Topic: Influencer.

My 3rd cousin Dr. Patricia Ann Prendergast (“AnnieP”) did not come into my life until I was in my fifties, but I still consider her a major influencer in the rest of my life, particularly as regards my genealogical work.

In 1987 AnnieP published a study leave project “The Search for Thomas and Susan d’Archy” – it led to a PhD. As she explained in her background to the project, “I first came across the name d’Archy when I was putting together a history of my family who settled in what is now called the Western Riverina (of what became the state of NSW) in the early 1850s. My GGG Aunt Margaret married as her second husband Francis, son of Thomas d’Archy squatter of Oxley Station, Hay and his wife Susan nee Byrne. … The next step in my search for Thomas d’Archy was to try and trace his descendants …. I began by looking through phone directories and the only entries for what is a very unusual name were two in Sydney and one in Queensland. Miss Nancy Elizabeth d’Archy of Kings Cross is a GG Daughter of Thomas ….”.

Miss N E d’Archy was my Aunt Betty, my mother’s sister. When I was visiting her one day she told me about Annie P interviewing her and showed me what had been sent as a result. As a researcher myself, albeit in a different field, I was immediately interested and impressed by what she had discovered. Until then apart from my mother’s English family I had only a vague idea of my maternal grandfather’s origins and a single badly drawn tree in a bible was the only source of information about my paternal side.

Over the following years I came to know AnnieP well, corresponding often and staying with her on several occasions. I was always impressed by the depth of her research and knowledge, her organisational skills and her boundless enthusiasm, even when in her later years she developed various medical challenges. She organised a special weekend for descendants of the early Australian settlers and convicts who arrived on the same ship, the “Tellicherry”, as Susan Byrne d’Archy’s grandparents. That was where I met a number of d’Archy relatives who AnnieP had tracked down, for the first time.

AnnieP was very generous in sharing all her materials and indeed without her early research, particularly in locating some records in Neuchatel, Switzerland, the early history of the d’Archys would be a mystery indeed. It still is in some ways …