Adventurous Elizabeth

When I first saw the belated birth certificate of William Napoleon Read, child of Elizabeth Margaret Lodge, and born on board the 'Napoleon' I believed that Elizabeth and her husband to be, James Ralph, were running away together under an assumed name. There were the initials JR, common to both, and both were carpenters/sawyers and the ages were compatible. I thought it was possible that they tried to get married, but couldn’t because she was under-age, she became pregnant and they fled. Since the child would be noted born under the assumed name on board, Elizabeth and James Ralph felt compelled to continue the fiction when they decided to regularize their own union in Melbourne, Australia.  It all sounded plausible….but what about her claim that she was married to James Read in 1850, in Wellington, New Zealand? No marriages registered, no intentions to marry and a check of the early index, held by the NZGS revealed no marriage by Elizabeth Lodge or James Read or Reed or Reid.

 Then I saw another family tree containing James Ralph and his parents and siblings and this one had James’s birth place which was not the same as that of ‘James Read’, apparently the father of William Napoleon Read/Ralph. This detailed tree included the fact that James Ralph had traveled to Australia with his parents and siblings on the ‘Sarah’ just before Elizabeth had sailed on the ‘Napoleon’. It sounded as if Elizabeth was following him, but it could have been a coincidence. She may have been following James Read. She may have been escaping censure. She may have been looking for her parents and sisters who could have still been in Australia.

There are shipping records for these journeys. Newspaper ‘Shipping Intelligence’

notes passengers under the name of ‘Ralph’ on board the brig ‘Sarah’ to Melbourne, departing from Wellington, 5^th June 1852. Passengers on the barque ‘Napoleon’ sailing 3^rd July 1852 included ‘Eliz Reed’ and ‘Mary A. Jackson and child’. Mary was the witness on the birth registration.

Other newspaper references between 1850 and 1853 in the Wellington district  refer to a James Read, a carpenter, a James Reed, a landholder, and James Read aka J.E.A Ferrars who didn’t pay his lodgings in March, 1852…

Researching is not a process in a linear progression. You know this fact or make an assumption….. apply it and find out more, which leads you backwards to something else, further on for some generations, then back again. Some people emerge as complex characters that are hard to trace: prone to unconventional ways of doing things, unpredictable and disinclined to follow the herd. Elizabeth could be one of those people…