U is for Uncle John

Three men named John Moxon

Either during World War 1 or soon afterwards, John Bruce Moxon's grandmother Ellen Mary Moxon (nee Egan) left Wrightville for Sydney with her five daughters so that they could benefit from a secondary school education.  The girls went to Fort Street Girls High School and matriculated, with two obtaining teaching positions and the others also taking up interesting work.

The youngest girl was born in 1913.  When she was 11, her mother Ellen adopted a baby boy and named him John.  That was in 1924 when Ellen was 51 and living in the inner city.

There was no formal adoption process in New South Wales before 1931 and his mother and older siblings never discussed his possible origins with young John. They saw it as their mother's job, if at all. The girls' father Harry Moxon was not around to raise him because he had settled in Lake Cargellico by 1921 and remained there for many years.  The two boys, born in 1900 and 1902 had left home.  John spent much of his childhood living on his eldest sister’s farm near Port Macquarie. His mother died when he was 19 or 20 and may have been ill during his teenage years.

The family story, never discussed with John, was that he was the child of a young girl who worked in a greengrocer's shop and that either she was Greek or the father was Greek.  The next generation, more recently mused that maybe he was the son of one of the older girls who were 18 and 16 at the time of his birth.  This scenario was not unusual in those days. In fact, until the 70s, many young people found out that their oldest sister was really their mother.

John grew up, married, and had two children. He was marketing manager for Sidchrome Australia.  Prior to that he worked with his oldest brother Percy at his spare parts business at Enmore and had served an apprenticeship with the NSW Railways.

He never discussed his parentage.  In fact, when his brother Herbert John (Bert) Moxon was in his early 80s and showing signs of dementia, John knocked on his door and door and Bert said “who are you? Oh, you’re the young boy my mother took in!”.  The rest of the family was aghast.  It certainly was a conversation stopper.

However lacking in curiosity John was, his daughter was the opposite.  She wanted to know her origins.  She asked her father to take a DNA test but he adamantly refused.  She asked me what she could do.  I suggested that she take a test and maybe she could get some answers.  Not as good as having her father test, but better than nothing. 

When the results arrived, her DNA showed she was 25% Greek, so either her paternal grandfather or grandmother was definitely Greek but probably not both of them.  She had been told about a possible father with a Greek name by one of her older cousins and I found (in the electoral roll) that there was a fruitier working in the Haymarket, near where Ellen Moxon’s family lived in the early 20s. He later married and moved to Western Australia.

The next objective was to check whether she was related to her Moxon cousins.  She had been very close to some of them including her oldest cousin who set us on the family history journey in the 80s.  We held our breath waiting for a gedmatch.com match between her and John Bruce Moxon (Bert’s son)  or one of the few Moxon first cousins who had taken a test.  These included the daughter, Wendy of the oldest sister.

There were no matches.

This was sad.  His daughter was their popular cousin.  But it ruled out one of the Moxon girls being his mother.

Nevertheless, John Moxon was a dearly loved member of the Moxon family.  Since retirement, John Bruce Moxon and I have had lunch with him regularly at his local club.  In recent years he had been admitted to a residential care facility in the inner west but was still fairly mobile.  He passed away on 2nd February this year.

The photo above was taken at John’s 80th birthday party in October 2018. The other John Moxon is John’s second cousin from Orange, New South Wales.  It was the first time that the three John Moxons had met.

D is for DNA

Margaret's DNA test results

Of course it is!  Where would we baby boomer retirees with time to indulge in family history research be without it?

Certainly a lot worse off than my mother Freda Tucker, who had joined two local historical societies in the 1960s after the worst of her child-rearing years were behind her.  This led in turn to an interest in family history, and as soon as the word spread to her mother's large adoptive family in Victoria, she began getting requests from cousins to seek out certain records at the NSW Archives, at that time located in the centre of Sydney.

I retired from full-time work in 2002 and by 2005 began to research my family as well as my husband's Moxon family.  Fortunately, he was just as interested as I was, but still working until 2008 when we started travelling overseas.

I had a lucky start: my mother had recorded what she knew of her Kentish birth mother and her journey to a new life in Sydney prior to Freda's birth in 1912.  My mother also strongly suggested to my father that "if you must wander around the house in the middle of the night because you can't sleep, why don't you record your life memories?"  So he did.

John had an older cousin who had started researching their Moxon family history in the early 80s and wrote to all her known Moxon relations - and some she was introduced to - to find out what they knew.  Bless you, the late Dr Wendy Lou Walker whose mother was a Moxon.  She was thus able to build a large tree of distant cousins, uncles and aunts.

 Unfortunately, when she obtained their great grand-father Joshua Middleton Moxon's death certificate, she pursued the wrong line for his father.  Certainly not Wendy's fault - the witness was his housekeeper who in 1894 had identified the wrong names for both his parents. It was Joshua who had established the Moxon family we knew in Australia.  His shipping record noted the small family of three arrived via Queensland in 1867 from London.  Ultimately, Wendy was able to find that Joshua's parents were Isaac Moxon/Moakson and Sarah Middleton.  Thank you Joshua for adding your mother's maiden name to your plain baptismal name.  It probably sounded more entrepreneurial, which was of course his aim.

A more distant cousin, Edward (Ted) Moxon whom we eventually met post-retirement had also undertaken extensive research, particularly regarding later generations.  His energetic research was very helpful for John's tree.  Ted was a longtime member of The Moxon Society and his sister May Anne Fowler is currently a very enthusiastic member who enjoys contributing stories.

By 2008, building on and checking via online records, John and I were able to start adding family stories, some of which sounded fanciful.  How could we verify some of this information?

One Moxon story was intriguing.  In 1883, the large family of Joshua Middleton Moxon imploded.  He was gaoled for three months; his pregnant wife left home; John's grandfather Harry left home at 14, breaking his apprenticeship to his father; a housekeeper left with three-year-old Alfred Moxon and changed his surname; the family was mourning the death of twins the year before.

Years later, Harry found his young brother Alf at Stuart Town in the central west.  The story was handed down in two distant Moxon branches that a rat had eaten Alf's toes and that was how Harry had identified him.  However, when the large family of Moxons gathered at Stuart Town for a reunion about 2011, Alf's son, Cecil Moxon stated that his father's toes were intact and laughed off the rat story.  It is more likely that Harry recognised Alf's adoptive "mother" in Wellington, near Stuart Town, NSW.  Alf had married in 1909 as Alf Wilson.  Later his marriage certificate was changed to Moxon.

So how did we prove that Alf really was that three-year-old child who had disappeared - some saying to Wellington in New Zealand?

Through DNA of course.  My husband John and various descendants of Alf Wilson/Moxon shared strong autosomal DNA, making them second cousins, or second cousins once or twice removed.

Additionally, members of the Society in England, Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand have been generously sharing their AncestryDNA with two Moxon Society committee members in England, Graham Jagger and Philip Lord.  This allows female members of the Society and those who have female Moxons in their ancestry to contribute their DNA, not just those male Moxon members who match on their Y-DNA.  The autosomal research has been a much more recent development since about 2015 when many English and Australians were enabled to test through AncestryDNA.

As a result, the numerous Moxon and Moxham trees for which the paper trail stalled were able to be reviewed and many trees were combined.