William Adams, his wife Elizabeth (nee Martin) and their two children Caroline and John arrived in WA on the Rockingham on May 14th 1830. The Rockingham arrived during a heavy gale and eventually ran aground near present day East Rockingham. Elizabeth was heavily pregnant but she went ashore at Garden Island to assist the Captain's wife who was in labour. Later that day Elizabeth and William's third child Mary Ann was born prematurely on Garden Island. William, who had fought at Waterloo, was indentured to Thomas Peel. The family spent the next three years at the settlement at Clarence (near modern day Woodman's Point) living in very poor conditions.
This database contains everything that I have discovered so far about William, Elizabeth and their descendants although individual "Notes" have been excluded from the online version.
Before I found the light and moved to TMG I was using software which did not allow easy sourcing. Hence much of my early data is not well sourced. I want to pay tribute to Vicki Cooper and Jan McElroy who were real pioneers of Adams family research in WA and who have provided me with a great deal of the information which underpins this database. I also want to pay special tribute to Tony Harrop who sadly died in 1983. Tony's contribution to Martin and Adams family research in the 1970s and 80s is immeasurable. Many other researchers have helped me with information including the late Lorraine Eddy for which I am very grateful.
I still have a great deal of work to do to make the "Notes" tags against key family members more readable and less of a "data dump". This task will be ongoing for some time.
If anyone has more information, photos and/or corrections I would love to hear from you. To be on the safe side I have excluded Living People from the database. If you spot anyone who is still alive please let me know and I will remove them.