Orphan Number: 3901

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Matthew Aston wrote:

Emma Moore (Orphan Number 3901) was my great great grandmother. Her parents, Daniel Moore and Ann Paget were both transported convicts. They married in Hobart in 1850. Emma was born on 4th November 1851. When Emma was admitted to the Queens Orphan School in 1857, aged 5, her father had died. Her older brother, Daniel was admitted there two weeks earlier. Apparently Daniel was one of the 406 children who died there. Emma only spent 9 months at the orphanage and was then discharged to the care of her mother who was free at that stage.

When older, Emma moved to the Hunter Valley in NSW, where she married my great great grandfather William Sanderson, an engine driver, in 1869, aged 17. I haven't been able to ascertain whether her mother moved there with her. Emma and William had a large family but most of the children did not survive. Their youngest child was my great grandmother Myra Ellen Sanderson (1883-1961). Apparently Emma died prematurely aged about 30, soon after Myra was born, but she now has many descendants.

I remember Myra from when I was a young child in the late 1950's. Myra married my great grandfather Thomas Harris Wright in Tenambit NSW in 1902. One of Myra's children, Florence Alice Wright (1906-1971) was my grandmother. She married my grandfather Osmond John Moriarty (1887-c1952) in 1927. Osmond served in the AIF in WW1 and returned, injured, from Gallipoli. They had two daughters, Mary (dec.) and my mother Patricia, born in 1930. Patricia is now 81. She married my father Kevin Leslie Aston (1930-2006) in 1952. They had 8 children, including myself, 14 grandchildren, including my own three children, and 2 great-grandchildren so far.

So, Emma survived her brief stay at the St Johns Park Orphanage and went on to make a wonderful contribution to Australia during her short life. My workplace is at St Johns Park right next to the old Queens Orphan School where she stayed in 1857-1858 and close to where her brother is probably buried at the old cemetery where no sign of the graves can be seen today.

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