Greetings Listers From the amount of bickering in the last few days, people have time on their hands. (And hey, it's a democracy. We should bicker occasionally to prove that.) SO PLEASE can some quiet / under- extended person volunteer to try to find a small part of an answer to this puzzle? My missing Aus lad has proved impossible for years, and it's such a common name that I guess many see it as not worth even attempting. Details: Winifred Callaghan, 14-year-old Irish Famine orphan, was shipped to Australia on the Maria in 1850. (End of the Earl Grey scheme.) She married (Cornishman) Master Mariner Richard Plummer Burgess, who drowned off New Zealand in 1863. I’m missing two of Win’s children, last seen in a NZ orphanage. William Henry Burgess, b 1858, and Thomas Alfred Burgess, b 1862, "went back to Australia and Ireland” (but which did which?) family legend says. The next generation, born about 1890 – 1920, should have family names Richard, Winifred, possibly Gertrude, and the usual Mary- Thomas-William-Henrys. I have partly traced many of the possible people in the on-line NSW BDMs, and hunted the cemeteries lists, but their names are too ordinary to let me make progress. I descend from Win and Richard's oldest son, Richard Henry, who stayed in NZ. A younger daughter Elizabeth married John Hiles in NSW, and I've traced her family. Many thanks for any ideas on where I can find either of my missing lads. (Yes, they fail to show in the Ireland 1901 and 1911 Censuses . . . . ) Please contact me at migseder@clear.net.nz - Migs Eder, Christchurch, New Zealand. Civilisation is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour - Arnold Toynbee, English historian, 1889 - 1975