Dunstan Family Page
The Wendron Parish Church is close to the tin-mining district of Porkellis between Falmouth and Redruth in Cornwall. William Dunstan married Eliza Jane Bolitho in the Wendron Church in 1876. The Dunstan family were tin miners, whilst the Bolitho family farmed a small property at nearby Trewavas. In about 1879, the couple and their two sons sailed for New Zealand, where their first daughter was born. In about 1880 they left for Clunes in Victoria where they were re-united with other members of the Dunstan family, and William Dunstan took up work as a miner on the Clunes gold reefs.
(Photograph Dun-wen-003, Russell Hudson, 1993)
Introduction
My great grandparents, William Dunstan and Eliza Jane Bolitho, were born in the Wendron Parish and were married in the Parish Church on 13 January 1876. In so doing, they followed generations of Dunstan and Bolitho forebears who were born, married and died in this Parish.
Bennett Dunstan (1817-1880), a tin miner in the Porkellis district and William Dunstan’s father, was married in the Parish Church to Johanna Priske on 7 July 1841; between 1842 and 1869 they had thirteen children. Three of their boys (also tin miners) migrated to Australia and New Zealand when the Cornish tin-mining industry declined. These were Bennett (1843-1906), Thomas (1844-1897), and my great grandfather William Dunstan (1852-1902).
Eliza Jane Bolitho (1855-1937) was born on a small farm, “Little Trewavas”, south of Porkellis. She was the second of fourteen children of James Bolitho and Elizabeth Wearne. Her parents, too, married in the Parish Church, on 14 August 1852.
William Dunstan and Eliza Jane Bolitho had two boys, William and James Arthur, before leaving Cornwall in about 1879 for Port Lyttleton, New Zealand. After the birth of their daughter, Susan Ann (1880-1890) they moved to Clunes, Victoria. Here, William Dunstan joined his two older brothers and his widowed mother Johanna. William Dunstan worked as a miner on the gold reefs at Clunes, and he and Eliza Jane had a further seven children in the years to 1898, the first child being my grandmother Laura Dunstan/Hudson (1882-1947).
William Dunstan died of “miners’ phthisis” in 1902, age 50 years; Eliza Jane lived in Clunes for the next 35 years, dying in the Clunes Hospital in 1937 at the age of 82..
More of the Story
I am still working on converting the data I have collected on the Dunstan and Bolitho Families to web pages. As the work is completed, it will be posted to this web site. Please pay me a return visit.