Hi all, I'm forwarding this message from Andrew Fogarty - a longer version of his earlier post. Hoping someone can assist him? Thanks! ----------------------------- Hello Listers, I am an Australian researcher recently admitted to the List. I have decided to post some remarks in the context of an encouraging development which has recently occurred in my genealogical investigations. I have been doing Fogarty research for a long time. I have not been a fast worker. I have made considerable progress. Can anyone connect with any of the genealogical details set out hereunder? First, some background. My late father was good at relaying information about family situations and events of his own time but did not know much about earlier matters. I am sure he did not know anything crucial about our Australian Fogarty family`s origins that has eluded me except in the sense that I am convinced I would have been able to draw good leads from him if I had been able to put my later discoveries and theorising into the conversation. I am sure my findings and ideas would have helped him remember and interpret things he had heard long ago. My father knew his father was from the Templemore area in County Tipperary and had come to Australia as an infant. He had the impression that his father had been born in about 1880. I have established that he was christened in 1878 and came to Sydney with his parents and siblings on the ship "Northampton" in 1879. I have established that the family reached Wagga in southern New South Wales by 1880. My father was born in Wagga and I have spent a large part of my life there. My father and his parents and some of his siblings moved in 1936 from the Wagga area to north-eastern Victoria. In 1941 my father enlisted for war service. My grandfather died in 1944. My father was then serving in the Melbourne area as a member of ground crew in the Royal Australian Air Force. He was granted a week`s special leave to attend to arrangements needing to be implemented because of his father`s death. The funeral was in Sydney. The father and son had had a strained relationship. My father dealt ruthlessly with his father`s personal effects at the family farm at Kiewa in north-eastern Victoria during the week`s special leave granted by the R.A.A.F. He appears to have made a big bonfire of everything he could lay his hands on. He was like that. He was a great one for throwing out the baby with the bath water. You only get one chance in life to do things right when that type of situation occurs. I was horrified when he admitted disposing of several albums of photos. For whatever reason, there seems to have been movement of members of my Fogarty family from the Templemore area in County Tipperary to the Durrow area in Queen`s County ( referred to by the Irish as County Laois ) in about the 1820s to 1840s. Durrow seems to have been about 40 kilometres by road from Templemore. My father told me a story a long time ago which has haunted me and kept me going in my research. It was a story based on advice from a third party who was relying on advice from a fourth party. The third party was my father`s Melbourne cousin Perce Fogarty. My father told me the story after a recent phone call to Perce. My father too was then a Melbourne resident. He had been domiciled in Victoria for 46 years and I had spent a large part of my life in Wagga. I was a Wagga resident when my father related a story based on his recent discussion with cousin Perce. It was a story about military desertion. It was asserted that my father`s grandfather John Fogarty had been a British Army deserter who disappeared from a ship tied up in Sydney on which his unit was being transported with family members to or from New Zealand in connection with some trouble which had occurred or been expected to occur there. I eventually came to feel sure that was wrong. I saw that my great-grandfather had come to Australia as an ordinary immigrant. But I told myself there seemed to be a tendency for a bit of truth to be contained in a twisted-about way in old family yarns and I always kept my father`s story in mind as a probably good lead. I think I have found a soldier who was the basis of the desertion story my father told after the yarn on the phone with Perce. Last week I obtained a copy of a passenger record for a Mary Fogarty said to be aged 22 and from Queen`s County who came to Melbourne in March 1858 by the ship "Rodney". Mary Fogarty`s entry in the shipping list said she went to a brother who was a private in the 40th Regiment. I have allowed myself to entertain the idea that Mary Fogarty`s brother was named Michael and that he deserted a few months later. I have arrived at that idea as a result of research which has included visiting a website called "40th of foot". Yes, no upper case in the last word. I discovered last year that the "40th of foot" website had a section about deserters which included an entry for a Private Michael Fogarty from Queen`s County aged 25. It was said he deserted in Melbourne in December 1858. There was a physical description apparently based on a police notice published in "The Government Gazette". The Mary Fogarty of the 1858 "Rodney" voyage seems almost certainly to have been my great-grandfather`s relative who my father said married a man named Arter. My father told me his grandfather had a Melbourne sister who was married to an Englishman of that name. I have seen that the Arter-Fogarty marriage occurred in Melbourne in 1862 and that the bride was named Mary. I have in recent days come to suspect that Mary Arter was in fact not a sister of my great-grandfather but a cousin. I think Perce Fogarty was probably relying on advice from someone in the Arter family when on the phone with my father. Someone who had told him Mary had a brother who deserted from the British Army. The Arter-Fogarty marriage registration gave the bride`s place of birth as County Tipperary and named her parents as John Fogarty and Margaret Brophy. I have a search report obtained from Ireland long ago which satisfies me that my great-grandfather John Fogarty was a son of John Fogarty and Margaret Brophy. I have seen in my research that a 40th Regiment soldier from County Laois named Kieran Fogarty served in Victoria from 1860 until 1863 and then was in New Zealand until 1865 in connection with the events commonly referred to as the Second Maori War. Kieran Fogarty was from the village of Ballykealy in the Durrow area. Kieran Fogarty stayed on in Victoria for a time after the bulk of the 40th Regiment`s departure for New Zealand in 1860. Kieran Fogarty eventually returned to Ireland and took a wife and raised a family. Kieran Fogarty had an older brother named Andrew who came to Australia. He married Johanna Darcy. Records state that Andrew and Kieran`s parents were James Fogarty and Catherine Campion. Andrew Fogarty died in Darlinghurst gaol in Sydney in 1888 while serving a six-month sentence for obtaining money from a firm of rural agents under false pretences while pursuing a living as a selector in the Balranald area in the western Riverina. It seems to me the deserter Michael Fogarty was probably a brother or cousin of Andrew and Kieran. My first name did not come from any tradition. It was chosen because my parents had a friend whose surname was Macandrew. As far as my parents knew, there had been no Andrew on either side of our family. I allow the possibility that Kieran Fogarty`s brother Andrew was also a 40th Regiment man. My first sighting of him in Australia occurs in 1861. I have found his wife and a son and daughter in Wagga in later times. It seems to me my father knew nothing about that family. James Donohoe`s book "The British Army in Australia 1788 - 1870: Index of personnel" says there were an Andrew, a Kerin and a Michael Fogarty serving in Australia with the 40th Regiment during its 1852-60 tour of duty. Regards to all, Andrew Fogarty Casino NSW Australia --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com