As you know Chris and I are working on a project regarding the Canadians and Americans who came to the northeast. Sometimes the amount of work in front of us is quite daunting, but we are enjoying it and learning some very interesting facts about the early days of the northeast, and the lives of these men. At the moment we are working on a rather large number of men who came from one small area in the USA. All to Australia, many to the northeast. We feel at some point it likely a large percentage of these men were in the northeast at some point - we have found that many of them stuck together. What is more amazing are the connections we have found between these men, at home, here, family members, business partners, travelling companions, distant relations, working relationships and mining mates. The cross referencing is an enormous part of the work. Another amazing thing is the number of these young men who died within the first year of arrival. Fortunately for us, we are working with an Historical Society in the USA. We are being sent information from family history books, mostly family names, but sometimes information like one of these men died and was taken back to the US to be buried.!!! Can you imagine this! As no burial details have been found in the US, we are working on this one at the moment trying to find a burial place here - the thought of taking a body on a 3 months sea voyage in 1854!!! The aim is that when the lives of these men from this area are compiled into a story format, we shall present this to the Society in exchange for the help they have given us. They then will have a record of the lives of these men for future generations of researchers in that State. As we work thru the names, we are particularly interested in the ones in the northeast but we also try to assist the Society in relation to the others we know were elsewhere. I know they would be interested to hear of anything of these men below, and we are more than willing to swap information with you. If anyone knows anything of these at all would you please get in touch with either Chris Wild or myself. To those we have been in contact with before, we are still working towards your names, we have not forgotten you or them, we are still gathering information as we find it, -- we just get sidetracked when we find one name connects to another name in the northeast, and suddenly we have two or three to research instead of one. Some of these men stayed in the northeast, or moved to other parts of Australia for life, others returned to the US - we are managing to track them wherever they went. We will start with a reasonably small number of these men now - we have written a story on half of these men to date. Augustus Brainerd Ebenezer Hill Philander Steward William Cleveland Sam Bickford Henry Neil William Pearson Norris Marston Albert Leighton Payson Edward Pollard Henry Pollard Daniel Allen Horace Eaton Asher Fletcher Freeman Allen Frank Allen Leonard Richardson John K Morrison Francis Teague Horatio Steward Abraham Longfellow If any of those above are of interest to you, please get in touch. We will send more names thru another time. regards Denise