Very interesting reading all the info about George Ham. I have recently come across him in England before he was transported. He was “co-habiting” with a Jane Peters, and they had an illegitimate daughter, Matilda Jane, baptised at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch in 1800 with the surname Ham. Jane appears in Poor Law Removal and Settlement Orders in January 1801 needing help as George had been transported, but the Overseers and Churchwardens in St Leonard’s passed her back to the Parish of Old Windsor in Berks, where she had previously been employed as a nursery maid.
In 1828 Matilda is baptised again with the surname Peters in Thames Ditton, along with her two illegitimate children Richard and Emma. Their reputed father is George Danvers Jenkins, a gentleman, who marries Matilda in 1831, then they have two more children, Catherine and Robert. On George and Matilda’s marriage record, her father’s occupation is given as Watchmaker, which doesn’t fit with the transportation records where he’s described as a Labourer, but as Matilda had never met him, she probably didn’t know much about him, and I gather that information about paternal occupations was quite often glamourised!!
Emma Jenkins carries on the family tradition by having two children with William Riley Stanford in 1848 and 1849, then marries him in 1856!
I have also seen on some other Trees that George Ham- (I’m not entirely certain it’s the same one at the moment)-had a marriage in England to an Anne, and some children with her, before he was with Jane Peters.
