By Patrick Vella
17 September 2015
17 September 2015
It's
difficult to determine and pinpoint the exact moment I started delving
into my family history, and genealogy in general, especially on my
maternal side, but having a mother who was a ‘Murray’ from Trinidad
certainly helped. I was curious to find out more about my roots, having
only faint recollections of what my mum had said in the past. Her father
was Ken Murray, which sounded Scottish, and her mother was Belle
nee’ Govia, which I later found out was Portuguese/Madeiran, thus
providing two very interesting genealogical lineages.
I
grew up hearing my mother talk about the carnival in Trinidad, the
white sandy beaches, roti, corn bread, steelpans and the land she came
from. Unfortunately, she became ill at an early age, and I never got
round to asking her more in the short time we had together. She passed
away in 1991 when I was 26.
A
number of years passed. Some memories were forgotten, some buried
forever, whilst others were resurrected by a children’s Christmas
concert in December 2014. My partner, who is a school teacher, decided
to have a Christmas sing-a-long for the girls in her class. This would
include Christmas carols from a number of countries, and in memory of my
mother, Trinidad was included. The concert came and went and was duly
forgotten, however the seeds were sown and memories started rising to
the surface again.
In
February 2015 I woke up to a renewed enthusiasm to actually do
something about my roots and maybe, in a way, honour my mother, my
heritage and my ancestors. I was confident that social media could be
used as a genealogy tool for tracing long lost relatives and
re-establishing contact.
I
commenced my research by looking for an old family tree that was sent
to us in 1993 by Ralph Weldon. Ralph had married Violet Mae Murray in
1948, in Arkansas, USA and was very active in the Union County Genealogy
Society where he served as President for many years. I eventually found
it, and luckily, it contained two pages with about 50 names of my
mother’s paternal Murray line going back to a Walter Murray born in
1708. This list provided a vital starting point and laid the groundwork
for researching the Murray side of the family. I made contact with the
children and step children of Ralph and was saddened to hear that both he and his wife had passed away.
Ralph’s
documents showed that the Murray family background is Scottish and
although still unproven, that they are descended from the Duke of
Atholl, named after Atholl in Scotland. ( It is a title in the Peerage
of Scotland, held by the head of Clan Murray and the Duke of Atholl's
traditional residence is Blair Castle, near Blair Atholl in Perthshire,
Scotland. )
I
searched for Murray family trees online and also made contact with
Alexandrina Murray, Project Administrator and Robert Burns, Project
Researcher for Colonial America who maintained the Murray Clan website.
They were very helpful but could not prove linage to the “Murrays of
Atholl” that was mentioned in Ralph’s documents without a DNA test.
Information
provided by Murray descendants who I made contact with online agreed
with Ralph's family tree. "The Murray family left Scotland around 1745
at the time of the Jacobite uprising when bonnie Prince Charlie lost his
attempt to defeat the King of England at the Battle of Culloden in
Scotland in 1746. Thousands of people were slaughtered, and our
ancestors left and escaped to Antigua, in the West Indies. Our earliest
known Murray ancestors are Walter Murray Sr. (1708 - 1792) and his wife
Bridget Murray who left Scotland around 1745 and settled in Falmouth,
Antigua."
My
search also turned up some very old digitized books about the West
Indies and these also provided some additional information about Dr
Stephen Murray who was mentioned in 1793;
"Dr.
Stephen Murray, a practitioner of considerable eminence at Falmouth, in
the vicinity of English Harbor, and at the time Surgeon to the Ordnance
on the island, informed me (says Dr. Chisholm), that the malignant
pestilential fever of the year 1793 was evidently imported from the
Experiment man of war, the crew of which received the infection at
Grenada. " (A History of the West Indies by Thomas Coke)
and Dr Walter Murray mentioned in 1812;
"I
appoint John Crawford of Antigua, Surgeon, Walter Murray of Antigua,
Surgeon, Adam Gordon of Antigua, Merch', & Lewis Smith of the
Ordnance Office, G', my Attorneys in Antigua. At Elgin 13 May 1812."
(The history of the island of Antigua - Vere Langford Oliver.)
The
Murray family seems to have stayed in Antigua until Henry Earle
Berkeley Odlum Murray moved to Guyana and Harold Berkeley Murray moved
to Trinidad. Harold was my mother's grandfather.
Over
the next 6 months I continued to make contact with a number of Murray
descendants spread all over the world, including Trinidad, Belgium,
Canada and the United States. My tree flourished and grew, at least on
the Murray side. Old books no longer in print containing family
pedigrees and priceless information on early settlers in the West
Indies, and in particular Antigua and Trinidad by Vere Langford Oliver,
were found online and they provided invaluable resources and
information.
On
my mother’s maternal Govia line, all I had was my grandmother’s name,
and the online searches I made didn’t turn up anything. She did not
appear in any Govia family tree I could find. Was she an only child? Who
were her parents?
I
asked my father’s sister if she knew anything about my mother’s family,
but all she remembered was being told that the Govia family had moved
from Portugal to Venezuela and then to Trinidad.
Although
this information seemed trivial, I realised that I would have to focus
on the Portuguese migration to the West Indies. Almost immediately I
stumbled upon papers and books written by a Dr Jo-Anne Ferreira of the
University of the West Indies, who specialises on the Madeiran and
Portuguese migration to Guyana, St Vincent, Antigua and Trinidad, having
Portuguese roots herself. We exchanged some emails and searched through
all the well known ‘public’ lists that were available online relating
to Portuguese families, but again, Belle did not appear in any of them.
Without even the names of her parents, it seemed an impossible task to
trace her lineage.
Weeks
passed, and my frustration grew. My mother’s paternal Murray line was
expanding rapidly as new information was coming in, and new contacts
were being made – but her maternal Govia line was a dead end. Dr.
Ferreira was kind enough to point me in various directions where I could
possibly get help. The Church of Scotland was one. I knew my mother was
baptised in the Church of Scotland so why not my grandmother? But
again, this didn’t turn up anything.
During
one of my numerous online searches, I stumbled upon an online blog
created and maintained by Ray Agostini, and in this blog he had a short
family history including a ‘John Emanuel Govia’ marrying a ‘Lola Camilla
Ffrench' and having
My
eyes keenly ran down the list in anticipation, but again there was no
mention of ‘Belle’ on the list. It was yet another dead end but there
was no harm in emailing Ray.
Ray
was kind enough to reply the next day. What was interesting is that
Ray’s mother, Ena Govia had married into the Agostini family, thereby
linking the Govia and Agostini families through marriage, but again,
Belle did not appear anywhere. Ena was one of fifteen Govia children and
to Ray’s knowledge, Ena’s father John Emanuel Govia Jnr. was married
only once...so the trail stopped there. What was also important however,
is that where the Govia family was notoriously difficult to trace, the
Agostini one was more researched and documented, with books such as
David Agostini's "The Ancestors" and "The Corsicans in Trinidad" by
Anthony De Verteuil available. The Agostini family provided me with a
vital link into the Govia family genealogy.
At
this point I was losing hope in ever tracing my mother’s maternal Govia
line. If my grandmother Belle did not appear in any family trees and
nobody seemed to have any information about her, there was little I
could do, especially with my parents and grandparents both passed. The
trail was going cold again.
I
spent some weeks exchanging emails with Ray. He proved to be
articulate, friendly, and helpful and many of his emails were peppered
with personal anecdotes and memories of the Trinidad he grew up in,
which to me was priceless information one did not find on the internet.
When we had both exhausted all leads, he directed me to his older
brother Mike, who was 20 years older and with more knowledge of the
‘older’ generation.
In
1950, aged fifteen, Mike Agostini had won the Trinidad National Open
100M championship. At 17, he broke the World Junior record for 100yds
running it in 9.4 seconds, where he defeated the 1952 Olympic champion,
Andy Stanfield (USA). He left Trinidad in 1953 at the age of 18 to study
in America on a running athletic scholarship. On the 23rd January 1954,
the same month that he enrolled at Villanova University, Mike ran 100
yards indoors in 9.6 seconds to break the world record.
At
the British Empire Games in Vancouver, Canada in 1954, Mike won gold
for Trinidad in
the 100 yards in 9.6 seconds. His international career continued for
another six
years. He collected silver in the 100 metres at the Pan American Games
in Mexico City in 1955. In the 1956 Olympic Games at Melbourne he was
6th in the 100m (10.7 seconds) and 4th at 200m (21.1). In the 1958
Empire Games in Cardiff he won bronze and, representing the newly formed
West Indian Federation, he won three medals at the 1959 Pan American
Games in Chicago (silver at 100, bronze at 200m and sprint relay). He
was also dubbed "World's Fastest Human" in 1954 and 1956. Mike retired
from athletics in 1960 at age 25. He married and
settled in Australia, where he became a successful businessman and
prolific writer (seventeen books published) on a variety of subjects.
I wrote a long introductory email to Mike with all I knew about Belle, and sent it off, having little expectation.
The
next day I received a long email in answer from Mike, and as I sat
there reading it, I felt the first tingle of excitement and I knew that
the long journey was finally coming to an end, but not quite over. Not
only did he remember Belle, but she was his Godmother, and a cousin of
his mother. He did not know who her parents were, but he told me that
out of his mother’s fourteen siblings from John Emanuel Govia Jnr., one
aunt, Lola Blanc was still alive, and if anyone would know anything, it
was sure to be her.
Two
other pieces of information emerged following a number of email
exchanges with Mike. One was that John Emanuel Govia, his grandfather,
had a father also called John Emanuel Govia Snr. who was married more
than once. This was his great grandfather.
The
second was that he remembered that Belle had a brother called Eddie who
had a daughter called Brenda. Mike passed on Lola’s telephone number
and Brenda’s email address.
The
rest, as they say, is history. After a chat with Lola on the phone, who
proved to be a lovely, charming, warm, elderly lady with an excellent
memory, she confirmed to me the names of Belle’s parents – John Emanuel
Govia Snr. and Virginia Mendes and that her grandfather had been married
twice. Belle was the result of his second marriage. The last piece of
the puzzle was determining how many siblings Belle had and if Eddie was
the only one from her grandfather’s second marriage.
Two
days later, a reply from Brenda came in and with it, a lot of
information about Belle, her two sisters Carmen and Thelma and her
brother Eddie.
Brenda
knew that Eddie, her father, was married three times and had eight
children before dying at the young age of 38. He had two boys from his
first marriage, five children from his second marriage (Brenda
included), and a daughter in Venezuela from his third marriage.
Around
this time, an email out of the blue appeared in my inbox from an
Elliott Govia. I had been sending emails out on a regular basis over the
course of the last few months to any and every Govia family tree owner I
could find online, but rarely got a reply, and when I did, there was
always the same answer about not knowing this ‘Belle’. This email,
incredibly, included an old Govia family tree – that had Belle and her
siblings on it. The quest was complete. Elliott had made the connection
between the Belle in an email I had sent to his father George some weeks
earlier and a Belle in an old Govia family tree he had in hand linking
me to the Govia ‘family’.
Coincidentally, these answers all came to me on my birthday.
The
last couple of days have been intense, hectic and even emotional. I was
invited into a Facebook group that focused on the Govia family and have
been told that I caused a ‘Govia explosion’ with all the information I
now had and shared. Many more have now joined, new photos and
information are being posted continuously and more long lost Govias are
being found and contacted.
This
journey started as a wish to honour my mother’s memory and connect with
my roots in order to honour her lineage. It has taken me in unexpected
directions and enabled me to meet some helpful, warm people along the
way and form new friendships and connections.
I
would like to especially thank Dr Jo-Anne S. Ferreira of the
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of the
West indies, Ray and Mike Agostini, Marie-Therese Agostini , Brenda
Hooft, Lola Blanc, and of course my partner Michelle who has supported
my quest over the last seven months.
About the author:
"Patrick
Vella is 51 years old and lives in Malta in Europe. He has been working
in Information Technology since 1985 and holds a Masters degree in
Business Intelligence. He has a background in martial arts and is an
avid reader, lover of history and part time genealogist."
