My Great (x4) grandfather, Walter Le Pelley (c.1840-?), the youngest child of Ernest Le Pelley (1801-1849) the 16th Seigneur of Sark, migrated to South Australia presumably due to the reversal of fortune encountered by the family. He married Elizabeth Gunther, the daughter of John & Mary Ann Rendall in 1863, and the couple had two children: Louisa Elizabeth (1864-1941) and Frances (Fanny) Amelia (1866-1885).
In April 1869, Walter makes his first appearance as ‘missing.’ Going missing of course, is a curious thing. I doubt Walter himself considered himself missing, that is, if he wasn’t dead. But he was un-contactable and people rather wanted to contact him.
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| Missing Friends. (1869, April 21). The South Australian Police Gazette (Adelaide, SA.), p. 55 |
Elizabeth died in childbirth later that year, and it is rather ambiguous as to whether he had returned by then or not. In any case two years later, a warrant was issued for his desertion of his children.
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| Deserting Wives, Families, Service, &c. (1871, March 15). The South Australian Police Gazette (Adelaide, SA.), p. 43 |
Still considered to be in the land of the living later that month.
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| Deserting Wives, Families, Service, &c. (1871, April 26). The South Australian Police Gazette (Adelaide, SA.), p. 66 |
The Government had stopped looking by 1879, but others had not.
James Robin and Co., was not a Law Firm as I first assumed, but a wholesale import business. James Robin too was Guernsey born, was there a family link? Was someone looking out for Walter’s daughters when he so obviously was not?
Where were you Walter Le Pelley?
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