Searching John Dyast alias John Cousins vanished after 1856 Bathurst pls help!!!

[jamais]

Topic 4: Did John die in Sydney in 1860?

A piece of information about John which has been widely taken as fact is that he died in Sydney in 1860. For instance, there is a Findagrave page (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/187964246/john-dyson) which uses this information, as well as a tree on Ancestry.

This info appears to have originated in this very forum thread, based on sensible speculation that John either reverted to using his birth surname (Cousins) by the time of his death, or that his highly unusual assumed surname (Dyast) was a variant of the more common Dyson. Two candidate deaths in Sydney were proposed:
- John Cousins (NSW death registration: 9023/1860 or V18609023 122B)
- John Dyson (NSW death registration: variously given as 1315/1860, 6869/1860 V18606869 122A, or
8869/1860 V18608869 122B)*

* I don't know what to make of there being three separate sets of registration details for an 1860 death of John Dyson in Sydney. I think the latter two are early church records, and given that they're nearly identical (only one number changes between them) I suspect that they are duplicates from the same parish's records. The first registration is way off from the other two but gives details which are identical to the early church records (died age 26 in Sydney). More research required re: whether these are all the same person!

Without spoiling the rest of the story, I'm pretty confident based on my research that neither of these decedents is our John Dyast. I'll share what I've found below - keen to hear other people's thoughts!

John Cousins

The burial record for John Cousins shows that he was an accountant living in Bathurst St. He died on October 17 1860, and was buried in the parish of Camperdown. However, he was aged 60 at the time of his death, so he clearly can't be John Dyast.

https://i.imgur.com/zs60FvF.jpeg

John Dyson

Now we move on to the burial record for John Dyson, who is a much more interesting possibility. He was aged 26 at the time of his death (age match!) on 21 August 1860, and was also buried in the parish of Camperdown. We learn that he was a mariner (occupation match!) who was resident at the Benevolent Asylum at the time of his death.

https://i.imgur.com/JgT5L4w.jpeg

The Sydney Benevolent Asylum was a charitable institution that offered care and shelter for the city's destitute and ill. (Here, 'asylum' carries the connotation of a place of refuge rather than a mental institution.) By using the resources made available by an amazing volunteer-run indexation project (https://sydneybenevolentasylum.com/), I was able to ascertain that there was a John Dyson at the Benevolent Asylum who was discharged on 21 August 1860.

After getting permission to access the records of the Benevolent Asylum, I found out some more about this John Dyson. Per his admission records, he was a mariner from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, aged 26, who arrived in Melbourne aboard the Telegraph in 1857. Suffering from paralysis and 'diseased lungs', he was transferred to the Benevolent Asylum from St Vincent's Hospital on 25 October 1859. (Please excuse the poor quality and cropping of these images!)

https://i.imgur.com/cwop7sk.jpeg

Ultimately, he died in the Benevolent Asylum on 21 August 1860 from 'disease of hip'. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he suffered from a condition like bone cancer in his hip which paralysed him.

https://i.imgur.com/yGsWBrV.jpeg

Now, the key question: is this John Dyast with a fake backstory, or is this John Dyson a different, real person? Well, I lean towards the latter. 1841 Channel Islands Census records show that there was a 'John Disson', aged 7 and living in Guernsey with his family. This is a perfect age match to the 'John Dyson' who died in Sydney in 1860.

https://i.imgur.com/r6Sog9S.jpeg

Furthermore, a John Dyson born 1835 in Guernsey did hold a mariner's ticket (I can see these details from a search result on Findmypast, but not the full details like ticket number as I don't have a subscription. If anyone could provide further info that would be much appreciated!)

So, did John die in Sydney in 1860?

In my opinion, we should stop treating the idea that John Cousins/Dyast died in Sydney in 1860 as fact until we have positive information to corroborate this claim. While I can't say for sure, I think it's unlikely that John corresponds to any of the death records that have been identified so far. The other hitch in this theory is that in principle his last known location should be Brisbane, where he received his Ticket of Leave, rather than Sydney. Having been sentenced in 1856, his Ticket of Leave wouldn't have expired until the end of his five year sentence (i.e., September 1861), so he wouldn't have freedom of movement to leave the Brisbane area until that time.

The outlier possibility is that two separate John Dysons died in Sydney aged 26 in 1860, and that the one whose burial records I have not found was our John Cousins/Dyast. Even though the first registration perfectly matches the John Dyson who died in the Benevolent Asylum (i.e. 'died age 26 in Sydney'), it does give me pause that it appears to come from much earlier in the year (1315/1860) than the other two from the parish records (>6800/1860)... Further investigations pending!

[mckha489]

Merchant ticket

his ticket no is 60061, he is 20.
Just one entry in a column headed. HOME 1854. (these columns go in years, with OUT & HOME at the head of each - so only one voyage recorded on that ticket number).
which reads

L. 31.5
Tasman
Ht. Town
R D^o 41

[shanreagh]

'Now I can't be 100% sure of this, but my working theory is that John's mother and Edward's sister are one and the same Jane Cousins. My main reason for this is that it seems like the most logical way to account for Edward being the person who initiated the search for John.'

and

'John was born to Jane Cousins and an unknown father in Sevenoaks in late 1833'

and

'He seems to have been raised at least in part by an older couple, William and Susannah Cooper, before leaving England as a sailor’s apprentice in 1848'.

I am wondering if the unknown father was in fact unknown to us today but was known to the family, including Edward (his uncle Edward (1819-1901).  Possibly the sort of 'open' to those who needed to know secret within the family.  My idea is that the unknown father or his family may in fact have made contributions that were held by Edward, the uncle, Cousins for Jane. The other idea is that perhaps the unknown father left a legacy to his all children on his death with John Dyast/Cousins being one, again with the contact for the legacy being Edward the uncle.

Edward did not know exactly where John was hence the the placing of a notice with the words about hearing something to his advantage. 

It may have had a clause that if John was not able to be located withinn a set time frame then his portion of the will be left to the mother of John, hence her wealth at her death.

I am also pondering if the Coopers may have been a relation to the father but not his parents, perhaps an older sibling plus his/her spouse or the father's aunt/uncle.

Has anyone in the family, with a possible link to John,  had a DNA test?  I am wondering if this would possibly show who the unknown father was.

[jamais]

Thanks so much for the info and thoughts mckha489 and shanreagh! I've just found out that I can use Findmypast at my local library, so I'm keen to get more info on the merchant tickets for both John Cousins/Dyast and John Dyson of Guernsey. shanreagh, very interesting thoughts re: John's father potentially having a role in his being raised by the Coopers, as well as Jane's wealth at her death. Definitely agree that the Coopers are worth digging into further and I'm working on that now; haven't turned up anything so far but will keep mapping out their tree. I'm also very interested in working on the enigma of who John's father was, hence the topic of my post today!

Topic 5: Was John Cousins' father John Doust?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been wondering for some time about John’s decision to use the surname ‘Dyast’. This surname is so rare that it’s basically non-existent, even considering that spellings often weren’t standardised in the era before mandatory registration of births.

This got me thinking about the possibility that John had heard by word of mouth who his father was, and ‘Dyast’ was some sort of phonetic representation of what he’d heard, rather than a variant spelling or mistranscription of a known name. While there has been suggestion that it could be a variant of Dyson, I find it unlikely that the sound ‘son’ could be mistaken for ‘ast’ as they’re quite phonetically distinct.

Interestingly, when I was researching John’s transportation to Australia, I kept getting a lot of hits for the similar name ‘John Doust’. This is because a John Doust, also from Kent, was transported to NSW for pickpocketing at the age of 24 in September 1835.    I didn’t think much of this at the time beyond my annoyance at how this coincidence kept obscuring the results I wanted to see, but on a whim I decided to investigate this John Doust some more.

It turns out that Doust was tried for two separate crimes within the span of a year:

• he was arrested in December 1834 for ‘stealing a cheese from a cart’, but it seems like the person he allegedly stole from didn’t show up to court so the case had to be dropped.
• he was tried and convicted for pickpocketing two handkerchiefs and some money in September 1835

Below is a link to pictures of the Kent Criminal Registers pertaining to these trials:

https://imgur.com/a/JN8hBXb

(Note: Doust’s age is given as 21 in reporting about the second offence for which he was convicted, but this is definitely the same Doust as all the paperwork regarding his transportation to Australia gives his birthdate as 1811, implying an age of 24 at the time of the crime. Convict Indents linked below; Doust is #108.)

https://i.imgur.com/HUXKEze.jpeg

Doust had a bit of a chequered life in Australia, serving time in a chain gang in 1846 for stealing clothing from a washerwoman.

https://imgur.com/a/d1yqGMY

He seems to have spent the rest of his life on the North Shore of Sydney in the days before it was fully developed, dying in Milson’s Point in 1883 (NSW registration 4890/1883).

But things got REALLY interesting when I went back to the newspaper archive to see if there was any contemporary reporting. Both of John Doust’s offences took place in none other than… Seal, Kent. (Technically, the first one allegedly took place in Wrotham, but John seems to have been taken into custody in Seal.) Here's some links to newspaper coverage:

https://imgur.com/a/U7E1byD

Seal was not a particularly big community in 1835, when the population would have been around 1,500 (source: https://kent-opc.org/Parishes/Seal.html). It was also the place where John Cousins/Dyast was born and grew up. This is of course a long bow to draw, and I want to be 100% clear that I am not claiming this as fact, but I do wonder if John Doust was John Cousins/Dyast’s father. We can place him in Seal in the same year as John’s birth (1834), and his name is very phonetically similar to the alias John chose.

If Doust had a bad local reputation as a petty criminal, it might help explain why he would refuse to marry Jane Cousins when she became pregnant, or even why she didn’t want to marry him. It would also explain John’s potential misconstrual of how his father’s surname was spelt; given the historical broadness of rural English accents, and the fact that John Doust was transported in 1835 when John Cousins/Dyast was only a baby, it’s possible that nobody was in a position to correct him. Finally, it also raises questions about whether John Cousins/Dyast could have known that his father was transported to Australia, and if so, whether this influenced his decision to travel out there himself.

Barring a lucky result from a DNA test it’s essentially impossible to know if this theory is correct. All the same, it’s fascinating that both of these men from a small village in Kent ended up colonial convicts in NSW despite their very different journeys through life!

[shanreagh]

Yes I would be slightly sceptical of Dyast being Dyson......even with the broadest of accents by the speaker and an unfamialiarity with such an accent by whoever was recording and who may have been recording phonetically. I agree that John

Dyast to me is more likely to be Dias and as far as we know John was not Spanish or Portuguese.

Then perhaps Dyers/Dyer though there is the T sound missing.   Your research into Doust sounds very promising.

I am very intrigued by this family and the research you are carefully doing.