The Sinclair croft at Dunrossness, Shetland When Thomas, Laurence and John Sinclair left Shetland for Western Australia, they left their parents, George and Margaret Sinclair, at Hillock in the parish of Dunrossness. Their sister Ann remained in Shetland with her husband, James Mainland. As George…
George Thomas Sinclair (1867–1917?) The seventh and last of Thomas and Mary Sinclair’s children, George Thomas was born on 17 March 1867 at Greenmount, in the wooded foothills above the Swan River east of Perth. He was the second of the children to be born…
For many Shetlanders who left in the nineteenth century, the story ends at the shoreline: a departure, a voyage, an arrival in a distant colony. But for the Sinclair brothers of Dunrossness, the story did not end there. It continued far inland, into a dry…
When Thomas Sinclair brought his family to Western Australia on the Tartar in 1863 he kept a diary of the voyage. The original is in the Esperance Museum, Western Australia. It is a fascinating document because it vividly describes what it must have been like for a…
Jessie was the eldest child of Thomas and Mary Sinclair, born in Dunrossness, on the 2nd April 1852. She spent her childhood in Dunrossness, where she went to the local school. The 1861 census recorded her as a ‘scholar’ living with her family at ‘Husbrake’….
The usual story about the discovery of the Norseman goldfield is that it was accidentally discovered by a horse named Norseman. For example, Rica Erickson said: Station hands left work, sometimes without giving notice, to go prospecting, Larry Sinclair among them. By luck, in 1894…
My wife’s great great grandfather was Thomas Sinclair, a Shetland Islander who was, at the time of his death in 1868, an assistant warder with the Convicts Department. I have discussed him elsewhere on this site. As the old records show, he was buried in…
Thomas Sinclair was born at Skelberry, in the parish of Dunrossness at the southern tip of Mainland Shetland, on 8 August 1828. He was the eldest son of George Sinclair, a tenant farmer, and Margaret Bain, and was named for his paternal grandfather, Thomas Sinclair…
Writing about her experiences onboard the migrant ship Tartar, Janet Millett stated that whenever the ship encountered really bad weather her husband would go to the married persons’ quarters where he would look after the women and children, presumably to reassure them and also to give…
John Skinner Prout (1805-1876) was an artist who came to Australia in the 1840s. He described his voyage out to Australia in an article in The Illustrated London News, with sketches of life on board ship. Emigrants to the Swan River Colony would have had a similar…