Family History: Certainty and Perplexity

Nanna’s partial misunderstanding of JBH’s journals is also understandable for more mundane reasons, ironically often relating to the records themselves. I strongly suspect no-one has yet read and comprehended JBH’s journals in their entirety – they are not easy reading.

Although Capt. Harwood identified himself at the start of one of the journals, he wrote in elaborate copperplate style that frequently dwindled to mere squiqqles when his sentence endings neared the edge of a page. When he started running out of pages, he turned them on their side and wrote at right-angles across his earlier words. (The photo that accompanies this blog shows the worst of the legibility; thankfully, most of the text is not this challenging.)

The sheaves within the larger book are not chronologically ordered. The ink is fading in places. The bindings are deteriorating, some sheaves are falling out, various pages are damaged. A few of the pages have what I suspect to be Nanna’s childhood doodlings, though these rarely affect legibility.

JBH wrote at a time when grammatical and punctuation rules were fewer and less strict than today, obsolete English characters were still common in handwritten text, spellings were often variable, and when now archaic meanings (especially of maritime terms) did not need explanation. Further, the European empires were still in their heyday: historic institutions, commercial businesses, and events were reported in the vernacular and values of the era; and key locations, once well-known, are frequently now geographically distant to us, unfamiliar, long forgotten, or renamed. Each adds to the textual obscurities.

The journals were not always written contemporaneously with the happenings described. Lengthy sections contain reproductions of other documents and parts of earlier journals. Many sections are clearly written after the fact and are seemingly intended to paint JBH in a positive light, especially regarding publicly reported, and often dramatic or scandalous events.

Non-written materials add to the challenge of understanding the family history. Photographs of unnamed family members and friends, not labelled at the time of production, sometimes have been subsequently mislabelled and wrongly dated. Consequently, it has been easy at times to wrongly attribute, ancestry, actions, and even individuals’ motives – based on superficial likenesses and/or shared localities and occupations.

The loss of private family information; newspaper publication of contentious, scandalous, and disputed actions; court summons and case findings; and incomplete journal transcription creates snippets of information, vague truths, uncertainty, and speculation. As I noted in the previous blog, many facts have become mysterious and elusive. Truth is becoming legend; legend is becoming myth – or just forgotten.

Once John Barker Harwood’s journals are fully transcribed, chronologically sorted, annotated, and published, some of the highlights and lowlights of his life will be clearer – especially some of the details surrounding the maritime disputes reported in early Australian newspapers and court summaries. Hopefully, the journals will also provide a little more insight into some of the painful personal situations JBH and his family endured.

The completion of the journals, combined with further genealogical and historical research, should mean some family legends will become factual again and myth, at least as far as JBH’s contributions to family, maritime and Australian history are concerned, will be kicked a little further down the generational timeline.