William Warnes

Level 346

Maureen Withey on 19th July 2026

Early on Tuesday morning last,  fifty four convicts sentenced to transportation at the late County Assizes and Sessions, were put on board the Sarah, Capt. Moore, lying in our River. The hatchways were closed at 20 minutes after two, and this London Trader sailed immediately for Lowestoft, which harbour they readied about eleven o'clock, and in three hours were out of sight, on their way to Portsmouth. Their being  sent off by sea (through the Norwich and Lowestoft Navigation) instead of by land-conveyance, will be a very considerable  saving of expense to the county of Norfolk. The following are the names of these convicts,  with their sentences: For Life— … Charles Goodson, William Warnes, ... Norfolk Chronicle, 3 May 1834.

Level 3

Tracey Bradbury on 19th July 2026

The multi-generational trajectory of the Wornes family was permanently set in motion on the night of January 23, 1834, in the rural landscape of Norfolk, England. William Wornes senior, a laborer from Stanhoe, launched a coordinated and violent ambush against his employer, Mr. J. Hunter, the overseer of the neighboring parish of Barwick. Alongside an accomplice, Charles Goodson, Wornes targeted Hunter’s residence at 9 o'clock in the evening, unleashing a sudden volley of gunfire through the home's windows. The assault was severe; a young servant girl, Mary Ann Langley, was struck in the face by flying lead as she entered the parlor, and a subsequent examination of the property revealed forty distinct bullet holes shattered across the different window panes. Following the shooting, Wornes fled the scene on foot, running back to his home in Stanhoe without his hat and entirely out of breath. When a guard stationed at the property intercepted him, Wornes immediately went inside to swap his heavy leather working boots, or "highlows," in a deliberate attempt to destroy the physical footprint evidence connecting him to the mud outside Hunter’s windows. Although both men attempted to manufacture an alibi during their trial at the Norfolk Lent Assizes in March 1834, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Characterizing the ambush as a "most barbarous outrage," the presiding Judge explicitly noted that had any of the occupants died from the forty rounds fired into the room, both men would have been executed on the gallows. Sparing their lives, the court sentenced both William Wornes and Goodson to be transported to the penal colonies for life — an exile that uprooted his family from England and initiated their migration to the Pacific. Following his life sentence, William senior was held in custody until his departure on the convict ship Lady Kennaway on October 27, 1834. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on February 13, 1835. While he served his sentence under the colonial assignment system, his family remained behind in Norfolk navigating the public scandal of his conviction. His daughter Rebecca was born in Norfolk in 1834 and baptized on October 26, 1834, just one day before her father's ship set sail. Seeking to bring his household to the colony, William senior later lodged an official application under the government-sponsored family reunification program, requesting that his wife and children be permitted to join him. In 1839, his application was successful, and Margaret and her five children boarded a vessel to Tasmania to rejoin the patriarch. The family’s reunion on the Tasmanian frontier initially expanded the household, with the births of John (1841), Matthew (1842), and Henry (1845) in Launceston. However, the domestic environment apparently quickly deteriorated under William senior's volatile dominance. The household completely fractured following the May 1846 birth of an illegitimate daughter, Ann, to his daughter Susan. The official civil birth registration recorded the child under the shorthand "U Warns" (possibly a clerical mistranscription of handwritten copperplate "W. Warns"), explicitly documenting William senior as both the father and grandfather of the child. Margaret left the family home when Ann was about 6 months old. At a subsequent legal proceeding, Susan testified under oath that Margaret had permanently walked out of the family home after "words" with their father around the harvest of late 1846 or early 1847, and had not returned since. Margaret fled the immediate household, apparently taking twenty-year-old William junior and four-year-old Matthew across the Bass Strait to Victoria to build a separate life. On October 5, 1847, William senior was granted his freedom. Eighteen days later, on October 23, 1847, the pressure cooker within the remaining Tasmanian household violently ruptured. At the family's Illawarra homestead near Longford, fifteen-year-old Francis Wornes was shot and killed by a pistol held by his father. Just eighteen days after the closure of the legal proceedings regarding the shooting, the infant baby Ann also died, effectively erasing the immediate physical evidence of the household's initial crisis. At the subsequent coroner’s inquest, the medical practitioner testified that the lead ball entered Francis’s nose and exited through the base of his brain, causing immediate death. Lacking any independent legal or social protections in the colonial system, twelve-year-old Rebecca and her sister Susan served as the only eyewitnesses old enough to testify. The sisters corroborated William senior's narrative of an accidental discharge involving an ambush in the dark. The colonial coroner returned a verdict of justifiable homicide, allowing the patriarch to walk free. This courtroom trauma precipitated a permanent, absolute fracture across the lineage, dividing the family into two parallel worlds. The Goldfield and Cobden Households (William Jr., Rebecca, Matthew, Margaret) This branch successfully executed a total geographic separation from the patriarch. Following the 1847 trial, Rebecca escaped Tasmania at some stage entirely to rejoin her mother. I suspect the entire family fled to Adelaide in South Australia, where Stephen claims he was born, and it was from this springboard the family moved to New Brunswick. Stephen's tombstone suggests he was born in 1856, but the 1861 Canada census has him aged 8. Rebecca may have escaped the family to head east to her mother and brothers, and used the booming economy of the central Victorian goldfields to forge an independent path, marrying Thomas Wagstaff in Bendigo in 1853 and raising her first five children within the immediate Bendigo district: Hannah (born 1855), Thomas Francis junior (born 1856), Margaret Anne (who died in infancy in 1859), James William (born 1861), and Eliza Anne (born 1863). Following the breakdown of her marriage to Wagstaffe, Rebecca partnered with James New around 1864, registering nine subsequent children across three primary gold hubs: James (1865) and Henry (1866) at Eaglehawk; Elizabeth (1867), May (1869), and Jane (1870) at Daylesford; and Robert (1871), Samuel (1873), Ellen (1874), and Rebecca (1876) at Sandhurst (Bendigo). She married James 6 months after Thomas died, 20 years after she had her first of 9 children with him! Her brother William junior also migrated to the goldfields, marrying Elizabeth Wantling (Verley) in Bendigo in 1859. The couple did not have any children together and eventually apparently separated; Elizabeth relocated to northern Victoria to live near her adult children from a previous marriage, passing away in Mooroopna in 1889, while William junior remained anchored as a farmer in the Cobden district. Matthew remained a bachelor in the Cobden district, remaining by Margaret's side until her death at age 82 on May 4, 1887. William and Matthew were co-informants on Margaret's death certificate, and it was here that there was the surprising listing of all surviving children including Francis aged 55, suggesting she went to her grave unaware of the 1847 tragedy. Matthew continued to reside in Cobden and was the informant on William junior's death certificate , who lived out his final years as a retired farmer. William junior passed away in Cobden on October 9, 1893. In his last will and testament, he appointed Rebecca's partner, James New, as his sole executor. The Supreme Court of Victoria probate file, granted on December 9, 1895, explicitly notes that William junior held no real estate at the time of his death, leaving a purely personal liquid estate sworn not to exceed the value of £242, three shillings, and sixpence to James New's administration. Whether William junior or his mother ever owned real estate during their decades in Cobden remains unverified. After fulfilling his caretaking duties, Matthew senior moved to Narrandera and Albury, where he married at age 65, before spending his final years in Pericoe within the Towamba Valley network. The Captive and Exile Line (William Snr., Susan, John, Henry) This branch remained bound to the volatile authority of William senior. To isolate his remaining children from anyone who could protect them, William senior dragged the household out of the colony, fleeing across the globe to the remote backwoods of Restigouche, New Brunswick, Canada, where he acquired a 100-acre land grant under the Labor Act in Colborne. Prior to their transatlantic flight, Susan gave birth to her son, Stephen, in 1853. Because his birth was the result of a continued incestuous relationship with her father, the birth was intentionally kept off the civil registries to evade the law, with the family later manufacturing a fictional birthplace of Adelaide, South Australia, to serve as a perfect paper shield. The true timeline of the household was unlocked by official passenger indexes, which document that John Williams — a free merchant mariner and cooper from St. Helier, Jersey — did not arrive in St. John, New Brunswick, until 1858, full five years after Stephen's birth. This geographical reality proves that John Williams was not Stephen's biological father, but rather stepped into the household years later. The 1861 Canadian Census records them sharing a single roof, enumerating William senior (aged 55), John (aged 20), and Henry (aged 17) directly alongside Susan, her new partner John Williams, five-year-old Stephen (enumerated as a Williams), and her baby daughter Amelia (aged 1). Between 1860 and 1867, Susan gave birth to four more children in Canada: Amelia, John, William, and Eliza. Following the disappearance of John Williams around 1865, the household executed a frantic exodus from North America. William senior, Susan, John, Henry, and the children abandoned Canada and arrived in Auckland, New Zealand. By 1869, Susan was living with Charles Hanson in Auckland, where they had a daughter named Mary. In January 1871, the entire extended family boarded the barque Alice Cameron to return to the Australian mainland. William senior led the clan inland to the Albury border district, where he died on December 31, 1875, at the age of 79, leaving behind a violent patriarchal blueprint that his adult children would replicate. While objective, verified historical facts map a family of sweeping global movements, a closer examination of the internal timeline reveals a dark, compelling reality regarding multi-generational control and systemic domestic abuse. This underlying theory posits that William Wornes senior established a precise blueprint of domestic control that his adult son, John Wornes, would later replicate. This lens of trauma perfectly explains the otherwise baffling fractures, sudden international flights, and total walls of silence that came to define the family across three continents. The primary manifestation of this domestic crisis occurred around December 1846, when William senior's wife, Margaret Humphreys, made the desperate choice to abandon her home. For a mother in a penal colony to risk total destitution and legally abandon her remaining young daughters suggests the discovery of an unbearable horror under her own roof. Just months prior, in May 1846, Susan had given birth to an illegitimate daughter named Ann. Though Susan later claimed under oath that the father was an absent third party, the civil index marked the father as unknown under the shorthand "U Warns," unmasking the patriarch. The immediate consequence of Margaret's departure was an isolated house of terror for the remaining children. This pressure cooker violently ruptured on October 23, 1847, when fifteen-year-old Francis Wornes was shot and killed. When re-examining these tragic events, the specific medical testimony—that the bullet entered Francis’s nose and exited the base of his brain—strongly indicates that this was not a random accident or a low-level scuffle in the dark, but rather the violent climax of a direct domestic intervention. Under this theory, Francis may have grown increasingly aware of the severe crisis gripping the household following his mother's flight and the birth of his sister Susan's illegitimate baby. Rather than an accidental discharge involving an ambush, the physical evidence allows for a scenario where a brave teenage son actively returned to the home to confront a tyrannical and armed father about the systemic abuse of his sisters. This confrontation cost a young man his life and forced his surviving sister, twelve-year-old Rebecca, to take the stand to corroborate a lie to save the patriarch from the gallows, becoming the foundational trauma of her young life. The Canadian Isolation and the Fate of John Williams The mid-1850s marked the absolute height of a massive, specific transatlantic maritime trade triangle that connected Port Adelaide directly to St. John and other ports in New Brunswick. Susan’s son Stephen claims to have been born in Adelaide in 1853, and this perfectly aligns with the shipping lanes they would have used to escape Australia for Canada shortly thereafter. The shipping logs from 1853 to 1855 show exactly how this transit operated and why it was highly accessible to a transient timber-working family. During the mid-1850s, Port Adelaide was experiencing an unprecedented construction boom, but South Australia lacked natural softwood forests for building. To fill the void, massive timber ships built and flagged in St. John and Richibucto, New Brunswick, sailed down the Atlantic and around the Cape, loaded entirely with Canadian lumber. Ships like the Titania, the Carrie Humphries, and the Josephine regularly arrived at the Port Adelaide wharves from New Brunswick carrying millions of feet of Canadian timber. Once these massive Canadian vessels unloaded their timber at Port Adelaide, they needed to return to their home ports in New Brunswick. Because they were commercial cargo ships, they actively took on paying passengers, ballasted cargo (like Australian wool), or desperate colonial laborers willing to work their passage to North America. Furthermore, the mid-1850s saw the rise of the world's most famous passenger clippers, which were built explicitly in the shipyards of New Brunswick to service the Australian run. I propose that sometime following the 1847 Francis inquest in Tasmania, William senior, Susan, John, and Henry and possibly Rebecca fled the island. To muddy their legal tracks, they headed west to South Australia. While laying low in South Australia in 1853, Susan gave birth to Stephen. Because the child was the product of her father’s continued exploitation, they couldn't register the birth locally without risking arrest, so they stayed off the books. When they walked down to the Port Adelaide docks in 1854 or 1855 to escape Australia forever, they didn't have to look hard for a ship. The harbor was filled with massive New Brunswick timber clippers preparing to sail right back to St. John. By boarding one of these returning lumber vessels, the patriarch successfully dragged his captive family straight into the remote forests of New Brunswick, using the very ships that built Adelaide to disappear from the southern hemisphere entirely. This may have been the opportunity for Rebecca to head to Bendigo to find Margaret, William and Matthew. This branch remained entirely bound to the volatile authority of William senior. To isolate his remaining dependents from anyone who could protect them, William senior dragged the household along a completely separate geographical trajectory from the Victorian goldfield escapees. Following their departure from Tasmania, they made their way to South Australia, where Susan gave birth to her son, Stephen, in Adelaide in 1853. Because his birth was the product of a continued incestuous relationship with her father, the event was kept entirely off the civil registries to evade the law. The family’s stay in Adelaide was brief; around 1854, they boarded a vessel leaving Port Adelaide to escape the colony entirely. They utilized the active transatlantic timber shipping lanes to cross the globe directly to New Brunswick, Canada. Moving with remarkable speed, William senior successfully acquired physical acreage in Colborne, New Brunswick, between late 1854 and early 1855, establishing a 100-acre wilderness homestead under the local Labor Act. It was into this isolated clearing, full five years later, that a free merchant mariner and cooper from Jersey named John Williams arrived in 1858, stepping into a household where the patriarch had already fathered his own grandson. The 1861 Canadian Census records this entire group sharing a single roof, enumerating William senior, John, and Henry directly alongside Susan, her new partner John Williams, five-year-old Stephen (enumerated as a Williams), and her baby daughter Amelia... Inside the Wornes bubble, truth was sacrificed for survival, and the outside world was a collective enemy to be deceived. With the independent children gone, William senior asserted absolute control over Susan, dragging her across the globe to isolate her in the remote wilderness of Canada. The entry of the merchant sailor John Williams into the household during the New Brunswick years marks a looming transition. As a merchant sailor, John Williams would have routinely been away at sea for months at a time, leaving his young daughter Amelia completely isolated in a home managed by William senior and an adult John Wornes — who had grown up normalizing his father’s predatory behaviors. It is highly probable that John Williams eventually returned from a voyage, discovered the exploitation occurring within the home, and confronted the family — an intervention that likely resulted in his death. Another explanation could be that they abandoned the property while John was away, choosing New Zealand where there was complete anonymity and were completely hidden from John. No death certificate or burial record exists anywhere for the sailor after 1861 that I can find; other researchers believe he died at Eel Creek, New Brunswick, in 1865, but no evidence substantiates this. Instead, shortly after the 1867 birth of Eliza, the family executed a frantic exodus from Canada to Auckland, New Zealand, mirroring the behavior of a household running from a crime scene. By abandoning the sailor in Canada, the protective barriers around young Amelia were completely demolished. Her uncle, John Wornes, who was nineteen years her senior and had lived in her pocket since her birth, targeted her from at least mid-adolescence. The Bowna Timber Syndicate and Enforced Silence William senior never re-married and John Wornes never legally married, ensuring no outside women could enter the home and expose their lifestyle. By the mid-1870s, the family pushed inland to the Albury borderlands, establishing a massive, thirty-man timber-splitting labor barracks in the village of Bowna. Within this tight, multi-generational circle, the abuse repeated itself; in 1878, a seventeen-year-old Amelia gave birth to her first son, Angus, in Albury, New South Wales. The arrival of a child born to a biological uncle and niece immediately threatened to expose the household to criminal incest prosecutions, triggering a panicked, frantic game of cross-Tasman ping-pong. They fled back to Auckland to lay low, returned to Sydney in February 1880 utilizing a highly coordinated "Williams sibling cover story" where Amelia's protective older brother, William Williams, posed as the father to clear port customs, and then raced back to New Zealand so their next daughter, Emily, could be born in Auckland under an entirely fresh identity. By March 1882, the family unit returned to New South Wales aboard the Rotorua, traveling openly under the name Mr. and Mrs. Wornes. John Wornes and Amelia eventually settled down next door from his brother Henry and nephew Stephen in the Albury border district of Bowna, where they raised eleven children in a common-law relationship. This branch of the family operated like a closed syndicate, rewriting their identities on paper as a basic mechanism of survival while fleeing an accumulation of domestic scandal and violence. From the moment William shot and killed his own son Francis, the family bubble functioned under a strict code of absolute silence, ping-ponging back and forth across the Tasman Sea between New South Wales and Auckland to outrun local gossip and legal authorities. Within this deeply isolated family unit, societal taboos completely broke down, culminating in John Wornes fathering eleven children with Susan's own daughter, Amelia. Forced to live a perpetual theatrical performance — switching surnames from Wornes to Williams to Hanson on raw shipping manifests—this generation viewed official documents not as a record of truth, but as tools of convenience to hide an incestuous, fugitive reality from the outside world. The ultimate triumph of this long saga belongs entirely to Amelia. While her mother, Susan, remained broken and institutionalized by the cycle until her death in 1903 (having her death registered down the road in the regional hub of Gerogery), Amelia possessed the profound resilience of her grandmother Margaret and her aunt Rebecca. On March 20, 1901, Amelia staged a brilliant social coup. She walked out on her uncle John, fleeing to the South Coast of New South Wales, and utilized her valid legal status as an unmarried woman to register at the Eden registry office as a single spinster and wed Charles Elton. Because her incestuous relationship with her uncle could never be formally recognized, she was technically free to marry. She chose to ruthlessly erase her past, apparently completely omitting her first eleven children from her life story and her final probate files to protect her fresh, respectable household. She married a younger laborer, Charles Elton, who either accepted her past or was completely unaware of her past, and helped her build a respected, legitimate home in the Towamba Valley until her death on September 28, 1946, where she was buried under a simple wooden cross. During the 1901 family crisis in Bowna when Amelia escaped, the sibling network established a highly organized protective arrangement to shield the youngest children, Alice and Ethel May, from the harsh conditions of adjacent labor camps, with Stephen Wornes and his wife, Ellen Jane, taking them into their home as surrogates, as deduced from the 1901 census. While older sons worked in the timber syndicate, this strategic layout ensured the girls were protected, with census data confirming the specific arrangement. While her younger dependents were left to grow up in the rugged, secretive logging camps of Gippsland with their uncle Stephen, next door to an aging John, the older siblings tracked their mother down the coast. In an extraordinary act of either defiance or resilience, these children hijacked the geography of the region; they formed a physical, supportive crescent around Amelia’s new home in the Towamba Valley, merging their lives in communities like Berry, Pambula, and Bega. Even when the inherited curse of Wornes family violence caught up with them in the 1930s — through the sensational strychnine poisoning of Arthur in 1930 and the suspicious hunting death of Matthew junior in 1933 when he was "accidentally" shot by his wife — the surviving siblings fiercely protected the maternal bond, respecting Amelia's quiet peace until the end. The fragile peace Amelia built was permanently threatened in 1926 when her son George Elton chose to move 350 kilometers north, marrying directly inside the Wornes family enclave of Berry. By embedding himself in the exact community where his half-siblings Emily, Arthur, and Matthew lived, George openly prioritized family connection over his mother's code of secrecy, an act viewed down south in the Towamba Valley as a dangerous betrayal that ultimately led to Amelia cutting him entirely out of her estate. Because the separate branches had severed all contact following the 1846 Tasmanian split, Matthew senior had probably never previously met Amelia, who was born in Canada and raised in New Zealand and the high country; their arrival in Pericoe marked the first time these two parallel lineages physically crossed paths. Matthew Wornes senior died in Pericoe on January 26, 1916, at the age of seventy-three, concluding a life that began in the trauma of a fractured penal colony household and ended peacefully in the shared soil of his family’s coastal sanctuary. While objective, verified historical facts map a family of sweeping global movements, a closer examination of the internal timeline reveals a dark, compelling reality regarding multi-generational control and systemic domestic abuse. This underlying theory posits that William Wornes senior established a precise blueprint of domestic control that his adult son, John Wornes, would later replicate. This lens of trauma perfectly explains the otherwise baffling fractures, sudden international flights, and total walls of silence that came to define the family across three continents. The primary manifestation of this domestic crisis occurred around December 1846, when William senior's wife, Margaret Humphreys, made the desperate choice to abandon her home. For a mother in a penal colony to risk total destitution and legally abandon her remaining young daughters suggests the discovery of an unbearable horror under her own roof. Just months prior, in May 1846, Susan had given birth to an illegitimate daughter named Ann. Though Susan later claimed under oath that the father was an absent third party, the civil index marked the father as unknown under the shorthand "U Warns," unmasking the patriarch. The immediate consequence of Margaret's departure was an isolated house of terror for the remaining children. This pressure cooker violently ruptured on October 23, 1847, when fifteen-year-old Francis Wornes was shot and killed. When re-examining these tragic events, the specific medical testimony—that the bullet entered Francis’s nose and exited the base of his brain—strongly indicates that this was not a random accident or a low-level scuffle in the dark, but rather the violent climax of a direct domestic intervention. Under this theory, Francis may have grown increasingly aware of the severe crisis gripping the household following his mother's flight and the birth of his sister Susan's illegitimate baby. Rather than an accidental discharge involving an ambush, the physical evidence allows for a scenario where a brave teenage son actively returned to the home to confront a tyrannical and armed father about the systemic abuse of his sisters. This confrontation cost a young man his life and forced his surviving sister, twelve-year-old Rebecca, to take the stand to corroborate a lie to save the patriarch from the gallows, becoming the foundational trauma of her young life. The Canadian Isolation and the Fate of John Williams The mid-1850s marked the absolute height of a massive, specific transatlantic maritime trade triangle that connected Port Adelaide directly to St. John and other ports in New Brunswick. Susan’s son Stephen claims to have been born in Adelaide in 1853, and this perfectly aligns with the shipping lanes they would have used to escape Australia for Canada shortly thereafter. The shipping logs from 1853 to 1855 show exactly how this transit operated and why it was highly accessible to a transient timber-working family. During the mid-1850s, Port Adelaide was experiencing an unprecedented construction boom, but South Australia lacked natural softwood forests for building. To fill the void, massive timber ships built and flagged in St. John and Richibucto, New Brunswick, sailed down the Atlantic and around the Cape, loaded entirely with Canadian lumber. Ships like the Titania, the Carrie Humphries, and the Josephine regularly arrived at the Port Adelaide wharves from New Brunswick carrying millions of feet of Canadian timber. Once these massive Canadian vessels unloaded their timber at Port Adelaide, they needed to return to their home ports in New Brunswick. Because they were commercial cargo ships, they actively took on paying passengers, ballasted cargo (like Australian wool), or desperate colonial laborers willing to work their passage to North America. Furthermore, the mid-1850s saw the rise of the world's most famous passenger clippers, which were built explicitly in the shipyards of New Brunswick to service the Australian run. I propose that sometime following the 1847 Francis inquest in Tasmania, William senior, Susan, John, and Henry and possibly Rebecca fled the island. To muddy their legal tracks, they headed west to South Australia. While laying low in South Australia in 1853, Susan gave birth to Stephen. Because the child was the product of her father’s continued exploitation, they couldn't register the birth locally without risking arrest, so they stayed off the books. When they walked down to the Port Adelaide docks in 1854 or 1855 to escape Australia forever, they didn't have to look hard for a ship. The harbor was filled with massive New Brunswick timber clippers preparing to sail right back to St. John. By boarding one of these returning lumber vessels, the patriarch successfully dragged his captive family straight into the remote forests of New Brunswick, using the very ships that built Adelaide to disappear from the southern hemisphere entirely. This may have been the opportunity for Rebecca to head to Bendigo to find Margaret, William and Matthew. This branch remained entirely bound to the volatile authority of William senior. To isolate his remaining dependents from anyone who could protect them, William senior dragged the household along a completely separate geographical trajectory from the Victorian goldfield escapees. Following their departure from Tasmania, they made their way to South Australia, where Susan gave birth to her son, Stephen, in Adelaide in 1853. Because his birth was the product of a continued incestuous relationship with her father, the event was kept entirely off the civil registries to evade the law. The family’s stay in Adelaide was brief; around 1854, they boarded a vessel leaving Port Adelaide to escape the colony entirely. They utilized the active transatlantic timber shipping lanes to cross the globe directly to New Brunswick, Canada. Moving with remarkable speed, William senior successfully acquired physical acreage in Colborne, New Brunswick, between late 1854 and early 1855, establishing a 100-acre wilderness homestead under the local Labor Act. It was into this isolated clearing, full five years later, that a free merchant mariner and cooper from Jersey named John Williams arrived in 1858, stepping into a household where the patriarch had already fathered his own grandson. The 1861 Canadian Census records this entire group sharing a single roof, enumerating William senior, John, and Henry directly alongside Susan, her new partner John Williams, five-year-old Stephen (enumerated as a Williams), and her baby daughter Amelia... Inside the Wornes bubble, truth was sacrificed for survival, and the outside world was a collective enemy to be deceived. With the independent children gone, William senior asserted absolute control over Susan, dragging her across the globe to isolate her in the remote wilderness of Canada. The entry of the merchant sailor John Williams into the household during the New Brunswick years marks a looming transition. As a merchant sailor, John Williams would have routinely been away at sea for months at a time, leaving his young daughter Amelia completely isolated in a home managed by William senior and an adult John Wornes — who had grown up normalizing his father’s predatory behaviors. It is highly probable that John Williams eventually returned from a voyage, discovered the exploitation occurring within the home, and confronted the family — an intervention that likely resulted in his death. Another explanation could be that they abandoned the property while John was away, choosing New Zealand where there was complete anonymity and were completely hidden from John. No death certificate or burial record exists anywhere for the sailor after 1861 that I can find; other researchers believe he died at Eel Creek, New Brunswick, in 1865, but no evidence substantiates this. Instead, shortly after the 1867 birth of Eliza, the family executed a frantic exodus from Canada to Auckland, New Zealand, mirroring the behavior of a household running from a crime scene. By abandoning the sailor in Canada, the protective barriers around young Amelia were completely demolished. Her uncle, John Wornes, who was nineteen years her senior and had lived in her pocket since her birth, targeted her from at least mid-adolescence. The Bowna Timber Syndicate and Enforced Silence William senior never re-married and John Wornes never legally married, ensuring no outside women could enter the home and expose their lifestyle. By the mid-1870s, the family pushed inland to the Albury borderlands, establishing a massive, thirty-man timber-splitting labor barracks in the village of Bowna. Within this tight, multi-generational circle, the abuse repeated itself; in 1878, a seventeen-year-old Amelia gave birth to her first son, Angus, in Albury, New South Wales. The arrival of a child born to a biological uncle and niece immediately threatened to expose the household to criminal incest prosecutions, triggering a panicked, frantic game of cross-Tasman ping-pong. They fled back to Auckland to lay low, returned to Sydney in February 1880 utilizing a highly coordinated "Williams sibling cover story" where Amelia's protective older brother, William Williams, posed as the father to clear port customs, and then raced back to New Zealand so their next daughter, Emily, could be born in Auckland under an entirely fresh identity. By March 1882, the family unit returned to New South Wales aboard the Rotorua, traveling openly under the name Mr. and Mrs. Wornes. John Wornes and Amelia eventually settled down next door from his brother Henry and nephew Stephen in the Albury border district of Bowna, where they raised eleven children in a common-law relationship. This branch of the family operated like a closed syndicate, rewriting their identities on paper as a basic mechanism of survival while fleeing an accumulation of domestic scandal and violence. From the moment William shot and killed his own son Francis, the family bubble functioned under a strict code of absolute silence, ping-ponging back and forth across the Tasman Sea between New South Wales and Auckland to outrun local gossip and legal authorities. Within this deeply isolated family unit, societal taboos completely broke down, culminating in John Wornes fathering eleven children with Susan's own daughter, Amelia. Forced to live a perpetual theatrical performance — switching surnames from Wornes to Williams to Hanson on raw shipping manifests—this generation viewed official documents not as a record of truth, but as tools of convenience to hide an incestuous, fugitive reality from the outside world. The ultimate triumph of this long saga belongs entirely to Amelia. While her mother, Susan, remained broken and institutionalized by the cycle until her death in 1903 (having her death registered down the road in the regional hub of Gerogery), Amelia possessed the profound resilience of her grandmother Margaret and her aunt Rebecca. On March 20, 1901, Amelia staged a brilliant social coup. She walked out on her uncle John, fleeing to the South Coast of New South Wales, and utilized her valid legal status as an unmarried woman to register at the Eden registry office as a single spinster and wed Charles Elton. Because her incestuous relationship with her uncle could never be formally recognized, she was technically free to marry. She chose to ruthlessly erase her past, apparently completely omitting her first eleven children from her life story and her final probate files to protect her fresh, respectable household. She married a younger laborer, Charles Elton, who either accepted her past or was completely unaware of her past, and helped her build a respected, legitimate home in the Towamba Valley until her death on September 28, 1946, where she was buried under a simple wooden cross. During the 1901 family crisis in Bowna when Amelia escaped, the sibling network established a highly organized protective arrangement to shield the youngest children, Alice and Ethel May, from the harsh conditions of adjacent labor camps, with Stephen Wornes and his wife, Ellen Jane, taking them into their home as surrogates, as deduced from the 1901 census. While older sons worked in the timber syndicate, this strategic layout ensured the girls were protected, with census data confirming the specific arrangement. While her younger dependents were left to grow up in the rugged, secretive logging camps of Gippsland with their uncle Stephen, next door to an aging John, the older siblings tracked their mother down the coast. In an extraordinary act of either defiance or resilience, these children hijacked the geography of the region; they formed a physical, supportive crescent around Amelia’s new home in the Towamba Valley, merging their lives in communities like Berry, Pambula, and Bega. Even when the inherited curse of Wornes family violence caught up with them in the 1930s — through the sensational strychnine poisoning of Arthur in 1930 and the suspicious hunting death of Matthew junior in 1933 when he was "accidentally" shot by his wife — the surviving siblings fiercely protected the maternal bond, respecting Amelia's quiet peace until the end. The fragile peace Amelia built was permanently threatened in 1926 when her son George Elton chose to move 350 kilometers north, marrying directly inside the Wornes family enclave of Berry. By embedding himself in the exact community where his half-siblings Emily, Arthur, and Matthew lived, George openly prioritized family connection over his mother's code of secrecy, an act viewed down south in the Towamba Valley as a dangerous betrayal that ultimately led to Amelia cutting him entirely out of her estate. Because the separate branches had severed all contact following the 1846 Tasmanian split, Matthew senior had probably never previously met Amelia, who was born in Canada and raised in New Zealand and the high country; their arrival in Pericoe marked the first time these two parallel lineages physically crossed paths. Matthew Wornes senior died in Pericoe on January 26, 1916, at the age of seventy-three, concluding a life that began in the trauma of a fractured penal colony household and ended peacefully in the shared soil of his family’s coastal sanctuary.

Level 2

Pat Garratt on 11th July 2020

The initial name is listed as Warnes and all details fefer to WORNES. The correct name being Wornes.

Level 6

W.Farrell on 10th June 2016

Rebecca Wornes and Susan Wornes, testified at the inquest of Francis Wornes.

Also known as William Wornes, William Wornes Born 15th November 1797 Baptized 30th November 1797 Married 13 August 1824 Died 1876 William Wornes was born 15th November 1797 at Stanhoe in Norfolk, England and ‘publicly baptized’ 15 days later on the 30th November 1797. #Norfolk Parish Records He was the son of William Wornes born in Norfolk circa 1760 and Margaret Mott. #Norfolk Parish Records The Baptism of William Wornes (last entry) William was a farmer. William Wornes married Margaret Humphries/Humphreys, the daughter of Francis Humphreys and Ann Jarvis both born in Norfolk circa 1770. Margaret Humphreys was born 8th May 1804 in Stanhoe, Norfolk and died on the 4th May 1887 at Cobden, Victoria. (Vic#5825). The marriage by banns took place in Stanhoe, Norfolk on the 13th of August 1824. IGI Film#455396 and Film#108834 Ref #108834. Pallots Marriage Record of William Wornes and Margaret Humphries At the Lent Assizes in Norfolk in March 1834 William Wornes was charged along with a man called Charles Goodson of ‘Intent to Murder’ a man called John Hunter. The charges against William Wornes and Charles Goodson & following transcript. Put on Judgment Both Guilty of intent (to cause?) death Charles Goodson } 23rd January last at Barwick William Warnes } certain guns loaded & charged with gunpowder & divers leaden shot Labrs. } which guns they in both hands of each of them (equally?) had and held at and against and upon John Hunter’s body to (?) and shoot & discharge with intent to murder him. 2nd To maim him 3rd To disfigure him 4th To disable him 5th To do him grievous bodily harm 6th -10th Pistols (implied?) of guns 11th -15th Charging Goodson as prime Warnes as Acc(omplis) 16th -20th Charging Warnes as Prime Goodson as Acc. 21st -25th Person Unknown Prime & Goodson & Warnes Accs. William Wornes was convicted on 22nd March 1834 of ‘Shooting with Intent to Murder,’ and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to Transportation for life. William Wornes conviction at the Lent Assizes Norfolk 1834 Prisoner No.78615 William Warnes/Wornes was transported to the Colony of Van Dieman’s Land aboard the vessel ‘SS Lady Kennaway’ from the port of Cork in Ireland on 10th June 1834. The record states ; Transported for shooting with intent to murder. Gaol Report; Bad Character & Connections. Convicted before twice if not more. Hulk report Good. Married 4 children. Stated this offence; ‘Shooting in at the window of a house belonging to a man named Turner’ Once for stealing corn, 2 months, again for Neglect of his work, 1 month. Married 4 children, wife Marg. At Stanhoe Native Place living report Very Good. Original document below William Wornes Conduct Record Prisoner number 78615 William Warnes/Wornes was transported aboard the vessel ‘SS Lady Kennaway’ from the port of Cork in Ireland on 10th June 1834 to the colony of Van Dieman’s Land. He arrived on the 13th February 1835 and appropriated for work to a Dr. Laudale/Landale? of Launceston. On February 9th 1838 William sought permission for Margaret and his family to join him. His petition was granted. Margaret was pregnant with their fifth child, Rebecca, when William was sent to Tasmania but by 1839 she had made the long journey with her children to join her husband. Three more sons were born in Tasmania beginning with John in 1840. The children of William Wornes and Margaret Humphries are as follows;- William Wornes b. 1825 @ Stanhoe, Norfolk. m. 1859 @ Bendigo, Victoria, age 34yrs to Elizabeth Wesley/Verley? d. 10 October 1893 @ Victoria aged 68years Susannah Wornes b. 1827 @ Stanhoe Norfolk. m.1/ circa 1846 Launceton Tasmania m.2/ circa 1860 Canada m.3/ circa 1869 Canada d. 29th June 1903 Gerogery N.S.W. Mary Wornes b. 1830 @ Stanhoe Norfolk child Mary 22.12.1846 @ Longford Tasmania m.c.1849 John Denby children | Maria Denby b.10.5.1850 @ Westbury Tasmania d.1927 @ Victoria Ellen Denby b.16.4.1853 @ Westbury Tasmania m. 1873 @ Victoria to Charles Keeble Isabella Denby b.23.11.1855 @ Westbury Tasmania d. 1911 @ Victoria Sarah Denby b.1858 @ Westbury Tasmania d.1859 @ Westbury Tasmania Rebecca Denby b.1860 @ Westbury Tasmania d.1944 @ Victoria Omega Denby b.11.9.1862 @ Westbury Tasmania d. 1948 @ Victoria John Denby b.6.10.1865 @ Westbury Tasmania d.19.3.1867 @ Westbury Tasmania Annie Denby b. 18.1.1868 @ Westbury Tasmania d. 1879 @ Carlton Victoria Francis Wornes b. 18 November 1832 @ Stanhoe Norfolk d. 27 October 1847 @ Longford, Tasmania Rebecca Wornes born 26 October 1834 @ Stanhoe Norfolk England married 1/ Thomas Wagstaff married 2/ James New died 29th September 1922 at Port Melbourne, Vic#10796 aged 88 years Direct Line John Wornes b. 3rd September 1841 @ Tasmania m? Amelia Williams ( his niece, daughter of Susannah Wornes ) d 10th September 1920 Victoria. Matthew Wornes b. 25th November 1842 @ Tasmania. d.26th January 1916 @ Perico NSW Henry Wornes b. 18 August 1844 @ Tasmania m. Jane Hannigan 1867 Ireland d. 1905 @ Wedonga, Victoria. William Wornes received his Pardon on the 5th October 1847 having spent eleven years and six months in the Colony and having held a ticket of leave for three years and three months prior to his pardon. The document gives the reason under the heading Cause of Indulgence; Having behaved in an unexceptionable manner during the 11½ years that he has been in the Colony. William Wornes Pardon The Wornes’ history becomes unclear after the birth in 1844 of youngest son Henry. It would appear that at some stage during the following three years Margaret Wornes left her husband in Tasmania with at least some of the children and went to Victoria. She was probably accompanied by her eldest son William. The actual date of the move is obscure and we can only conjecture as to what her reasons may have been at the time. It’s possible that she went to investigate the chances of acquiring land to farm and /or a new home in Victoria ready for when William received his pardon. They had known the pardon was due to be granted in the June of 1846. The only known facts are as follows: On the 23rd of October 1847 only 18 days after William Wornes obtained his pardon he shot and killed his son Francis with a pistol. An Inquiry was opened on the 25th October 1847 and recorded a verdict of accidental death. On the 27th of October 1847 the Tasmanian newspaper, the Hobart Courier carried the following report, Murder: We have heard that a small farmer by the name of Vaughan (mistaken) residing/traiding? at Norfolk Plains shot his son, a boy of almost 15 years of age on Saturday last. The crime is attributed to some domestic differences but we are not enabled to state the facts with sufficient accuracy for publication. Following this initial report the ‘Cornwall Chronicle’ in its Directory of Births, Deaths and Marriages 1835 – 1850 recorded the following two entries: 27 October 1847 D. WORNES Francis son William 14yrs – Accidentally shot – Illawarra nr.Longford – Saturday. 03 November 1847 D.WORNES Francis son William, br.(other) Rebecca(13) & Susan & 3 other brs – shot by his fr. at Illawarra nr. Longford – inquest verdict – Justifiable homicide. Oddly the number of Francis’ siblings is incorrect and no mention is made in the notice of his mother Margaret. The Inquest verdict was actually recorded as Accidental Death. (So much for the accuracy of newspaper reports.) One researcher noted that Francis Wornes was later listed on Margaret Wornes death certificate as being 55years old and suggests that Margaret, and by extension her eldest son William may not have known about Francis death. It isn’t actually clear whether Rebecca, or indeed which, if any of the other children were in Tasmania with their father at the time of the shooting but it seems unlikely that any of the family were unaware of what happened in Tasmania. What is known is that in 1853 eldest daughter Susannah gave birth in Victoria to a son she named Steven Wornes. Susannah had already been married to a man name Robert Bayle in Tasmania in 1846 and had a daughter on the 16th May that year, but there is nothing more known of what happened to either Robert Bayle or their daughter Ann. Second daughter Mary Wornes had married John Denby in about 1849 and remained in Longford Tasmania where they had eight children. Prior to her marriage Mary Wornes had also had a child; a baby girl named Mary born on the 22nd of December 1846. Youngest daughter Rebecca had married Thomas Wagstaff in 1853 and was living in Sandhurst Victoria. At some stage after the Wornes’ move to Victoria, there seems to have been a major rift within the family. It’s apparent that most of the children and probably also their father William were resident in Victoria during the early 1850’s but at some time before 1861 William Wornes senior went to Canada with three of his children; sons John and Henry and his daughter Susannah and her young son Steven. For whatever reason Margaret did not go with them! Perhaps she couldn’t forgive William for Francis death or maybe she simply didn’t want to make another long voyage to start again in Canada. William did return to Australia some ten years later but he settled not in Victoria with Margaret but in New South Wales. There is a passenger named Wornes, registered on the steam-ship ‘The City of Sydney’ sailing on December 27th 1854 from Melbourne to Sydney and there are also two male Warnes listed aboard the ‘Shamrock’ from Melbourne to New South Wales in 1853; one travelled on the 4th of September and the other on the 10th of October. The 1861 Canadian Census for the Parish of Colbourne Restigouche, New Brunswick. William Wornes bought a package of land to farm in ‘British North America.’ The 1861 Canadian Census shows William Wornes a farmer aged 55years living in New Brunswick with his sons, 20 year old John, a general labourer and seventeen year old Henry a farm labourer, both single. Susannah and her husband John Williams and two children are also living there. By 1870 the family were living in Auckland, New Zealand. Susannah was by then married to Charles Hanson, and their daughter, Mary Susannah Hanson was born in Auckland in late October of that year. The family are next recorded in the passenger list of the ‘Alice Cameron’ which sailed into Sydney from Auckland on the 4th of January 1871. Steven Wornes is the only family member not on this passenger list but travelling with them is Jane Hinnigan, the young wife of Henry Wornes. Alice Cameron Passenger List January 1871 William Wornes remained in Albury New South Wales until his death five years later. Henry Wornes did eventually return to Victoria but both his and his sister Susannah’s death certificates record their mother as ‘not known’ (In Henry’s case his father also), so it would appear that the estrangement from their mother continued until their deaths. William Wornes died 1876 in New South Wales. He was buried in the Albury Pioneer Cemetery in New South Wales. ( Plan1 - Section A - Row 8 - Number 8.) (William’s son John who registered the death mistakenly registered his father’s name as William John Wornes. A description of William Wornes on his transportation reads Wornes William No.1872 Stanhoe Trade; Ploughman and Shepherd, Height without shoes 5’3¾” Age 34, Complexion pale, Head medium size, Hair and whiskers dark brown, Visage Oval,Long, Forehead medium high, Eyes Brown Hazel, Nose Medium Long, Mouth & Chin Small. William Wornes Grave lies to the left of the tombstone shown right. William Wornes 1797 - 1876 Rebecca Married twice, firstly to Thomas Wagstaff (5 children) and then to James New (9 children)