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couple may have been Honeychurchs or Honeycutts. And the boys (what no girls?) may not
have been theirs, borrowed perhaps, adopted, to save someone else's offspring from being
taken into official care. Surely, after 30 years of painstaking, world-wide exploration, a
completely new branch, a tree of Honeycombes, cannot have flourished unsung, unknown, and
taken root in Australia unobserved?
Calm eventually prevails, as does rational speculation, which is aided by a dim discounted
legend and some facts I had unearthed earlier that month.
The legend, passd on by aged aunts, alleged that the Australian Honeycombes were descended
from three brothers.
They are in fact descended from two brothers, Richard and John. But these two did have
another older brother, William Robert, a carpenter, who vanished in Bristol a few years after his
marriage in 1849.
Seeking to substantiate the legend, I had assumed that this Wiiliam Robert had also emigrated -
but when? And did his wife, Emma, go with him? This assumption was supported by the fact
that a William Honeycombe was recorded in Bendigo as having lived there in 1856. But he was
a miner This wasn't a problem, however, as William Robert, the carpenter in England, could
have been caught up in the Victorian gold-rush and gone goldmining in
West of Echuca
What, in the meantime, had happened to William Honeycombe, to Lawrence Mountjoy and
Jane?
In the previous chapter, William and Lawrence were last heard of in 1868, the year in which
Thomas Mountjoy launched his Temperance Hotel. They were then both named as being on the
committee of the new Wesleyan church at Highton. William was 71 that year; Lawrence was 48
and his wife Jane 42. Her stonemason brother, Richard Honeycombe, was still in Geelong. But
soon Jane and her father William would be the last of the emigrant Honeycombes to remain in
Geelong. And then he would also leave.
Two years earlier, Richard Mountjoy had died, and the first of that family's links with Cornwall
had been severed.
There is no gravestone bearing Richard Mountjoy's name in the Highton churchyard, although,
as a Wesleyan, he must have been buried there. Three of Caleb and Louisa Mountjoy's boys
had already been interred at Highton, all under the age of eight. Three more of their children
would be buried there, including their oldest son. And in due course Jane would follow
Lawrence to an adjacent grave. However, in 1868 both still had many years to live.
So had William's second wife, Elizabeth the schoolteacher, who in 1869 was back in
Melbourne, where in February she was admitted to the Benevolent Asylum in North
Melbourne, suffering from 'debility'. Said then to be 60, she was discharged in July that year,
then readmitted in August for four weeks. In December 1871 she was readmitted for six
months, and then spent nearly two years in the asylum; from October 1872 to September 1874.
It seems that the second Mrs Honeycombe was slowly going insane. She would die in the
asylum in January 1898, aged 86, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Melbourne
Cemetery, as alone and unattended as she had been when she arrived in Melbourne as a poor
immigrant in 1851.
Did she ever try to see her husband, or try to get in touch? After all, she bore his name for 46
years, although she spent only three of those years with him as his wife. Did he ever wonder
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