Europe 2008 Part 6

Family History

 

Our first call the next morning was to the Public Library at Okehampton to catch up on our emails. Then we headed out along the country lanes to the north-west in search of a little village on the Devon-Cornwall border called North Tamerton.

Here is the village church, now closed, with the village graves silent around it. This is where the Barriball family, Margaret's father's ancestors, lived in the middle of the nineteenth century before they left on the emigrant ship "Timandra" to sail to New Plymouth in 1841.

We could not find the family name in the graveyeard, so drove on down the lane to the main road and on to a group of five villages, including this one, built of stone, called Altarnun.

 

This is the church in Altarnun, which is the original home of Margaret's mother's family, the Burnards.

They emigrated to Motueka in the middle of the nineteenth century, where they built a ship and traded between that part of the South Island and Wanganui and Wellington.

This church has carved pew-ends. The antiquarians reckon they were carved in the sixteenth century. One of the nineteenth century Burnards was also a carver, this time in stone, and while still a teenager he carved this gravestone for one of the family, which is still in the Altarnun graveyard. He later established quite a reputation as a sculptor.

 

From Altarnun we went back to the main road and turned north towards Wadebridge and came to the village of Egloshale, which is a suburb of Wadebridge, and sits on the bank of the Camel River.

 

Egloshale was the home of my ancestors, the Tremains, before they left for Auckland like the others.

One of the things that was interesting to us was that these three villages were quite close to one another. It was only about 20 km from North Tamerton to Altarnun, and a similar distance from Altarnun to Egloshale - thus we realised that Margaret's ancestors and my ancestors were almost 'neighbours' - from a 'modern-day perspective' it only takes 10 minutes at the most to drive from one village to the next.

Again we could find no graves from the Tremain family, so we set off through Wadebridge along the western coast of the estuary.

On the way we passed close to St Mawgan, home of yet another family, the Olds. We have since learned that Olds still live there. Margaret's grandmother was a member of the Old family before she married grandfather, Frank (Pek) Barriball.