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South Western Victoria. E-mail: judpaula@cbl.com.au Our Pettingill family arrived at Portland Bay Victoria Australia on 9th April 1853 on board the ship "Eliza". The "Eliza", a 321 ton Barque had left Plymouth England four long months earlier on 30th November 1852. On board were John Pettingill aged 34, agricultural labourer of Norfolk, his young bride Elizabeth (his 2nd wife) aged 21, along with 5 children from his first marriage - Mary Ann 12, Emma 11, John 9, Harriet 7 and Sarah Jane 4. On the voyage out to Australia Elizabeth gave birth to a baby girl, she was named Eliza. Another two children were born at Yambuk; Frederick George born 1857 and Martha born 1859. Elizabeth died aged 29 in 1859 and is buried at Port Fairy Cemetery. John married for the third time in 1862 to an Irish lass, Mary Cleary. They went on to have seven children. In all John fathered 15 children that we know of. JOHN PETTINGILL John was baptised 19th October 1817 at Fritton in Suffolk England, son of John Pettingill and Mary Ann Cutting. As mentioned above John was married three times, his first wife was Marianne Keable, sometimes spelt Cable. They were married in 1837 at Fritton. The first of their 5 children was Mary Ann born 15th October 1839, also at Fritton. When Mary Ann (my gr.grandmother) was 16 years old, she married James Dyson in 1854 at Belfast (Port Fairy), James and Mary Ann had a large family of 16 children. The Dyson's were yet another pioneering family of the district with strong links to the Sharrock family.
Of the other children of John and Marianne….
John and Elizabeth Clement/Ameys/Amos….
John and Mary Cleary….
JOHN PETTINGILL born 1790 & MARY ANN CUTTING born 1799 The above were also the parents of….
According to an obituary, Frederick was born at Great Yarmouth NFK in 1841, although at this stage we haven't found a birth for him. The obit went on to say "He spent most of his youth and early manhood at Great Yarmouth. He followed a clerical avocation in the Old Country where he was married. When he was about 33 years of age, in 1874, he decided to try his luck in Australia to which country he came, landing in Melbourne, his wife and family following about 12 months later. Opportunities seemed to offer in the Port Fairy district, and at Yambuk he started a fellmongery business. After a few years of active work there, he transferred his domicile to Rosebrook where he took charge of a wool scouring establishment, and afterwards purchased the farm property at Rosebrook. Some years later he disposed of this and went into hotelkeeping, his first business venture in this direction being the Woolsthorpe Hotel which he owned for 2 years". It goes on to say that he next purchased the Caramut Hotel and later the Seacombe Boarding House at Port Fairy, which he and his wife ran for 13 years.
It would appear that all of John and Frederick's other siblings stayed in England.
John born 1790 was the son of yet another John and his wife Martha Miller.
Unfortunately, not very much is known of the lives of our early Pettingill families in Victoria. It is a known fact that life in the colony at the time of their arrival in the early 1850's was very tough and primitive. Despite this, the family survived and flourished, many settled in the district and lived out their lives there, others moved on. The descendents of this pioneering family are now spread far and wide across Australia. FRITTON SUFFOLK/NORFOLK ENGLAND In 1974 county boundaries in England were changed. Up until that year Fritton was within the county of Suffolk, now it is Norfolk. There are actually two villages with the name Fritton in Norfolk; our village is the one closer to Great Yarmouth on the coast of what is now Norfolk. Fritton Decoy, on the river that runs up to Great Yarmouth, can be traced back to the Vikings when they, the Vikings, preyed upon the coast of the region. The name Fritton is thought to have received its name through a knight called Freytun and is also mentioned in the Doomsday Book. The village church, St Edmund's, as it stands today is the work of many periods of English history. There are Roman tiles in the tower, as well as Saxon and Norman features.
When I first started researching this family, I was very lucky to have made contact with a lady by the name of Cherry Ayers of Lowestoft in Suffolk. Cherry has a very keen interest in the Pettingill surname, however to our mutual dismay, she discovered that a gr.gr.grandmother she thought was a Pettingill, turned out not to be on her tree. Fortunately for us, she had done heaps of research into our particular family and she, along with a cousin Jeff McNeil of Whittington in Geelong, have been largely responsible for much of the data collected up to this time. E-mail: judpaula@cbl.com.au |