The links on the left are to "access points" to an extended family tree which includes at its core about eight generations of the ancestors of my kids.

There is one page for each person and that page is linked to that person's spouse/s, children, parents and grandparents where known. Unless permission has been given it only includes those born more than a 100 years ago. From the "ancestral core" the links can wander off into areas that have interested me at one time or another, sometimes quite a distance as with the "Sandiacre Doars".

There are even a number of "unlinked" pages for all sorts of reasons. Some of these came about while trying to identify people in the old Shaw family albums and some like George Clauscen just because someone asked about the origin of Clauscen Street (strangely he turned out to have lived in a house once owned by my g-g-grandfather).

These family tree individual pages were created automatically using the Legacy Software which builds sentences by combining the information in the database with a set of standard phrases. The trade off for this automation is that the syntax can at times seem a bit convoluted.

To be more correct the family tree starting with my son George.

There are even a number of "unlinked" pages for all sorts of reasons. Some of these came about while trying to identify people in the old Shaw family albums and some like George Clauscen just because someone asked about the origin of Clauscen Street (strangely he turned out to have lived in a house once owned by my g-g-grandfather).

These pages family tree individual pages were created automatically using the Legacy Software which builds sentences by combining the information in the database with a set of standard phrases. The trade off for this automation is that the syntax can at times seem a bit convoluted.

The Huberts are the family of my wife's father, Mike Hubert. His father, Fred, was born in the docklands area of East London and was the last of at least four generations of Huberts working on and around the water. Fred was in RAF in Palestine, was a London cabbie and when he arrived in Australia worked on the boats servicing the lighthouses up and down the Queensland coast.

Fred's father William James Hubert was a Thames lighterman until the late 1880s when he joined the Thames Water Police. After being pensioned from the police he remained near the Thames as a nightwatchman on the docks and it was while on duty there in 1926 that he was fatally injured by a fall from the quay onto a barge.

William James's father, also William, was a lighterman for most of his life. He first worked in the Battersea area, then spent some years on the water near Harwich and Ipswich before returning to the Thames, this time in the east. Like his son he died while working on the docks, in his case at age 65 from heat exertion after a period of unemployment.

The earliest Hubert about whom we have an occupation was William's father James George Hubert, a barge builder from the Nine Elms area of Battersea. We know that he was in this line of business as early as 1822 and that his son James carried on a similar business in Ipswich from the 1850s. Not much is known about his father James other than that he was in the Battersea area in the early 1800s. Based on the surname we could probably assume this was a Hugenot family (my father-in-law is hoping for a connection to the Frenchman Robert Hubert who was hanged at Tyburn, convicted of causing the Great Fire of London).

Most Doars from the Derbyshire / Nottinghamshire area at the end of the 19C were descended from William Doar and Katherine Taylor of Sandiacre.

The links above provide access to this information in three forms - a series of linked web pages, a chart and a report. The chart and report are probably a little more accessible but are limited to six generations.

The web pages include Doar descendants from later generations who have given their permission to be included and a number of photographs and other images that have been excluded from the report to reduce its size.

Full name indexes can be found at the top and bottom of each page. These cover not only the Doar descendants but my full and extended family.

When I think of my family it's usually the Shaws that come to mind. This is the family of my mother's mother's and she is the only one of my grandparents who was Australian born. My father's family was only his sister and his parents, just a little out of place with their Midlands accent, ties on Sunday and long walks along suburban roads. My mother's Glasgow born father had family here, a tribe of Halket cousins, with close domestic and business connections for the first few decades in Melbourne but by the 1960s and my generation contact was almost non-existent.

The Shaws on the other hand were everywhere. This extended family gathered in various configurations a few times a year and to a small child there seemed to be dozens of seemingly interchangeable great aunts and uncles and later a swarm of cousins to share beach and farm holidays.

Although living modestly since the early 1900s my grandmother's generation still maintained the forms and attitudes of a more illustrious past. I remember one of my great aunts telling me how the family had lost its fortune in the Depression and it wasn't until much later that I realised she meant the 1890s not the 1930s. Although already dead two years by the time she was born, it was her grandfather, Alfred Shaw, who shaped her world view and that of her generation, and to a lesser extent those to follow.

Following his elder brother, Alfred Shaw had arrived in Victoria a young man with barely a trade. The death of that brother left him involved in a tinsmithing business just as the goldrushes took hold. For twenty odd years his business thrived and expanded to follow the gold across Australia and New Zealand making him a wealthy man well-connected in the colony.

His fortune peaked in the early 1890s and then was swept away by the bank and property crash. His children, having been raised in affluence and being members of the first generation of locally born Anglos, were firmly entrenched in the belief that they formed part of a colonial elite.

The following entry appears in the 1888 publication Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present........................

"Hayball, Robert (deceased) was born in 1814 near Chard, Somersetshire, Eng, where he served his apprenticeship to the building trade, being sprung from a race of builders. In 1840 he married Eliza Thompson of Tiverton, Devonshire and came to Australia in June 1841 in the Duchess of Northumberland. For a time he carried on building in Melbourne. On 7th Jan 1843 he moved to Brighton where he followed his calling (with the slight interruption of a visit to the Forest Creek diggings in 1852) until 1882. In that year he retired altogether from business and died on the 20th September 1887....

During a business lifetime of continuous activity and of so long duration, many buildings have been erected by him, amongst which are one of the first houses in Richmond built for Caption McCrae, and, to some extent, the well known Apollo Hotel in Russell St, Melb. Out of a large family 5 sons and 3 daughters are still living, all of whom save the eldest who was born in Melb, were born in Brighton. The sons are as follows: - Edwin born 7th Dec 1842, Robert born 29th April 1850, William born 16th April 1855, Alfred Harry born 17th Jan 1863 and Herbert Walter born 12th August 1864. The 3 eldest are builders while the 4th is a law student at Melb. Uni., and the youngest, who was for several years at Messrs Robertson & Moffat has now the management of the office of Hayball Bros, timber merchants. On the retirement of their father in 1882, Robert & William Hayball carried on the business under the trade title of R & W Hayball. In the following year the eldest son joined them and an alteration was made to Hayball Bros in the name of the firm. In 1882 they opened a timber yard at the corner of New and Lewis streets, Brighton, but were ccompelled by the rapid increase of business to purchase the present site - four acres of land in New street near Bay street. Shortly afterwards what had previously been a vacant paddock was covered with extensive workshops, timber racks, steam sawmill and planing sheds, stables, storerooms &c., this establishment being one of the largest in Victoria, the whole being connected to the Melbourne Exchange by telephone. In addition, they have been appointed agents by the patentees of several of the latest improvements in general furnishing ironmongery, of which they keep a large and varied stock; they are also agents for the company who manufacture the costly hydraulic freestone so much used at present for building purposes. This firm gives employment to a great number of men. In all parts of Brighton and surrounding districts can be seen buildings which have been erected by them, the most prominent of which are the new Brighton free library, three two story shops (now in the occupation of Messrs. Hicks, Snead and Miller) in Bay-street, and a great number of villa residences at Brighton Beach."

Thomas Hale arrived in the Colony of Victoria in its first few years and worked in the 1840s as a carpenter. By the early 1850s he was a partner in thriving building business in and by the late 1850s had begun to call himself an architect.

By the late 1850s he was a St Kilda City Councillor and there was talk of him entering colonial politics. By the early 1860s he had fortunes had reversed and he had moved to the rural centre of Daylesfornd as a Mining Registrar.

There seem to be some indications that Thomas Hale may have been a bit of sharp operator. Maybe he had already had some experience of wheeling and dealing back on Guernsey where his father had a pub and his mother's family seem to hace been connected to the cross channel trade only. It wasn't so many years before his birth that Guernsey had been a centre for smuggling to and from Napoleonic France.

My story of Thomas Hale on these pages is incomplete but I have gathered a great deal of source material which I'll gradually distill into these pages.

George Clauscen is not related but to me as far as a I know but is included here because I have found some interesting links. I was talking with an old friend with an interest in the land boomers and he mentioned that a mutual friend who lives in Clauscen St, North Fitzroy had asked about the origins of the Clauscen of the street name. She had heard that he was German born as were her parents. I was looking into my own land boom era ancestors at the time so had a quick look around the web.

It seems George Clauscen was linked to the major players of the land boom being a co-director with Benjamin Fink in at least one company. This was a very "land boom company" in that its purpose was to bring the cable tram line to Northcote which it did at the height of the boom.

Another intriguing link was the fact that there was some business between this company and British Insulated Wire (BIW) which made an unsuccessful bid to electrify the tramway in 1898. I spent some time a couple of years ago attempting to find the dates and purposes of one or more visists to Australia at about that time of ancestor by marriage and Secretary of BIW, Edward Tracey.

A stronger coincidence came to light as I was researching the history of my g-g-grandfather, Alfred Shaw's Brighton house "Ratho" or "Hiawatha". The Miles Lewis "Melbourne Mansions" database showed a subsequent occupier as "George Clauser". I knew that George Clauscen had died in Brighton and a quick look at the Sands & McDougall which confirmed that "Geo C Clauscen" had lived at "Ratho" in 1905 and 1906.

I also stumbled across George Clauscen's address on leaving "Ratho". He lived for at least a couple of years at a house konown as "Westra" in Menzies Avenue, Brighton. Some initial research shows that this house was on a block subdivided in 1906 from "Blair Athol", another early Brighton property. "Blair Athol" was occupied successively from before 1890 until after 1900 by two of the brothers of Theo Felstead who married Alfred Shaw's daughter, Eva, at "Hiawatha" in 1894. Theo was also the son of Jane Hale, sister of my g-g-g-grandfather, Thomas Hale.

Geo