Category: Posts

From my trip to the UK National Archives. No records survive from ‘my’ Joseph Wilkes’ court appearance that led to him being transported to New South Wales. Sadly, all 1817 and earlier Warwickshire Assize court records were destroyed long ago. But I knew there was a chance that there could be some records for ‘the… Continue reading Court records of ‘the other Joseph Wilkes’

Here I’m presenting a piece of research aimed at getting to know Birmingham as it was when Joseph Wilkes was a young man. Joseph Wilkes was a silversmith, and I wanted to get a better picture of the Birmingham around the time he was a teenager and a young man. I searched the available business… Continue reading All the silversmiths in town

What did Joseph Wilkes’ Birmingham look like?  Joseph grew up in Birmingham around the turn of the 19th century. It was important to me to get a sense of what Joe’s home town looked like back then.  During my research trip in 2023, I looked at the available historical maps in the Birmingham Library.  I… Continue reading Maps of Birmingham

In this post I present an example of how difficult it can be to research Australian convicts, because records are not always perfect and only persistence and some creative searching might get you a result. One of Joseph Wilkes’ friends was a man named Jeremiah Buffey or Buffy. I was looking for his hulk records,… Continue reading Tricky hulk records

In this video I talk about how I found a record of Joseph Wilkes’ son Jeremiah in an 1876 NSW directory held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

In July 2023, I travelled to Birmingham and Warwick in the hope of finding additional intelligence on Joseph Wilkes’ early life. Over four days I scoured the archives at the magnificent Library of Birmingham and the Warwickshire Archives in Warwick. At the library I found maps of Birmingham from the early late 18th and early… Continue reading Research trip to Birmingham/Warwick

In 2018, I read the journal of the captain who navigated Joseph Wilkes and his fellow convicts all the way to Australia on the ship Dromedary. The coordinates the journal contained allowed me to track the voyage. I thought it would be fun to be able to plot the journey on Google Earth, and I… Continue reading Voyage to Australia 1819