I am a museum researcher in the United States, trying to find someone named Mr. Bonat, who is described in a family diary as "Bowna Div. Army man." We only recently learned that Bowna Div. is or was a place in New South Wales, a land-holding. Mr. Bonat married a woman from Quebec named Marie-Louise LeBel (born 1876), who migrated with her family to Michigan, in the United States, around 1885. We think the marriage took place in the 1890s, or a bit later, but not after 1905, since Mr. Bonat was dead by then. I am very sorry to say that we don't have Mr. Bonat's first name, nor the date or place of his birth, nor the precise date or place of the marriage, nor his place of death. (We do know a fair amount about Marie-Louise LeBel Bonat, who traveled a great deal. By 1905, she was living in Philadelphia and listing herself in the city directory as a "widow," thus giving us an approximate date for Mr. Bonat's death. She lived mostly in the US, with occasional periods in Paris, and died in Middletown, Rhode Island, in 1936.) I have several questions relating to Mr. Bonat that I hope listserv members can help me with. (1) Was the village of Bowna (flooded now, I understand, by construction of a dam), or the Bowna (sub)Division, named for a family whose surname was Bowna? If so, does anyone have information about this family? -- what did they do for a living? where did they came from (if originally from some place other than Australia), and when did they come? Are there any descendants, or is there a way to track them, to see whether one of their ancestors did in fact marry in French-Canadian woman named Marie-Louise LeBel? (2) How can I find out if a man, or a family, named Bonat lived in the Bowna (sub)Division, and get more information about him? The name Bonat is quite unusual, so that even though we don't have his first name, I think he would show up on military or parish lists, census records, etc. Maybe Bowna or Albury parish records -- do those exist anywhere? Or census records for perhaps the 1880s or 1890s -- I would search for both Bonat and Bowna. Note: Before we found out that Bowna is a place name, we thought it might be a misspelling of "Bonat," since both words would be pronounced the same, if Bonat is a French name. It is also possible that Marie-Louise, who was very fond of all things French, "Frenchified" the name Bowna so that it came out Bonat. That's why it might make sense to search for the name Bowna as well. Thank you very much for your assistance. Sincerely, Carren Kaston