1792
The two ships
William Ezzy 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
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.
1805
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
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.
1830
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
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.
1985
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 is the reason we can show you a face from 1870.
Today
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.
“Some things can't be replaced. But they can be restored.”
The same standard, for your family
Every collection we take in is inventoried on arrival, scanned at high resolution, handled with archival care, and returned to your hands. Originals are never posted, never sent overseas, never handled by strangers. Your digital archive lives on professional storage here in Australia. That is not a marketing promise; it is the family habit, continued.