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description of the Honeycombe children as four 'boys' as opposed to 'sons' (and to a Mrs
Vivian's children as two 'girls' as opposed to 'daughters') reflects" the fact that some children
were deliberately distributed amongst friends, relations or neighbours. Two of the four boys with
the Honeyeombes might have been friends of Henry and John and have travelled with them,
while Elizabeth and Martha might have bunked with an ali-girl family or some motherly friend or
relative.
Perhaps the girls, short-haired for hygienic reasons, wore boys' clothes for propriety and ease.
What is certain is that no Mr and Mrs Honeycombe and four children are unaccounted for in
English records in the 1850s, apart from William and Elizabeth Honeycombe and six of their
children (Jane, Richard, Henry, Elizabeth, Martha and John). It is also certain that all of them,
parents and children, lived for a time in Australia, where they are also known to have died.
I have spelt out this particular problem involving the identities of the first Honeycombe family to
come to Austraiia to indicate some of the uncertainties and complexities that arise in the piecing
together of this or any family history.
As will be shown, all the Honeyeombes living in Australia today (excluding those of New
Zealand origin and myself) are the descendants of Wiiliam the stonemason and of two of his
sons, Richard and John - just as all the Honeyeombes in the world today are descended from
the two sons of Matthew Honeycombe of St Cleer in Cornwall, who died in 1728.
What follows in these pages, dug from living memory and wastelands full of buried records,
documents, papers, letters and wills, is the story of forgotten people, seemingly insignificant
people, like millions today who strive and dream and breed and die and are unremembered
within a generation or two of their deaths - their very individual lives, their very existence, lost as
their children's children age and fade, until no one is left to remember.
And yet, like fossils in the rock, a trace of them remains, buried in libraries, recorded in words;
and those words let them live again, however briefly. The wonder is that the simplest annals of
the poor have been noted somewhere, somehow, by someone, been stored away and survive.
It is a triumph of bureaucracy that so much remains of such littleness. And from what remains
we can recreate, however imperfectly, the fragmented reality of times past and other people's
lives. The written word ensures their immortality; and oddly ours.
What follows is the story of Everyman, the history of obscure and ordinary families, who made
no mark on histpiy but whose transitory existence happened to be marked in a very small way
by faceless recording angels. It is a family saga, and follows a double quest. Mine was to
discover who these vanished men and women were, how they lived and what they did. Their
lifelong quest, for some truth and meaning in their lives, was not unlike mine, and like mine, was
more than likely largely unresolved. Then and now, they and I sought solutions to some of the
mysteries, great and small, of their busy lives. They learned through experience, informed by
thought; I through thought informed by fact. I speculated reasonably, I hope, on what might
have been, as they surely did on what might be.
But between us there is a void. We know their futures, and they nothing of us. Like divinities we
know their beginnings and their ends. Their births and deaths have no mystery for us. We may
even glimpse a pattern in their lives, some shape, some purpose to all their yesterdays. Yet we
will never know as much as they about themselves. Nor what they saw and felt and thought and
said and did.
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