Finding Mary Bishop
My wife, Gail, carries the Bishop genes in our family. During our research, there was some confusion around the identity of Mary Bishop, a convict also known as Mary Davis or Davies, who arrived on the First Fleet. Mary had a daughter named Charlotte, who was born on Norfolk Island a couple of years later.
Routine tracking of births, deaths and marriages led us to Gail’s most recent convict ancestor, Jacob Chillingworth, a surname well-known in the Tamworth locality, who married a much younger Susannah Pentley, daughter of another convict named John. Encouraged by these discoveries, we found that Susannah’s mother, Charlotte (née Bishop), led something of a tempestuous life, with
