1671
Beedon, Berkshire
Before the ships
Long before any ship, the family is already in the registers. The Ezzy line begins as Hyssy in the parish books of Beedon, Berkshire: a William christened in 1671, his son John in 1699, a grandson at Hampstead Norris in 1734, and William himself at Beenham in 1768. The Lambs are in the registers at Staindrop, County Durham, by 1719; the Witneys at Chinnor in Oxfordshire. Three counties of parish clerks kept the line on paper for a century before the colony existed.
1792
Windsor river flats
The two ships
William Ezzy, a brewer's servant by trade, reaches the colony aboard the Royal Admiral with his family. His wife Jane arrives free, a distinction that will soon matter a great deal. By the mid 1790s the family is settled near Windsor, on the river flats that will hold them for two centuries.
1797
Mulgrave Place
Jane's thirty acres
On 1 May 1797 Governor John Hunter grants Jane Ezzy thirty acres at Mulgrave Place. The grant is recorded as Ezzys Farm, and it makes Jane the first woman granted land in the Hawkesbury. At the time only 25 women in the entire colony held free grants, beside 737 men. The record survives in Register No. 2, page 169, and on the colony's paperwork her convict husband was assigned to her, as her farm labourer. Two years later the river rose fifty feet and put the farm under water. The family stayed.
1805
Portland Head
The fire at Portland Head
On the Lamb side of the family, Elizabeth Chambers pulls an infant from a burning house at Portland Head in June 1805. The Sydney Gazette reports it that winter. Her husband Henry Lamb's name is still on the map today: Lambs Creek, near Portland Head, is named for him.
1817
St Matthew's, Windsor
Two families become one
Rebecca Lamb marries John Ezzey at St Matthew's, Windsor, on 24 March 1817, her father Henry standing witness. The Lamb and Ezzy lines join, and everything that follows on this page descends from that morning in that church.
1823
Bells Line of Road
The open file
One family story refuses to be proven or dismissed: that William Ezzy supplied the horses for a crossing of the Blue Mountains. Grace chased the claim through four historical societies and the Mitchell Library without ever finding the book it came from, and noted that Archibald Bell's 1823 expedition set out from Richmond, straight through the family's country. She left the question open in print for a future member of the family to settle. The file stays open. That is what archives are for.
1830
Kurrajong
Bonnie Doon and the gum tree
John buys Henry Lamb's eighty-acre Kurrajong grant, deeds signed by Governor Macquarie, and builds a home the family calls Bonnie Doon. The land stays in family hands for five generations. Family tradition, recorded in the book, says John carried a gum-tree seedling up from the riverbank wrapped in his pocket-handkerchief and planted it outside the kitchen window. When the book was written in 1984, the tree was still standing. A family that plants a tree for its grandchildren understands what an archive is for.
1837
Kurrajong
The bushranger
George Armstrong of the Donahoe gang vows to burn Bonnie Doon down after John shelters police. John and his sons keep armed watch through the nights until Armstrong is shot in 1837. The house stands. So do the records: John serves as District Constable at North Richmond and later as a trustee of the Hawkesbury Benevolent Society and Hospital. Of his eleven children, none dies in infancy, a quiet miracle for the era.
1843
Liverpool to Sydney Cove
The Bible and the hell ship
On Christmas Day 1843 the Witney brothers sail from Liverpool with their families aboard the United Kingdom, a vessel the port authorities would call a hell ship. The crossing takes 126 days. Twenty-eight passengers are buried at sea, twenty-four of them children. Edmund Witney records the sailing date on the fly-leaf of the family Bible, and forty years later pastes his wife's burial-plot receipt beside it. Among the children who survive is his daughter Mary Anne, aged three, who will marry Henry Ezzey and choose her own children's names from that same Bible. It is still in the family.
1870
Comleroy Road, Kurrajong
Born on the family's road
Naomi Grace Ezzey is born on 22 March 1870 on Comleroy Road, Kurrajong, where the official survey mark, Ezzy Trig, still carries the family's name. Her parents chose her names from the family Bible, the way they chose all fourteen of their children's. When diphtheria swept the farm in her childhood, the flooded river cut them off from any doctor; her mother dosed the children with castor oil and sulphur, and every one of them pulled through. By her late teens Naomi was almost totally deaf, and from then on she took part in every conversation by reading lips. The name Grace enters the line with her, and it has never left.
1895
Neutral Bay & Battersea
The cook and the bandmaster
Fred Taylor was born on Buckingham Palace Road, London, fourth in a line of Bristol musicians, and played palace functions through his uncle by marriage, the conductor George Riseley. A ship's orchestra brought him to Sydney, where he lodged with the Peet family at Neutral Bay. The Peets' cook was Naomi. Bandmaster and farm girl married on 19 July 1895, and the records follow them to Battersea, where Elsie Grace was born in 1897, then home to Newtown, where Queenie Florence Taylor arrived in 1903. Naomi had never liked England. The Hawkesbury does not let go easily.
1930
Naremburn
Two Graces
Naomi Grace dies in the August. Seven weeks later, on 2 October 1930, her granddaughter is born and named Grace. The two never met. The name is the heirloom, passed the way the photographs were: from a hand that kept it to a hand that would. The baby's mother, Queenie, will carry the family's memories for another sixty-six years, long enough for the daughter she named Grace to write them all down.
1985
Windsor & the Mitchell Library
Grace writes it all down
Grace Douglass, sixth generation, starts pulling the thread at the Mitchell Library in 1964 and never stops. She joins the Hawkesbury Family History Group from 1983, helps produce the Hawkesbury Pioneer Registers, transcribes the St Matthew's cemetery, and in 1985, with her cousin Laurel Legge, publishes the three volumes this page is drawn from. She checked every family legend against the record: when the family called Henry Lamb "Sergeant", she pulled the pay lists and printed the private she found there. Documented, not embellished. She is the reason we can show you a face from 1870.
Today
North West Sydney
The archive continues
These photographs and papers outlasted the Hawkesbury's floods, a bushranger's threat, and two centuries of moves, marriages and estates. Not by luck, but because keeping them was always somebody's job. Her grandson now does that job for other families, from the same stretch of country.