slatersue on Family Tree Circles

Hi, my name's Sue. I live in Canterbury, Kent, UK and have been researching my family history for about 10 years - so addictive!

William Lemon OLIVER is not strictly mine but married into my Sankey family. However, he is so interesting and there must be someone out there in Australia (Western?) who is descended from him.

Wm came from a very respectable non-conformist family of Grocers, Wine Merchants. However, he seems to have been the bad apple in the barrel. In 1841 he was living with his widowed sister Mary and helping her to run her late husband's Chemist Shop. He was also in a partnership with William BEARD as a Mining Agent, Share Dealer & Share Broker. The partnership being dissolved by mutual consent in 1847. When he married Bertha SANKEY in Canterbury in 1854 he was shown as a Stock Broker of Widcombe House, DeBeauvoir Square and Threadneedle Street. He was on the committee of the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association, which was dissolved in 1857 and made personally bankrupt in Oct 1858.

In November 1858 he was convicted at the London Central Criminal Court of "Uttering a Forged Cheque" and sentenced to 20 years transportation. I thought this was a very harsh sentence but it seems he was not a proper stockbroker and had actually defrauded several clients out of large sums of monies.

He was on the Merchantman, which left Bermuda on 12 Oct 1862, arriving Fremantle 14 Feb 1863. His occupation is given as Surgeon on the Ship's Manifest. I can find no confirmation of this and suspect he was exaggerating again!

He was only incarcerated for a short time - getting his Ticket of Leave on 7 Jul 1864. This is where I lose track of him totally.

His wife Bertha disappeared from census records - popping up again in 1891.

Anway I have quite a lot of information of the LEMON and OLIVER families of Middlesex so if there's anyone out there who might own William Lemon OLIVER I'd be happy to pass it on.