The Taylor Family History Site

Welcome to the Taylor Family History Site.

This site contains information about the ancestors of the Taylor family of Perth, Western Australia. It has a companion site – Our Genealogy – which contains detailed genealogical information about the Taylors. This blog adds more detail about people, with more information about their personalities, occupations, where they lived and the events that occurred during their lives.

Who is covered in the blog?

While the title says this blog is about the Taylors, it incorporates other surname groups as well. As you can see from the ancestral tree in the diagram below, as well as Taylors the ancestors of present-day family members included Sinclairs, Mainlands, Turners, Gosses, Palmers, Playles, Rosers, Hallams and Moxhams.

The family tree in the diagram goes back 5 generations from the present. The posts in the blog will mostly describe ancestors in those 5 generations. While some information exists beyond that, it is not possible to talk about ancestors beyond 5 generations with any confidence because records are either absent or questionable. For those who want to reach back further there is more information about remote ancestors on the Our Genealogy site.

The tree is constructed from the perspective of my wife, Marlene. It would look exactly the same for her siblings, Vicki, Julie and Robert and, with minor modifications, it would be similar for her first cousins as well.

The Taylors (see the lines at the top of the diagram) are essentially the descendants of families of working class and farming folk in Great Britain. The main Taylor family probably originated in Lancashire which has a high concentration of people with the Taylor surname. Many of them were agricultural labourers or workers in the factories and shops of the mid-west of England. In the case of the Turners, they were working class people from Wolverhampton who were canal boatmen and railway workers.

The Sinclairs were from the Shetland Islands, the descendants of generations of fishermen and tenant farmers. The Rosers and Playles, with whom the Sinclairs inter-married, were agricultural labourers from the south-east of England.

I know much less about the Hallams than about the other surname groups. Most of the genealogical research about this side of the family has been carried out by Robyna Hallam, who has kindly let me see the documents she collected. I have supplemented her information with family stories and newspaper accounts, particularly about John Robert Hallam, Marlene’s grandfather.

I also know little about the Moxhams. Apart from Robyna Hallam’s documents I have found little about the family’s history both before and after they arrived in Australia.

Security

Most of the blog is open to public access but I have restricted access to some stories about living and recent relatives to protect their personal information. To get access to these restricted posts, please get in touch with me and I will arrange it if possible.

Comments

I encourage you to leave comments about anything you see on the blog, particularly if you find mistakes or want to dispute the way something has been presented. There are also many gaps in our knowledge of the family, so if you have information that is not already on the site, please tell me about it. As well as facts I would love to see more photographs, so if you have any photos that you would like to see included, please send them to me.

Comments won’t appear automatically as I have to read and approve them before they go public. Not because I want to censor anyone but to protect the site from spam!

I hope you enjoy the blog as much as I have writing it. More stories will appear from time to time and some of the existing ones will get changed as more information is discovered. The site is relatively modest (as at July 2022) but will grow over the ensuing months. Call back from time to time to see what’s new and what has been changed.

Michael