Anthony Dunford and Barbara Brabazon had 5 children
1.Edward William Durnford b 22 nd Oct 1803 in London and died 30 January 1889 in Hampshire
2.George Anthony Durnford b 18 Sept 1804 in Kent and died 8 Oct 1856 in Simla East Indies
3.Catherine Jemima Durnford b 3 Feb 1806 died 8 October 1820 in St John Marylebone
4.Arthur Gifford Durnford b 14 Jan 1809 Brockhill Surrey d 22 Dec 1886 Hindolveston
5.Harriet Barbara Durnford b 9 May 1810 in London d 2nd May 1885 in York Ontario
1. Edward William Durnford married Elizabeth Rebecca Langley b 1804 in Sri Lanka
married in 1829 at St Johns Church Cardiff d 28 Jan 1894 in Southend
1. Edward William Durnford
In 1825 he was nominated a "Candidate for the Corps of Royal Engineers," and joined the Ordnance Survey at Cardiff. In August 1826, he was posted to Chatham and was gazetted 2nd-Lieutenant in Sept. of the same year.
He joined the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1827 and served there until 1842 when he transferred to the English Survey in which he served until 1844. He was promoted 2nd-Captain in 1841. In 1845 he embarked for service in China. In 1849 he served in Scotland until 1855 when he embarked for service in the Crimea.
He was however, detained at Malta and served there until 1856, when he embarked for Ireland where he was employed upon district duties until 1857, being appointed Assistant Adjutant-General to the Royal Engineers serving there. In the meantime, he had been promoted to Brevet Major in July 1854 and Lieutenant-Colonel in December of the same year.
Shortly after his promotion to full Colonel in 1860 he was appointed Commanding Royal Engineer in Ireland, which he held until 1866 when he again embarked for Malta as Commanding Royal Engineer and Colonel on the Staff. He remained at Malta until his promotion to the rank of Major-General in 1868.
He was promoted Lieutenant-General in 1874, and in the same year he was gazetted to the rank of Colonel Commandant in the Corps. He was further promoted to the rank of General on Oct. 1, 1877.
He died a the age of 85 on Jan. 30 1889.
They had 5 children
1.1 Anthony William Durnford 24 May 1830 Manor Hamilton Ireland 22 Jan 1879
South Africa
1.2. Edward Congreave Langley Durnford 8 May 1832 - 1927
1.3. Annabella Barbara Durnford 19 Mar 1834 Limerick Ireland - 1884
1.4 Catherine Jemima Durnford 16 Mar 1836 Killerhrandra Ireland d 1904 Devon
1.4. Arthur George Durnford 9 Aug 1838 -Westport Ireland 1912
1.5. Harriet Maria Boteler Durnford 1 Mar 1840 - 1916
The family of Edward William Durnford is in a following post
2. George Anthony Durnford
Was a Captain in command of 27th Foot went to assist British garrison besieged by Dutch trekboers Port Natal 1842. At Congella They were boarded Conch in Algoa Bay under Capt William Bell and it took 2 weeks to reach Natal.
The result of this conflict was the end of the Boer Republic of Natalia and the final annexation by Britain of Natal to the Cape Colony followed in 1844.
At the time of Langalibalele's birth, European settlements in Southern Africa were confined to Cape Colony and to Portuguese fortress of Lourenço Marques.In 1824 Fynn established a small British settlement at Port Natal (later to become Durban) but the British Government declined to take possession of the port.From 1834 onwards, the Voortrekkers (Dutch-speaking farmers) started to migrate from the Cape Colony in large numbers and in 1837 crossed the Drakensberg into KwaZulu-Natal where, after the murder of one of their leaders, Piet Retief, in the massacre at Weenen they defeated Shaka's successor Dingane at the Battle of Blood River, put Mpanda on the Zulu throne and established the republic of Natalia.
Friction between the Voortrekkers and the Pondo, a tribe whose territory lay between Natalia and the Cape Colony led to the British occupying Port Natal, the subsequent Battle of Congella followed by the siege and relief of the port. After the port had been relieved, the Voortrekkers withdrew from KwaZulu-Natal into the interior and the British established the Colony of Natal.
"Narrative of the Entrance of the 'Conch' at Port Natal" by Capt. William Douglas Bell, printed by the Natal Mercury, Durban 1869.
"Annals of Natal" Vol 1 & 11 : J. Bird Rosemary Dixon-Smith, great-great-granddaughter of Captain Bell, first Port Captain of Natal.
3. Catherine Jemima Durnford
Catherine was born 3rd February 1806 and baptised 19th February 1809 in Warfield Berkshire in England. Catherine died 8th October 1820 at St John Marylebone.
Her address was Queen Ann Street London
Special Note: While researching all the different family lines, there was bound to be some mistakes especially from the information in different genealogy programes, and while it was my aim to update and correct any prior information, the previous information supplied for this Catherine Jemima Durnford actually belonged to her niece, another Catherine Jemima Durnford daughter of Edward William Durnford.
This has now been corrected. Throughout the family lineage there are so many people named exactly the same.
4. Arthur Gifford Durnford b 1809 in Brockhill in Surrey. He became a minister and he married Marianne Wiffen in 1839 in Essex.
They had 13 childrenAnthony Yates Durnford 1842 - 1843
Marion Durnford 1842 m Newnham Philpott
James Poole Oates Durnford 1845 - 1919 m Woodward
Sophia Bestard Durnford 1846 - 1903
Georgina Harriet Pellow Durnford 1848 - 1935 m Thomas Henry Griffinhoofe
Katrine Brabazon Durnford 1849 - 1849
Madeline Durnford 1850 - 1851
Lucy Isaacson Durnford 1854 - 1939 m Fletcher Ivens
Kathleen Durnford 1857
Mable Montague Bockett Durnford 1859 1864
Julia Maude Dunford 1860 - 1879
Arthur Gifford Durnford 1864 1864
How sad it is to see the deaths of the young children, very difficult for the parents.
They lived in Hindolveston in Norfolk. He died December 1886 she died in 1864, possibly in childbirth.
All the children carried interesting middle names. Usually it is the name of a grandparent or g.ggrandparent, and with these children it has taken some time to work out the connections.
The name Yates is Marianne's Grandmother - Isabelle Yates who married Henry Wiffen
Their son was Henry Yates Wiffen and he married Elizabeth. Parents of Marianne.
Going on the surnames, Oates should be the name of Marianne's mother Elizabeth.
Which leave Poole, Pellow and Bestard and Brockett. There was a habit also in the Durnford's to name their children after famous Military figures.
Bastard and his brother were at Plymouth, and quelled a riot. As well as military they were Members of Parliament. Pellow was a very strong Military family, being Governor General of India, and in the Navy, Bastard was the godfather of one of the Pellows.
John Halsey Bockett was the son of John Bockett and Martha Halsey John married Rebekah Bradney and their daughter Frances married Rev Thomas William Barlow, the Prebendary of Bristol
who was the son of William Barlow.
His brother Sir George Hilaro Barlow married Elizabeth Smith. They had a large family and the eldest daughter Eliza Harriett Barlow married Pownoll Bastard Pellow the 2nd Count of Exmouth.
The Bocketts were a Quaker Family as was the Wiffen. Family jigsaw's nothing like them!
The Droits de L’Homme Engagement
On the 13th of January 1797 shortly after
midday two British frigates sighted an unidentified French ship off the
coast of Brittany. The frigates, Indefatigable, Captain Sir Edward Pellew, and Amazon,
Captain Robert Reynolds, immediately gave chase and by four o’clock in
the afternoon observed the ship to be a large vessel with two tiers of
guns
January 1797, ranged from eight to twenty-seven, though two of the youngest, Pownoll Pellew and Fleetwood Pellew, the captain’s sons, appear to have been carried on the ships books in order to reduce the period of active service required before they could sit their lieutenants’ examinations
In the case of the Indefatigable, the young gentlemen were no exception, six were the sons of Pellew’s friends and acquaintances, two were Pellew’s own sons, and one was related to his wife.
5. Harriet Barbara Durnford born 1810 in London she married Nov 1830 to Capt Charles Gerard King in Chatham England.
Capt Charles Gerard King was born in 1801 in Vella Eas Indies, and he died November 1855 in Istanbul in Turkey.
Their children
Arthur Charles Alpin King b 1833 in Chatham
Barbara Catherine King b 1835
Pauline D'Estrade King b 1839 Drakes Island in England d 1911 in York Ontario
Florence Harriet Barbara King b 1840 England d 1881 Muskoka Ontario m Rev Joseph Cole
Edward William Durnford King b 1842
Louisa Alice King b 1843 Kent
Charles Gerard King b 1845 d 1920 Muskoka Canada m Priscilla Dangerfield
Georgina Metcalfe King b 1850 d 1921 Welland Ontario m George Rodney Owen
Harriet Barbara Durnford wrote a book 'Letters from Muskoka', by an Emigrant Lady. The book was published in 1878 and is a record of her experiences as a pioneer woman living in the "bush" of Muskoka, Ontario, Canada.
Notes from Internet search......................
It sounds like the premise of a 19th-century reality show: a British lady accustomed to servants, tea and whiling away the hours with embroidery is plunked into the Muskoka bush in 1871, where she lives in a cabin missing a door, fights an endless plague of mosquitoes and chases cows from the cabbage plants.
She may not be suited for the bush, but our 61-year-old widowed protagonist has a dry wit. “The pleasure of a solitary walk is greatly impaired by the vague terror of a stray bear confronting you on the pathway,” she writes.
In 1871, Harriet Barbara Durnford King, daughter of a prominent British military family, leaves Calais, France, a city that has been a shelter for her and her family during “fifteen years of widowhood.” The Franco-Prussian War, now finished, has disrupted her life. Harriet has an adult son making a go of it in Canada and she, along with three of her other children, is convinced to join him in this magical El Dorado called Muskoka.
She is courageous, she is miserable and she nearly starves. She writes it all down in Letters from Muskoka, credited to an anonymous “emigrant lady,” which is published in 1878.
Generations of the King family scatter. Then, seven years ago, a television writer and director living in Los Angeles, a man with the regal name of Durnford King, learns he is the descendant of Harriet. He also discovers cousins back in Canada he never knew existed.
Durnford King has seen the old westerns but never imagined his relatives in the story, in a much tougher landscape — 1870s Muskoka.
Charles King was Harriet's son who came to the Muskoka ahead of the family, and later opened a resort called "King's Park" on Lake Rousseau. Montague King is Durnford's father.
“Parts of it, you really felt they weren’t sure they were going to make it — are we all going to starve out here?” he says.
“I certainly arrived with a vague notion that passing deer might be shot from one’s own door and that hares and rabbits might almost be caught with the hand,” his great grandmother writes in her long ago book. “These romantic ideas were ruefully dispelled.”
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In the basement of his cozy Port Carling home, John Chapman, who looks like a woodsy Donald Sutherland, sorts pictures of ladies in Gone with the Wind dresses, as his wife calls them, and serious men with waxed moustaches.
“I probably wouldn’t have liked them,” Chapman says with a laugh. “A little too uppity.”
Harriet left France with many of these items — paintings of relatives, books, her late husband’s telescope — and now they live in a trunk in the unpretentious basement of her great-great-grandson John Chapman, alongside a commemorative newspaper from President Barack Obama’s election.
“I just can’t imagine as a settler, how tough it would have been,” Chapman says. “I don’t know how she did it myself.”
Although he did not inherit the family fondness for wearing a suit at breakfast ( “only funerals and weddings,” he says), the 67-year-old has the entrepreneurial spirit. He’s lived around the world working as a boilermaker, owned a successful bait shop in Port Carling and is now the owner of a taxi service.
On a not too cold day, he follows Harriet’s trail and drives to an area near Huntsville, the sunshine flickering through the snow-covered pine and cedar trees. Back in 1871, the hilly Muskoka Road was the main overland route into the north, a “colonization road” to open up the district, built by the government and maintained by settlers. The colonization roads had worked well opening up southern parts of the province.
“It worked a lot less well in Muskoka and Parry Sound because survival was so much tougher there,” says Lee Ann Eckhardt Smith, author of Muskoka’s Main Street. “Road maintenance was very far down on the list of priorities.
“With the Canadian Shield, the road could not be cut straight. It would run into a cliff or a lake or a river or a swamp, and so it was really this twisting, hilly, horrible thing for most of its life, but it did evolve over time, and it now forms part of Highway 11.”
After taking a train and two steamers to Washago, north of Orillia, Harriet travelled this road with a hired carriage. The entire journey took days. The forest was burning and she had been told it hadn’t rained for three months.
“The farther we went from Toronto, the more barren and ugly the country appeared, and the hideous stumps in every clearing became more and more visible” she writes. “Toward dusk the lurid glare of the burning trees in the far-off forest became appalling, as well as magnificent. . . The forest gradually closed in upon us, on fire on both sides, burnt trees crashing down in all directions, here and there one right across the road, which had to be dragged out of the way before we could go on.”
Marta Iwanek/Toronto Star
Here is a postcard from King's Park, the resort on Lake Rosseau that the King family ran for decades after leaving their original settlement in the bush.
Chapman stops his van near his great-grandfather’s old wooden house, nestled in deep, untracked snow. He stands on the lonely road with his hands in his pockets, the tips of his ears red, his grey hair catching snowflakes.
“Can you imagine the 1870s?” he asks. “I can see why a society person would feel out of place.”
________________________________________
Harriet’s review of her first night in the bush was undeniably scathing.
Sleeping arrangements: “of the most primitive description.”
The toilet: “unsatisfactory.”
Breakfast: “needs no description.”
Scenery: “the dense forest circling us all round . . . gave me a dreadful feeling of suffocation.”
“Had it not been for these drawbacks, I should greatly have admired the situation,” she writes.
This was the latest Canadian frontier, the result of an influx of immigration in the 1850s and a demand for more space, says Eckhardt Smith.
“The whole idea had been to leave it to First Nations to have all of Muskoka and Parry Sound, and gradually they just kept edging them out with different treaties,” says Donna Williams, author of Hardscrabble: The High Cost of Free Land.
In 1868, the Ontario government passed the Free Land Grant and the Homestead Act. “A FREE GRANT OF LAND! Without any charge whatever,” read one notice, addressed to “all parties desirous of Improving their Circumstances by Emigrating to a New Country.”
Anyone over 18 was eligible for 100 or 200 acres of land — provided they cleared 15 acres, built a house and lived on the property for six months of the year, for five years.
“It was a controversy that raged for oh, at least three decades,” says Eckhardt Smith, “about whether Muskoka was just the greatest place you’d ever want to live, a land of opportunity, and all you needed to do was come up here and work hard and you could make it, and people who said, ‘If you go there, you will die.’ ”
________________________________________
Harriet’s land was between her children’s parcels. You can see “Mrs. King” written in a square box in an old atlas, representing the land that brought her so much grief.
She arrived in autumn. The family cleared the land and called the neighbours to a “bee” to help build a house. It was Harriet’s first bush faux pas — she passed along invitations on a Sunday (offensive to religious neighbours), and called the bee for November (too cold). Three people came.
With no roof, Harriet stayed with her daughter Florence until the spring. Gone were the days of pretty drawing rooms, embroidery and “social and intellectual converse.”
“It was anguish to me to see your sisters and sister-in-law, so tenderly and delicately brought up, working harder by far than any of our servants in England or France,” she writes in her book, which is composed of lengthy letters to a child still living across the Atlantic.
“I confess, to my shame, that my philosophy entirely gave way, and that for a long time I cried constantly. I also took to falling off my chair in fits of giddiness, which lasted for a few minutes and much alarmed the children, who feared apoplexy.”
The winter of 1872 was cold. The silks, delicate shawls and laces were “perfectly useless.”
“Instead of the spring which I fondly anticipated, we burst at once from dull gloomy weather and melting snow, to burning hot summer and clouds of mosquitoes and flies of all kinds.”
Harriet’s great-great-granddaughter Roz Barden moved to the same area in 1979 without realizing the coincidence: “There are times I don’t even step outside, the blackflies and mosquitoes are so bad,” she says.
Durnford King looks at some old King family photos in 2008. The visit was the first time the long-lost cousin met John Chapman, who is looking on.
The growing season was short. The family couldn’t afford a machine to remove the tree stumps. They had to let nature rot them.
Harriet thought the stumps looked like spectres in the dim light. “I could almost fancy myself in the cemetery in the Dunkirk Road, near Calais, and that the blackened stumps were hideous black crosses which the French are so fond of erecting in their churchyards.”
The family had a few cattle, and named them — one was Mistress Dolly. In the morning, the neighbour’s cows, Bling and Baldface, would show up like little children to fetch the King cattle away to the bush, to feed for free. All the cows wore bells.
Before the family built a fence, much of Harriet’s time was spent “running out with the broom to drive away the neighbour’s cattle and protect our cherished cabbage plants, and the potatoes just coming up.”
In the hot summer of 1872, the family tried to relieve Harriet’s suffering by moving the “hideously prominent” stove outside the cabin. They cut a new door in the back to make access to it easier for her. Unfortunately, to her “great discomfiture” they didn’t have the lumber to make a new door. It remained a gaping hole for a time.
It was a lonely summer: Harriet’s pregnant daughter-in-law and daughter went to Bracebridge to await the birth of the first “bush baby.”
There was solitude, but not privacy. “I was liable at any moment of the day to have some passing settler walk coolly in, and sit down in my very chair if I had vacated it for a moment.”
One day, a man’s face appeared at the door.
“I greeted him with a scream.”
His salutation was: “Wall, I guess I’ve skeered you some!”
Aside from this man and another “well-meaning, but especially noisy and vulgar individual who was a continual terror to me,” Harriet found the settlers around her to be helpful, hard-working and kind. Each imagined his land the best, each had “the largest turnip ever seen” and each hoped the railway might pass through their land someday, she remarked.
“There might be a little quarrelling, backbiting and petty rivalry among them, with an occasional dash of slanderous gossip; but I am inclined to think not more than will inevitably be found in small communities.”
Her old life made no sense in the bush. Servants were hard to come by when anyone 18 or older could take up free land. The best thing a man could have was a trade.
She wrote about the strangeness of sharing a table, on one occasion, with a Kentish plowboy: “This was my first initiation into the free and easy intercourse of all classes in this county, where the standing proverb is ‘Jack is as good as his master!’ ”
Marta Iwanek/Toronto Star
Great-great grandson John Chapman holds a photo he has stored in a trunk in his home in Port Carling of a woman identified as pioneer Harriet Barbara King.
The plowboy was thriving. He had cleared 30 acres and had more than a dozen cattle and a large family. In the winter he supplemented his earnings by working in Bracebridge as a stable boy.
Ladies and gentlemen did not have these advantages, she writes. Many of the men in the area spent their winters working in the lumber business away from home to earn extra money, but gentlemen could not leave their ladies unprotected, she wrote.
The family had friends in England they were able to call upon for resources and support, but there were times of near-starvation. The fall wheat in 1984 was a “magnificent” crop, but it was then spoiled by repeated freezing and thawing. “Every grain was found to be wizened, shrivelled, and discoloured, and fit for nothing but to feed poultry,” Harriet writes.
“We suffered at intervals this year more severely from the want of money than we had ever done; and had even long spells of hunger and want, which I trust have prepared us all to feel during the remainder of our lives a more full and perfect sympathy with our destitute fellow-creatures.”
Harriet submitted articles to publications, hoping to pay the bills. Some were accepted, but penury was always lurking in the margins.
At Christmas 1874, “We had been literally without a cent for two months, and all our provision for Christmas festivities consisted in plenty of potatoes and a small modicum of flour.”
Some of her children left the settlement as early as 1873, and by 1875, Harriet had left the bush behind, using money from “unwearied” friend in England. By 1881, she is living with her daughter and son-in-law in Bracebridge.
“I went into the Bush of Muskoka strong and healthy, full of life and energy, and fully as enthusiastic as the youngest of our party,” she writes. “I left it with hopes completely crushed, and with health so hopelessly shattered from hard work, unceasing anxiety and trouble of all kinds, that I am now a helpless invalid.”
________________________________________
Canadian bureaucrats and politicians encouraged immigration to the region, British philanthropists sponsored thousands of people with limited means to make the journey, and in Muskoka, Thomas McMurray, an early settler and booster, was a de facto PR man in his 1871 book, which includes a question-and-answer section.
“Q:. Are there many settlers in the District, and how do they thrive?
“A: There are thousands of settlers, and they all thrive well and like the country.
“Q: Is any portion of the Free Grant Lands tolerably free of stones and rocks?
“A: Yes, some places entirely free, with 70 per cent fit for cultivation.
There were success stories, and there was some fertile land, particularly around Bracebridge, Hardscrabble author Williams says. But the majority of the newcomers weren’t farmers, and the land was mean.
“We were certainly deceived by the accounts given of Muskoka; after four years residence I am inclined to think that from the very first the capabilities of its soil for agricultural purposes have been greatly exaggerated,” Harriet writes in her book.
The government continued to send delegations to Muskoka into the 1880s. They found most of the land hadn’t even been cleared; “it was just burnt out stumps, and the people who were there looked pretty badly off,” says Williams.
By 1880, “Manitoba Fever” hit. Some people abandoned their Muskoka farmland for the decent soil and a railway westward.
“Harriet, she told the truth about how terrible it was,” says Scott Shipman, who came upon King’s story when he was editing and adding historical context to the more upbeat and humorous pioneer story of young Frederick de la Fosse for the book English Bloods.
Marta Iwanek/Toronto Star
John Chapman poses for a photo near the original family settlement north of Utterson, Ont.
He says both accounts are great reads that offer different perspectives, and he is working on an edited version of King’s book, to provide more historical context. “Eventually I got caught in it so bad I had to find out where they all came from and what happened to them after the story,” he says.
Harriet died in Toronto in 1885. Her descendant Roz Barden says the names of Harriet’s sons Edward and Charles can be found in Toronto business registries — they worked at a medical oxygen company. Charles eventually returned to Muskoka, where he opened a resort called “King’s Place” on Lake Rosseau.
In 1902, it cost $6 a week to stay, and there was room for seven guests. By that time, The Toronto Daily Star resort guide noted that Muskoka was known for its “unbarbered beauty spots”, a quiet alternative to the “American watering places,” with their brass bands and gin rickeys.
________________________________________
Sitting in his living room, where the big screen television is on mute, John Chapman talks about the times he saw “Durnford King” on the end credits of television shows. It always bothered him.
Unbeknownst to Chapman, Durnford grew up in Toronto. His father, Montague “Monty” King was around 60 when he was born.
Durnford’s parents split when he was 10, and he never heard from his father again. He started a career in advertising, and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he transitioned into the entertainment industry. He has directed music videos (Jefferson Airplane, Roberta Flack) and television specials (Oscar Peterson’s Canadiana Suite) and written scripts for shows like Highlander and The Lost World.
“My entire life goes by, and every once and a while I try and find out what happened,” he says.
In 2008, Durnford’s daughter Thalia Ryder began looking for traces of grandfather Montague online. Scott Shipman, who lives in Huntsville and had been tracking down King family descendants for his research, saw her posts and emailed.
“He actually had been doing research on the family for years and years and years. He said he was in touch with some of my relatives. I didn’t know they existed.”
The surprise was mutual.
“Nobody in the family, even my mother, nobody knew that he (Durnford) existed,” Chapman says.
Chapman knew of another family that Monty had, with two daughters.
A few years ago, Durnford brought his family to Muskoka to meet his cousins. Chapman presented him with a cake: “Welcome home Durnford, King of Muskoka.”
“Now we’re like a couple of twins,” Chapman says. “I love him to death. He’s got the family look. It’s nice to now the King family isn’t extinct.”
On a recent trip, the cousins took a boat ride on Lake Rosseau, where “King’s Park” is faintly visible on a rock where the old resort used to be. Another memorial was even more obscure: Harriet’s grave, in Mount Pleasant cemetery, was marked with a small slab that said “King.”
“She was really a courageous person,” says Durnford. “Getting a book published when you’re living in the backwoods of Muskoka is no small feat . . . I thought she deserved some kind of recognition.”
This fall, the cousins laid a new stone. In January, the snow that Harriet resented so much covers the grave. Brushing it away, the white flakes fall into the crevices, making the accomplishments of Harriet’s life stand out:
“Daughter, mother, grandmother, friend, poet and pioneer woman. Wife of Capt. Charles Gerrard King, Author of ‘Letters from Muskoka’ By an Emigrant Lady.”
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