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- Kate Emery - The West Australian
April 14, 2014, 7:08am
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/latest/a/22625474/meet-the-royals-of-wyalkatchem/
The Wheatbelt town of Wyalkatchem is a good 15,000km from the Kensington Palace apartment the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge call home.
But it can now claim to be royal country after one of its oldest local families was revealed as distant relations of the future king of England, Prince George.
In a town with a population of fewer than 600, most people know the Holdsworths: for generations they have worked the land as wheat and sheep farmers and many of the items in the town's agricultural museum have been donated by one Holdsworth or another.
What few know - and what the Holdsworths themselves did not know until last week - is that the family are related to the son of Prince William and Kate Middleton through their ancestor Samuel Hickmott, an English sheep thief sent to Australia as a convict in 1840.
As revealed by The Weekend West, Hickmott's son Henry went on to marry a girl who would be the great, great, great, great-aunt of Kate Middleton.
Henry's son, first cousin five times removed to Prince George, left behind 12 children and it is from those children that the Holdsworths and dozens of other WA families also related to Prince George descend. Revelations of WA's connection to Prince George come ahead of the 2014 royal tour in Australia on Wednesday.
However, the royal couple and their son will not be coming to WA. The West Australian visited the Wyalkatchem branch of the Holdsworth family to break the news of their royal connection and found a close-knit and friendly family free from pretension. In addition to the Wyalkatchem clan, others have settled in Perth, Bunbury and Mandurah as well as out of the State.
The Holdsworths appear to be connected to Hickmott through two of his 12 great-grandchildren: Ruby Minnie Hickmott and Florence Hickmott.
Ruby married Enoch Arthur Holdsworth with whom she had four children. Florence Mary Hickmott married Richard Austin and also had four children, including a daughter, Gladys, who married Albert Edward Holdsworth.
Trevor Holdsworth summed up the family's reaction to the news, saying it had come as "a bit of a shock".
"I'll probably take a bit more of an interest in watching (the royal family) on the TV," he said.
"Normally I wouldn't bat an eyelid."
The Hickmott ancestry is not the only connection between Wyalkatchem and English royalty. Sir William Heseltine, private secretary to the Queen from 1986 to 1990, was born in Wyalkatchem in 1930 and grew up in what is now known as the Museum House.
John Holdsworth is something of an expert on the family tree, which he has traced back to the 1600s.
But he said the royal connection came as "news to me".
"I had trouble convincing people," he said.
"I got a lot of laughing."
Niece Emma Holdsworth was among those who was sceptical - to say the least.
"I thought Uncle John was joking," she said.
Barbara Holdsworth said she was disappointed the royal tour of Australia and New Zealand would not make it to WA.
"I'm rather excited we can say we're related to Prince George," she said.
The Holdsworths are just one of at least two dozen WA families with links to the royal baby.
None of those contacted by The West Australian knew of the connection. Royal relatives' surnames include Applin, Bamford, Begley, Bielby, Carter, Crameri, Davies, Egerton-Warburton, Fratel(le), Free, Harrison, Hickmott, Holdsworth, Hovell, Kiernan, Lewis, Marsden, Pendlebury, Prentice, Quartermaine, Tate, Taylor, Turnbull, Usher, Whittington, Weise and West.
Christopher Wilson - Daily Mail
April 15, 2014 12:33PM
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/prince-george-has-ancestors-who-settled-in-south-australia-including-the-son-of-a-convict-who-stole-three-lambs/story-fni6uo1m-1226884170194
Prince George has ancestors who settled in South Australia - including the son of a convict who stole three lambs
When baby Prince George arrives in Australia on Wednesday, diehard republicans will no doubt protest he is just another over-privileged royal with no more right to reign over them than a kangaroo. But it seems that the little fellow has rather more in common with the average Aussie. Through a horny-handed, sheep-stealing ancestor, he is actually related to hundreds, possibly even thousands, of modern Australians. Thanks to his grandmother, Carole Middleton, 59, the eight-month-old can trace his roots to a 19th-century farm labourer from Kent, in England’s southeast, who was found guilty of stealing three lambs and handed the obligatory sentence: transportation to Australia.
But will this new-found blood link help in the Royal Family’s continuing battle against the republican movement or strengthen arguments for the Duke of Cambridge, 32, eventually becoming Governor-General of Australia?
The third in line to the throne’s ties are the result of a human drama that, in microcosm, tells the story of the forging of Australia itself.
After his transportation from Kent, farm labourer Samuel Hickmott started his new life in the young nation, breaking rocks as a member of a chain-gang. It would take him 10 years to win his freedom. Hickmott had a son, Henry, who married Sophia Goldsmith - Carole Middleton’s great-great-great aunt. That name has survived the decades in between to be borne by the Duchess of Cambridge’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith. In December 1839, Samuel Hickmott and his brother Thomas were arrested and accused of stealing the three lambs. The brothers were similar to many members of the 19th century underclass, suffering a combination of insufficient work, poor health, under-nourishment and the withering effects of the Industrial Revolution. Both of them had been to jail and the workhouse. Of course they were breaking the law, but for them, it was the only way to feed their starving families.
Samuel had four children by two wives, but both women died. With farm work hard to find, he twice placed the children in the Lamberhurst poor house. He and his brother Tom served short jail terms for vagrancy, but in their defence, the pair were the last to be chosen for any work because they were unable to read or write. When the Hickmott brothers were arrested, they were at breaking point. They appeared at Maidstone Assizes, an hour southeast of London, on January 2, 1840, and an airtight case was made to the judge. The brothers had stolen the lambs and the remains of the meat was found in their houses. The prosecution, determined to secure convictions, produced the lambskins and evidence from two local butchers.
Thomas, of “a notoriously bad character”, was sentenced to be transported for life. His younger brother Samuel was sentenced to 10 years’ transportation. This meant a life sentence. Convicts were not given a return ticket and rarely raised enough money to buy one. So for the theft of three lambs, the Hickmott brothers were shipped to the other side of the world - Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania - with no hope of return. The 101-day journey across the high seas on the prison ship Asia was a living hell and the brothers stepped ashore with great relief. Samuel would spend the next decade working on a chain-gang, breaking rocks and helping to prepare roads on the island, with no hope of escape. While little is known of Thomas’s fate, the gruelling punishment did not break Samuel. More than eight years later, he received a conditional pardon and was released. In a bullish mood, he sailed to South Australia, where he met one of his four sons - Henry, who was just 15 when he last saw his father. Henry had pledged to start a new life and brought his young bride, Sophia Goldsmith, whom he’d met in Kent where her family were neighbours of the Hickmotts.
Even in the fetid steerage cabins, the journey aboard the migrant ship Emily, accompanied by its sister-ship named - appropriately, you might say - Kate, was more luxurious for the newlyweds than it had been for Hickmott senior. The couple arrived in Botany Bay on September 9, 1850, and prepared themselves for an exhausting trip across the vast continent to the colony of South Australia.
Sophia Goldsmith was tall, dark and willowy. The marriage, however, was not to last beyond its fifth year. After producing three children, the youngest of whom was to rise to become a Member of Parliament, Sophia died.
The Hickmotts - Samuel, his son Henry and Henry’s son, Henry Edward - steeled themselves for rough times ahead. Samuel worked as a labourer, while his son Henry sweated it out in the local brickworks at Mount Barker. The men were hard and they were ambitious.
When the Australian Gold Rush began, all three travelled 300 miles southwest overland from Mount Barker to Clunes, near Melbourne, in the Victorian goldfields, where father and son worked all hours as miners, labourers and brickmakers.
Aged 72, after years of being toughened on the chain-gang, it is recorded that Samuel was still hard at work, helping build the family fortune. However he died not long after. His son Henry and grandson Henry Edward moved to Charlton in Victoria, where they eventually bought a farm and established a brickmaking business. Henry Edward would go on to become a successful building and roads contractor. More than 40 years after his grandfather left England in chains, Henry Edward was poised to become the MP for Pingelly. While his mother died soon after his birth, he named his first child Sophia. In a portrait, above, she shows a striking similarity to her kinswoman, the Duchess of Cambridge.
So, what of the Goldsmiths who remained in England?
Sophia’s carpenter father hated the fact the family had been shamed by his daughter’s marriage to the son of a sheep-stealer. Sophia’s brother, John, meanwhile, remained a labourer and brickmaker. Likewise his son, also named John, as did the next generation’s male progeny, Stephen. For a century, while the Hickmotts slaved away to improve their fortunes in Australia, the Goldsmiths trod water both socially and professionally. Only when Stephen’s son, Ron Goldsmith, become an engineer and builder did their prospects improve. Ron’s marriage to Dorothy Harrison, the decidedly upwardly mobile daughter of a miner from Hetton-le-Hole, Tyne & Wear, in England’s far north, provoked more social ladder climbing. It was an upward trajectory that has ended with the extraordinary achievements of their daughter, Carole Middleton, producing a daughter who is mother to the future king of England and Australia.
Henry Edward Hickmott - Samuel’s grandson - and his wife Elizabeth had 12 children and it is their numerous descendants who make up the nucleus of what has been dubbed the “Australian Royal Family”.
The three siblings - Henry Edward, Eliza and Emma - were Prince George’s first cousins, five times removed.
Despite cousinage becoming watered down, descendants of these Hickmotts have a right to claim kinship with the future king.
Today, they range from blue-collar workers through to middle-class professionals and such well-known Australian figures as Brendon Grylls, a Western Australian MP, and IT multi-millionaire Stanley Lewis.
While he won’t know it, Prince George will be among his people, his relatives, when he travels throughout Australia, including Adelaide, next Wednesday.
- Daily Mail
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2013 - CLEARED
Has 22 ancestors but no descendants in this family tree.
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Philip MOUNTBATTEN, b. 10 Jun 1921, Isle Kerkira, Mon Repos, Corfu, Greece
Prince; Duke of Cambridge William Arthur Philip Louis WINDSOR, b. 21 Jun 1982, Paddington, Middlesex, England 
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