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January 1840 and transported to Australia that April.
    Samuel’s son Edward was, like his father before him, an inmate of the new Maidstone jail, which had been opened on the north of the town in 1819. After being released, he met the Goldsmith brothers on a building site where he was working as a bricklayer. He soon captured the heart of their sister Mary Ann, by now a pretty teenager. They tied the knot at Trinity Church, Maidstone, on 30 May 1842. She was just sixteen years old and he was five years her senior. The following year, she gave birth to the first of her six children, Mary Ann. Some years later, however, her husband was working on the other side of the world, in India, leaving her to bring up their children.
    Sadly, John Goldsmith did not live to see any of his grandchildren grow up. After a long battle against stomach cancer, he died on 7 June 1847, at the age of 66. His wife Rebecca was at his bedside.
    The following year, it was the turn of the couple’s youngest daughter, Sophia, to marry into the Hickmott family. She would have been deemed a scarlet woman in those days; the 21-year-old was living in sin with her brickmaker fiancé, Henry Hickmott, in Hackney, east London, and was heavily pregnant with their second child when they tied the knot at the parish church on 18 June 1848. Within a year, the couple followed in the footsteps of Henry’s convict father and emigrated to Australia with their two daughters, Emma, a toddler, and baby Eliza. They boarded the ship Emily at the Port of London on 4 May 1849 and arrived at Port Adelaide three months later on 8 August.
    Perhaps John Goldsmith travelled to London to wave his sister off on her voyage. We know that before long the lure of the capital would prove too great. By the time John had turned 21, in 1848, he was the only one of his siblings still living at home. His two brothers, Charles and Richard, had made their way to London to find work as brickies and his sisters, Mary Ann and Sophia, had married and moved far away from home. To the impressionable young labourer, the bright lights beckoned. While his widowed mother Rebecca, who was now working as a charwoman, moved to nearby Tovil and took in a lodger, John moved up to London, taking a room in a house in Green Man’s Lane, Hounslow, close to his elder brothers.
    In the capital, John met laundress Esther Jones, who was the daughter of a workmate and five years younger than him. They fell in love and got married on 23 September 1850, at the Parish Church of St John the Baptist in Hoxton in the East End of London. Both were illiterate and signed the register with a cross. They moved in with her parents. Within weeks of the wedding, Esther was pregnant with their first child and Kate’s great-great-grandfather, named John after his father and grandfather, was born at Esther’s parents’ home on 6 July 1851. There was to be a nine-year gap before they had another child, but then another five came along. Due to their expanding brood, they moved into their own home in Triangle Place, Islington, and their happiness seems to have been complete. The only sadness to blight their life together was the death of John’s mother, Rebecca, on 29 December 1869, as a result of bronchitis.
    Although life expectancy was short, both John and Esther lived long enough to bring up all their children and see them leave home. They were still alive on 18 September 1882, when their eldest son John, a general labourer like his father and grandfather before him, tied the knot with his common-law wife Jane Dorset, four years his junior, at St Mary’s Church, Paddington, and for the birth of their daughter Eliza two years later. Sadly, however, on 19 December 1885, Esther succumbed to bronchitis at the age of 53. In 1888, the year after Victoria’s golden jubilee, Esther’s widower husband John died of a strangulated hernia at the age of 61.
    So, unlike Kate’s other great-great-grandfather John Harrison, orphaned at the