Favourite Find: My 2x Great Grandfather's Obituary

Joseph Henry Jones

Another Storyteller Tuesday challenge from Robin Stewart:

“Each week, Genealogy Matters publishes a challenge for anyone interested in family history called Storyteller Tuesday Challenge. The challenge is that your post should be 350 words or less and should directly address the prompt for that week”

Tell a story about your FAVOURITE FIND while researching your family history.

My favourite find relates to my 2x great grandfather Joseph Henry Jones, who was my long time brick wall, until I found the following incredible obituary.

“From: Jamieson Chronicle, Saturday, November 9, 1895

Our representative at Gaffney’s Creek, The Other Vagabond reports: One of those horrible discoveries, which makes the most hardened of us shudder, was made on Wednesday last, by Mounted Constable Polmear. He had that morning received information that a man named Joseph Jones, an alluvial miner who was ‘a hatter’, on the Goulburn River, a few miles above Knockwood, had not been seen at his home for nearly 3 weeks.

The energetic constable at once set about finding the missing digger. The result of shrewd and careful inquries caused him to take an old and unused bush track leading from Luarville, to the German Spur. Mr. James Cadam accompanied Mr. Polmear, and they had not proceeded more than a quarter of a mile from the Commercial Hotel, when the gruesome spectacle of poor Joe’s dead body, in a very advanced stage of decomposition, barred the way.

The unfortunate man, who was known by the sobriquet of ‘Joe the Quacker’, had taken this track as a shortcut to his temporary home on the Goulburn River, never dreaming, no doubt, that instead of reaching his camp in good time, he would never see it again; that he would die a lonely and miserable death, within sight of the houses and active bustling humanity.

He was about 60 years of age and though not of robust constitution, was lively and active but….Ah, the but….Joe had periodical failings. ‘Tis the old, old, very old story; an empty whiskey bottle; an empty pain killer bottle; a grinning corpse; a ghastly spectacle; a noisome thing; a hideous putrid mass to be tumbled into a coffin to fill a pauper’s grave; just one more nameless mound, which will for a short time mark the spot, where a little of the flotsam and jetsam of the bush were covered up out of sight.

But the remains of unfortunate Joes are not buried as I write. The putrefactive remnants lie in an outhouse at the Commercial Hotel awaiting official enquiry.

*Punctuation and paragraphs have been added for ease of reading.