HI Robert, Thankyou for the rant and the two links to the picture of California Gully I will save copies of them. What you say is how I imagined it would be. The DeAngelis family were from the east end of London/Middlesex living down by the docks, where Antonio must have been working out of as a seaman. The area where they lived was called Limehouse and that area is famous for opium dens and being very much full of slums and dregs of the earth type of people. I lived a few miles away from that part of London as a child and it still had such a reputation in the 1950s/60s. Charles Booth toured the area on foot in the 1800s and made a survey of what he saw there, those surveys make interesting reading if you have people over in Australia who came from that part of London. http://booth.lse.ac.uk/ To arrive in Australia seeking their fortune on the goldfields would have been better than where the DeAngelis family came from. The sad thing is they went back to the same area in the East End to live after just a 3 or 4 years on the goldfields, I wonder why. Maybe the life was too hard, perhaps Antonio's wife could not stand the life and was homesick, who knows? Salvatore Sydney, who was born at California Gully, died in 1901 in that same part of London and 4 of his 7 children went into the workhouse school from where they were sent on to another school, miles from their home and mother, to be trained in various occupations, they were aged between 11 and 4 at the time. I have lost track of them for the time being. Thankyou for your help it is appreciated. Regards Jenny DeAngelis Spain. <<> if California Gully in 1857 was anything like Ballarat - then the >> conditions for those with money were pretty good - come to think of it - >> anywhere and anytime - those with money generally found living conditions >> pretty good - whether they were aware or even cared about the living >> conditions of those with less money is debateable - did those with high >> incomes or large resources exploit the aspirations of those without>> >