User:MichaelPFox61

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InsertformulahereGreetings Wikipedians

I'm joining Wikipedia to share tidbits of what I've learned about Sir Robert Randolph Garran. My appreciation, and yours, should go to the South Australian Department for Families and Communities, particularly Sue Vardon. I've been fascinated since being asked to research the history of Sir Robert and his family. Please feel free to add to the knowledge. Michael P. Fox

Wikipedia's page on RRG is here ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Garran

Other information ...

Sir Robert had two other older sisters who died of dyptheria. Australian cities were squalid in the late 19th C. It was, by all accounts, an era of severe disadvantage in Australia. The Garran family were relatively comfortable.

Mary Isham (nee Sabine) met Sir Robert's father, Andrew, while he worked as a journalist at the fledgling newspaper in Adelaide, South Australiai, the British colony of South Australia founded on mildly utopian aspirations. The family later moved to Sydney and Andrew Garran went on to be an elder statesman in the debates concerning nationhood.

How Mary ended up in Adelaide can most likely be traced back to the Eppes and Randolph families, their links to Virginia and their subsequent trans-Atlantic wanderings. Randolph was, after all, Sir Robert's middle name. Pocahontas was the name of one of his ancestors and, supposedly, the family tree goes way back there. Roanoke registry could verify. John Rolfe and Pocahontas, I think. Read the whole story about her, John Smith and John Rolfe to have a go at gaugeing, somewhat, the import of their descendant's affect on the history of several nations.

Thomas Jefferson and another US President, John Smith (one of two by that name?) were related. Let's remember that Sir Robert was born in 1867. The latter half of 19th C wasn't that much removed from the descendants of the participants of the Declaration of Independence. US Constitutional historians would be familiar with, for example, Peyton Randolph (I had to go to bed early in the 60s when Peyton Place came on). It'd also be interesting to find out if W. Randolph Hearst has any familial history.