel returned to Australia with Dorothy Margaret and Denis. Their brother Meredith had emigrated to Quebec three weeks before his father’s death, leaving few traces behind.
My Eureka Moment
Australian newspaper archives (searchable via trove.nla.gov. au) held intriguing clues. I discovered a Denis Freeland Atkinson, born in Tasmania in 1918. Eureka – his father’s name was Prof Meredith Atkinson and Freeland was his mother’s maiden name. I tried to contact Denis’ children via the newspaper that published the death record and the undertakers, but to no avail.
Turning my attention to Dorothy Margaret Atkinson, I found records that suggested she died a spinster before the Second World War. A few years later, however, I had a welcome surprise when a remote family member in Sydney sent newspaper articles about Dorothea Margaret Atkinson’s wedding. This was definitely her, despite the name.
Amazingly, there were two Dorothy Margaret Atkinsons working as law clerks and living close by in Darlinghurst, Sydney, on the 1930s electoral rolls. I had followed the wrong person!
Luckily, Dorothy/Dorothea married a man with an unusual name, Robert Maxwell Ewing. I was able to trace their daughter Christine Perrot, who had written a book called L’Arbre: Récit about the local war memorial. I contacted the publishers and was delighted to get a response from Christine the following morning.
At last, I had made contact with a family member. We began corresponding, and Christine put me in touch with Denis’ children Stephen and Lynn.
I quizzed my new-found second cousins about Meredith, the elder brother who went to live in Canada. Intriguingly, they only knew of an Uncle Peter who had gone to Canada and hadn’t been heard of for 90 years.
My Breakthrough
I had concrete evidence that he passed Canadian immigration as ‘Meredith’, but when I searched for ‘Peter’ records began popping up. Peter Atkinson appeared in 1935 on the SS Southern Cross travelling from Brazil to Canada.
He passed away in Kelowna, British Columbia, in 1991 and his remembrance notice mentioned family in Saskatoon, which is in Saskatchewan. I found his children Michael, Dennis and Louise via a Google search, and wrote to them explaining our connection. It was so rewarding to connect them with Dorothy and Denis’ descendants.
Thanks to my new-found connections I’ve found another second cousin, Meredith Badham Shelley, daughter of Felice, who was believed to be the niece of Prof Meredith’s second wife Isobel. It turns out that Felice was actually Meredith and Isobel’s daughter, born in 1917 while he was still married to Margaret!