I’ve been digging up bits and pieces about the life of my mother’s paternal grandfather (my great-grandfather), James Frederick Moore Yonge.

Born in Germany (although he seems to have answered “England” most of the time when asked about his birth), he literally traveled around the world, ended up getting married in California, running a pharmacy in Tombstone, Arizona and was living there at the time of the now famous “Gunfight at the OK Corral” in 1881.

One of my new sources isn’t a genealogical site like Ancestry.com, but instead its a subscription to Newspapers.com, which consists of a searchable database of newspapers, with many going back into the 19th century.

So here is one of the gems that searching Newspapers.com turned up. It’s a probate notice published in The Morning Post (London, England) on April 16, 1864 concerning the personal estate of John Vaughan Carden Reed. The notice advises my great-grandfather and his siblings of the death of “your late brother.” I think Reed was their half-brother, although I’ve just started trying to confirm that.

According to the notice, Reed had been a Lieutenant in the Royal Marine Light Infantry on board the HMS Ganges. He died at sea “on or about the thirty-first day of December, 1858….”

A death notice in another London newspaper, The Morning Chronicle, reported Reed died while the ship was at sea off Vancouver. He was 29.

There’s a Wikipedia entry on the HMS Ganges. Here’s a brief excerpt:

From 1857 to 1861, she was the flagship of the Pacific Station, based at Valparaíso, Chile under the command of Rear admiral Robert Lambert Baynes. She spent considerable time addressing the San Juan Boundary Dispute from the Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard at the Colony of Vancouver Island after which she returned to England to be converted into a training ship; she began service as the training ship HMS Ganges in 1865 at Mylor Harbour, near Falmouth; in 1899, she was moved to Harwich.

In any case, I find the many details included here fascinating. For one thing, the family had spread across the globe. None were then living in England. There’s the sister, Eliza, “formerly of North Lodge, Winkfield, Windsor, in the county of Berks, but now at Sabastapol, in the Crimea, in the Empire of Russia.” Berks, otherwise called Berkshire.

First brother, Francis Arthur, was serving in the British army and living on the Island of Mauritius. Then my great grandfather, James Frederick, “formerly of Plymstock, in the county of Devon.” He had visited Francis in Mauritius, but by this time was in Melbourne, Australia, working on a sheep farm operated by a cousin, where he was joined by another brother, Stephen Duke.

A profile compiled by my late sister, Bonnie, explained that our great grandfather was close to his cousins, as they had lived together for a time when they were growing up. The cousins’ mother, Elizabeth, was his aunt.

Elizabeth (Roberts) Yonge had remarried. Her second husband, the Rev. William Scott had been appointed the first Government Astronomer for New South Wales, so she and two of her sons moved with him to Australia. Here the boys, Kenneth and Walter, went into the wool business. One brother operated a sheep station; the other factored the wool from Sydney.

This explained why the brothers were in Australia at the time the probate notice was sent.

In any case, I find this little slice of family history quite interesting. What an informative glimpse into this period in history.