MOSES, David
b. London, 1811
Marmion, 1828; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1827.
Single; Fishmonger; Height: 161 cm.
Dark complexion, bushy brown hair, dark grey eyes, long oval face, large nose broad bridge, narrow thick lips. A Jew. Born Winfield Street London. David Moses (aged sixteen), Samuel Barnett (aged fourteen) and Abraham Isaacs (q.v.) (aged twenty) stole a pocket book from a man in Whitechapel. They were watched by two of the Bow Street Patrol, who arrested them immediately. David Moses was tried on 5 April 1827 and sentenced on 31 May. Moses was detected stealing on board a convict transport and was described as a ‘lazy, impudent fellow’ who was ‘a Jew’, ‘bad’, and a ‘regular thief’. His father lived in Bell Lane, Spitalfields. ‘I was last employed by Davis the fishmonger in Houndsditch’. He brought fifteen shillings and five pence with him on board the Marmion.
David Moses arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 6 March 1828 and on 24 December 1828 was sentenced to three months in irons and six months in a road party for insolence and neglect of duty. On 3 January 1829 he was sentenced to two additional weeks in the chain gang for having surreptitiously removed his irons. Twelve days later he received twenty-five lashes for insolence. During the year he worked with the road parties in New Norfolk, Bell Mountain and Black Snake. At the latter he received twenty-five lashes for three absences. He remained with the chain gangs through to December 1833 (although, on 12 April 1833, he was listed as having ‘absconded’).
On 8 July 1835 Moses was free by servitude and was charged with ‘burglariously breaking and entering the dwelling place of John Johnstone and stealing thirty-five pieces of silk handkerchief’. Moses was acquitted. On 19 October 1836 he was charged with having assaulted Deputy Constable Benjamin Watkins who declined to prosecute. Finally, on 24 August 1838, he was sentenced to two years at Port Arthur for stealing a pound and half of English salmon. During 1841 and 1842 Moses was the assigned servant of Mr Cawthorn and for a number of ‘minor’ offences involving absence without leave, neglect of duty and insolence he received twenty-three days in solitary confinement and three weeks in irons. His convict record concluded on 26 December 1842 and a ticket of leave was granted on 6 October 1843.
OBSP, 1826–27, case 1584, p. 592; CON 34/2, no. 620; CON 31/29; CON 32/1, no. 620; CON 18/15 (Description Book with first name ‘Daniel’); HO 10/51; VDL Papers, p. 107, ML, A1059–4; Hobart Town Courier, 12 April 1833, 31 August 1838, 6 October 1843.
MOSES, David Lionel
b. London, 1827–1845
1842; Free.
Single.
David Lionel Moses was the fourth son of Henry Moses, merchant of London, and the brother-in-law of Louis Nathan (q.v.). He joined the synagogue in Hobart Town as soon as he arrived in 1842 and on 11 April 1843 gave £25 to its building appeal. He rented seat no. 70 in the synagogue's first year. He died on 27 September 1845 at the home of his sister and brother-in-law in Murray Street. He was eighteen years old. His funeral was the fourth to be carried out by the synagogue. In December 1854 his brother, Hyam Leopold Moses (q.v.), gave £200 to the Hobart Town congregation so that a protective wall could be built around the Harrington Street Jewish cemetery.
Hobart Town Courier, 8 October 1845.
MOSES, Elias
b. London, 1812–1874
Ann, 1833; Free.
Single; 12 children.
Elias Moses was the son of Moses and Elizabeth Moses of London, five of whose children came to Australia. Elias's siblings were Samuel, David (q.v.), Catherine, who married Moses Benjamin (q.v.), Rachel (q.v.), who married Samuel Benjamin (q.v.), and Miriam (Frankel, q.v.), who married Jacob Frankel (q.v.).
The log book, or shipboard diary kept by Elias Moses, and now held by a private collector in Sydney, begins with his embarkation on 1 May 1833 and concludes when the barque Ann arrived in Port Jackson. Moses finished his diary with the words: ‘They say experience makes fools wise. Strive for the next voyage. I hope I shall be able to keep a better log. Arrived Sydney (Thank God) November 13, 1833’.
Elias Moses founded the firm of Benjamin and Moses in Goulburn in the year he arrived in Australia. He also became the owner of Sydney House in George Street, Sydney, and the London Stores, George Street, Windsor. Elias married Julia Moses (q.v.) on 15 April 1840. She was the daughter of Abraham Moses (q.v.) of Monaro and who had travelled to New South Wales on the Palambam. Elias and Julia had a daughter, Rachael, in Goulburn in 1841. Deborah (1843 [born in London]), Elizabeth Julia born 3 January 1845 at Goulburn, Fanny born 1850, Moses born 1852, Joseph born in Sydney in 1854, Samuel Benjamin Moses born 23 December 1855 and died in 1931, Catherine born Melbourne in 1856, Sophia 1859–1946, Amelia born 1861, Louisa 1863, and Florence in 1866.
Elias was an activist within the Sydney Jewish community and the linchpin of an important Australian Jewish colonial family. He was a seat holder in the new York Street Synagogue in 1845 when he gave the congregation ten guineas and was listed as living in Goulburn. The first High Holyday services in Goulburn were held at his home in Auburn Street in 1844. The Argyle Store in Goulburn established by Moses and (Samuel) Benjamin in Goulburn's earliest years became one of the leading businesses of pre-gold rush Goulburn. Both Elias and Solomon Moses (q.v.) lived in Auburn Street and were listed in the 1841 Census. Elias was one of the trustees of the Goulburn Hospital (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1845). In 1845 Samuel Benjamin and Elias Moses owned the Argyle Steam Boiling Establishment, which bought surplus sheep from farmers and boiled them down for fat. He was one of the four trustees to be responsible for the land granted by the governor to the community, on 8 April 1850, to build a Jewish school in Sydney, and he was one of the instigators of the Macquarie Street secession when the Sydney community split into two. During the early 1850s the records of the New South Wales Government showed that he purchased land at Goulburn (for £20), Sydney (for £247), Wynyard Square in Sydney (£996) and Sydney (£1604). Elias died in Sydney at his residence, 582 Bourke Street, and was buried on 14 June 1874. He was sixty-two years old and described on his tombstone, in the old Jewish section of Rookwood Cemetery, as ‘an honest man’ who was ‘buried with great respect’.
Ship Indent 4/5205; Land Purchased 2/7933; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 1833, 26 April 1845; Voice of Jacob, 6 June 1845.
MOSES, Emanuel (Money Moses)
b. Peterboro, 1780–1841
Lord Lyndoch (2), 1841; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Central Criminal Court, 1839.
Married; Publican and fence; Height: 173 cm; 3 children.
Florid complexion, black to grey hair, round face, high forehead, light brown eyes, prominent nose. He could read and write ‘a little’. Emanuel Moses was involved in the case of the great gold dust robbery by the Caspar family (Ellis Casper, Lewin Casper, qq.v.). His daughter Alice Abrahams, aged thirty-three, was arraigned in the same case. His conduct on board the transport ship was ‘good’. Emanuel's wife, Sarah (q.v.), and their children, Mary (q.v.), Rachel (q.v.) and Rebecca (q.v.), travelled out to the colony on the Mayflower.
Griffiths, in The Chronicles of Newgate, tells the story of the fate of Emanuel Moses, more generally known as ‘Money Moses’. Moses was tried with his daughter, Mrs Alice Abrahams, who, it was said, helped him melt down the stolen gold dust:
he was the most daring and successful of fences … Such an event as the conviction of ‘Money Moses’ almost the father of his particular line of trade, produced an amazing consternation among his fellows. Originally exhibiting upon his person all the signs of indulgent living, his confinement reduced him to the shadow of his former self and there were to be heard among his friends apprehensions that a voyage to Australia would complete the work which the air of [Newgate] prison had commenced.
His friends were correct! Moses disembarked at Hobart Town on 5 February 1841 and was sent straight to the hospital at New Norfolk, where he died on 5 July 1841. Griffiths added that ‘Money Moses’, who was very well known in the vicinity of Covent Garden, ‘was a direct descendant of [Isaac] Ikey Solomon’ (q.v.). While he was ostensibly the publican of the Black Lion in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane, there ‘secretly he did business as one of the most daring and successful fencers ever known in the metropolis’.
CON 35/5, no. 1046; CON 31/32, no. 1944; CON 63/1; A. Griffiths, The Chronicles of Newgate, pp. 474, 480; ‘The Life of Elias moses’ by Chris George in AJHSJ, vol. 20, part 4, June 2012, p. 501f.
MOSES, Hannah
Convict.
Prostitute.
The Sydney Gazette of 5 August 1820 recorded that there had been a burglary from the home of Hannah Moses. On 18 March 1826 the paper reported that she had been sentenced to three months gaol as a ‘notorious prostitute’.
MOSES, Hannah (AARONS)
b. London, 1819
Free.
Hannah Moses was one of the daughters of Joseph and Rachel Aarons (qq.v.). She married Isaac Moses (q.v.) on 28 February 1839. On 16 June 1846 the Colonial Secretary replied to Mrs Hannah Moses of Elizabeth Street North (Sydney) regarding her plea on behalf of her father, who was in Parramatta Gaol for a period of two years. She was told that the government could not interfere. On 22 September she wrote again and the rest of the sentence was remitted. Hannah also intervened on behalf of her mother, Rachel Aarons, who, she said, was in ‘bad health’ while she remained in the Darlinghurst Gaol. Her plea for mercy was granted on 6 November 1845.
CS Correspondence Miscellaneous Out, 4/3550, p. 87; CS Copies of Letters Sent Re Convicts, 1845–48, 4/3692, p. 14.
Henry Moses was one of the thirteen Jewish men in Yass who signed a petition for the establishment of a Jewish cemetery in Yass. In May 1847 Henry Moses, in Yass, wrote to the Colonial Secretary stating that he would like to buy two acres of crown land at Binalong. There was no store within 23 miles. He promised to establish a store and a tannery with a properly qualified person in charge. He would sell all kinds of merchandise at the lowest possible prices, taking colonial produce in exchange.
Henry Moses died at Parramatta in 1859, aged fifty.
Colonial Secretary, Letters rec'd: Land for Churches, Schools, Parsonage and Cemeteries 1825–54, 4/2650.4, 20 December 1844.
MOSES, (Moss) Henry
Free
A ‘currency lad’ born in Sydney in 1831. The second child of Mary Connolly, who became Rebecca Moses (q.v.).
On 7 September 1848 the 17 year-old Henry Moses was convicted, with his father John (q.v.), at the Goulburn Circuit Court on 7 September 1848, for perjury and given a seven-year sentence and sent to Sydney.
On 2 June 1851 Moses, a prisoner on Cockatoo Island, saved a soldier from drowning. As a reward a year of his probation period was remitted and a pardon was granted on 31 August 1853.
Moses was not permitted to return to the Yass district and settled in the area of Shoalhaven and worked for some time with Michael Hyam (q.v.), an old friend of his father. In 1862 Henry married Michael Hyam's daughter, Sarah Zorilda Hyam.
He built a hotel, the Shoalhaven Central Hotel, in Greenhills. By that time he had changed his name to Henry Moss. He became mayor of Shoalhaven for a year and then became the first mayor of Nowra. He was re-elected mayor six times and served on the council for the rest of his life. He was honorary secretary of the Shoalhaven Turf Club. One of his hobbies was prospecting and a volume of his poetry was published.
Inspector-General of Police, Convict Branch, Register of Colonial Pardons 4/4494; CS 51/4862, 53/7568. Alan Clark: ‘He had a Vision for Nowra’ in JAJHS vol X!, part 4, p. 643.
MOSES, Hyam
b. London, 1809
Lady Feversham, 1830; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1829.
Single; Dealer; Height: 161 cm.
Dark ruddy freckled complexion, black hair, dark brown eyes. BW tattooed on right arm. No education. Jew. Hyam Moses stole twelve handkerchiefs that he grabbed from the front of a hosier's shop on 15 September 1828. Two days later he was caught in Whitechapel after trying to snatch six veils from a shop. He was sentenced on 29 October 1829 to be transported for seven years for each offence.
Hyam Moses arrived on 29 July 1830 and was sent to the Hyde Park Barracks. Moses was first assigned to Col. Allen of the 53rd Regiment and then to W. Smith at Wiseman's Point. He ran away and was apprehended on 31 March 1832. When he was recaptured, he was sent to the treadmill for twenty-one days and then to work with the Twenty-Third Road Gang. In 1837 he was assigned to Mr C. Roberts of Sydney. He married Louisa Nixon in 1841 at St James' Church of England in Sydney. He was granted a certificate of freedom on 4 January 1844.
OBSP, 1827–28, p. 917; Lady Feversham Printed Indent, no. 30-1304; CF 4/4388, 44/12; Indent 4/4013, p. 116; Sydney Gazette, 31 March 1832; Mutch Index 116/25.
MOSES, Hyam Leopold
b. London
Calcutta, 1842; Free.
Married; Merchant; 2 children.
Hyam Leopold Moses arrived in Hobart Town on the Calcutta, travelling cabin class from London, on 17 October 1842. He was the third son of Henry Moses of London and a brother of David Lionel Moses (q.v.) and Samuel Moses. He donated £5 to the synagogue in 1844. In 1845, together with Henry Samuel Benjamin (q.v.), he served the congregation as its honorary auditor, and was assigned seat no. 7 in the synagogue. He also gave £5 to the Sydney Synagogue and twelve shillings and sixpence to the newly formed Melbourne Hebrew Congregation at the High Holydays of 1844. Hyam Leopold Moses returned to England to find a wife and, on 2 June 1847, the Chief Rabbi, the Rev. Dr Adler, married Hyam Leopold Moses Esq. of Hobart Town to Rosetta Bloom, eldest daughter of Lawrence Phillips Esq. of the Strand. On 10 March 1848 the birth of a son was reported in the Hobart Town Courier. In 1854 Hyam Leopold Moses gave £200 to build a wall around the cemetery in which his younger brother, David, was buried. The family left Hobart Town in August 1854 and returned to London. Moses changed his family name to ‘Beddington’ in 1868.
Angela Shire (ed.), Great Synagogue Marriage Registers, 1791–1850; Hobart Town Courier, 29 December 1843; The Times, 5 June 1847; family research by Stephen Hanford, Melbourne.
MOSES, Isaac (MOYSE)
b. London, 1766
Royal Admiral, 1792; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1792.
Single.
Isaac Moses picked a servant's inside coat pocket, in which there was an empty leather pocket book valued at sixpence. At the Old Bailey in June 1792 he was sentenced to seven years transportation. Isaac Moyse, aged twenty-seven, had been sentenced to death at Bury Street, Edmonds, on 25 March 1789. He was subsequently pardoned, but was reported to be on the Royal Admiral in 1792.
It appears that Moses was the only Jew on board the transport (although there was a Nathan Harris, aged twenty-five, who was a porter.) The Home Office records contain the following letter, written by the convict James Lacey from False Bay at the Cape of Good Hope:
Y'r Honour,
We are now arrived at this Place, after a very prosperous and healthy voyage so far. Soon after leaving the land, our confinement, which before was particularly severe, was in great measure abated, our treatment in every respect far superior to what we from the outset were led to expect, until a Jew convict, who from his former bad conduct to his associates met with continual taunts, and not having any other mode of revenge, informed Cap'n Bond that there had been a plan concocted on board of the hulks for the convicts to gain possession the vessel and in consequence eight men intrely [sic] innocent of that crime suffered a very severe punishment, but in very short time he was detected and in turn the Jew underwent a discipline in itself very severe, yet not in any away adequate to his deserts [sic]; the Jew has formerly been admitted on evidence and on his depositions several weer [sic] transported, when his dread of meeting on the settlement, as is supposed, and the aforementioned desire of revenge actuated to make the report of a fictitious meeting.
Isaac Moses' sentence had expired by 1811 and he was permitted to leave the colony in June 1818. He travelled to England on the Lynx in that month.
HRNSW, vol. 2, p. 479f.; HO 10/1; Sydney Gazette, 30 May 1818, 27 June 1818.
MOSES, Isaac
b. London, 1795–1846
Surrey I (4), 1823; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Surrey Quarter Sessions, 1822.
Single; Servant; Height: 168 cm; 4 children.
Sallow slightly pock-pitted, dark brown and curly hair, grey eyes, large nose, inclined to right. Scar over right eyebrow.
Isaac Moses was the brother of Phoebe Hart (q.v.), John (Jacob) Moses (q.v.), ‘pastry cook, who came to the colony free and lived in George Street’, Moses Moses (q.v.), of Yass, Catherine Moses, Susannah Moses, and Abraham Moses (q.v.). All but Catherine and Susannah came to Australia. He arrived in New South Wales on 4 March 1823 and was initially assigned to the District of Sydney. On 17 March 1823 he was sent to Port Macquarie to serve the initial part of his sentence. Moses was listed in the 1828 Census as a 34 year-old dealer living in Sydney at the house of Mary Larkins in Kent Street.
Larkins had six tenants and four of them were Jews: Isaac Moses, Lewis Lyons (q.v.), Mordecai Abrahams (q.v.), and Solomon Simpson (q.v.). Moses was listed as owning two horses and six head of cattle. An exemption from government labour was issued on 2 January 1830 and on 20 March 1830 the Sydney Gazette reported that Isaac Moses had been charged with having imposed upon the Deputy Sheriff by pretending to be free and having £30 worth of property and to reside with his brother in George Street. He was let off with a warning and was told that when he was able to prove that he did indeed hold a certificate of exemption he would be able to conduct a business and to sue and be sued. A ticket of leave was issued in Sydney on 24 April 1830. Moses received a ticket of leave on 1 May 1830 and was given exemption from government labour and allowed ‘to reside with his brother John Moses in George St’. In 1831 Isaac Moses received permission to marry Mary (Maria) Bellamy (aged twenty-three), who came free to the colony. Two years later, in 1833, the Rev. Dr Lang officiated at the marriage of the widower Isaac Moses to Hannah Thrum, aged sixteen, at Scots Church.
The Sydney Gazette reported, on 16 March 1833, that Mr Isaac Moses had been struck by a man who had an umbrella after Moses had followed him after seeing him stealing a pair of trousers from Mr Isaac Simmons' auction rooms. On 13 September 1834 his ticket of leave was changed to allow him to reside in the Parramatta District. The Colonial Secretary received an angry letter from a James Maguire who complained that Isaac Moses had caused him serious injury ‘riding him down on the Sydney racecourse’. A jury had found in favour of Maguire and Moses was ordered to pay Maguire £15 and costs totalling £40 9s 3d. Maguire was still waiting for his money and he believed ‘Isaac Moses had plenty of property at Parramatta’. Maguire alleged that Moses had entered into ‘a collusive agreement’ with his father-in-law and his brother, who said his goods belonged to him.
Moses was issued with a certificate of freedom on 18 August 1836.
Moses bought two blocks of land at the first Yass land sales on 31 July 1837. On 25 January 1838 Moses bought additional blocks of land at Berrima, Muswellbrook, Gosford (in 1840) and Goulburn (1839) for a total cost of £167. I. & M. Moses of the Argyle Store, Yass, gave ‘grateful thanks for encouragement’ since they had opened their store in the town. Isaac Moses built the Rose Inn, on Comur Street, Yass, in 1837. In 1839 when it was sold at auction it was described as containing eleven rooms, three of which were eighteen feet by eleven feet, a cellar, a stone-built kitchen outside and a ten-stall stable. The Rose was sold ‘solely on account of ill health of the proprietor’ on 21 January 1839 to James Middleton, who subsequently leased the hotel to Isaac's nephew Henry Hart (q.v.).
Hannah Moses died in 1838 at the age of twenty-one, and was buried as a Jew in the Parramatta. Isaac Moses married a third time, on 28 February 1839. This time the marriage was conducted by the York Street Synagogue. His wife was Hannah Aarons ‘of Castlereagh St’, and it was Jewish marriage no. 23. The children of Isaac and Hannah Moses were Abraham (27 June 1840), born in Sydney, Aaron (2 December 1841), and Barnett (11 May 1843).
John and Isaac Moses both signed a petition for a Jews' burial ground in Yass on 20 December 1844. Moses supported the establishment of the synagogue in Sydney, contributing £25 for the 1839 building appeal and renting a seat in the synagogue in 1845.
An attack on Isaac Moses was published in the Omnibus and Sydney Spectator (25 March 1843) for ‘carrying on a roaring game’ with the cattle of Dr W. Evans.
Isaac Moses died on 20 May 1846 at the Tarban Creek Asylum and was buried at the Devonshire Street Jewish cemetery and in 1901 was reburied at Raphael's Ground in 1901.
Petition 4/2650.4, 20 December 1844; CS 4/4081, 24 November 1831, with TL 31/926, and TL 30/2204; Exemption from Labour 4/4283, 2 January 1830; Permission to Marry Book 4/4512, p. 29, no. 339; Petition for Jews Burial Ground, Yass, 4/2650.4, on 20 December 1844; 4/2284.6, 9 January 1835, in 35/239; Sydney Monitor, 28 April 1830; Sydney Gazette, 24 April 1830, 5 April 1832, 16 March 1833; Steve Hart, ‘The Life and Times of Some Jewish Pioneers of Yass Township’, AJJHS, vol. 16, no. 2 (2002), p. 174.
MOSES, John (Jacob)
b. London, 1800–1883
Asia I (1), 1820; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Westminster, 1820.
Single; Fruit dealer; Height: 163 cm; 8 children.
Ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. John (Jacob) Moses had pretended to be drunk and then suddenly snatched at a man's watch. At the trial he wept and said ‘I beg for mercy’. He was convicted and sentenced on 28 June 1820. He was the son of Joseph Moses and Deborah (née Barnett), and the brother of Moses Moses (q.v.), Isaac Moses (q.v.) and Abraham Moses (q.v.) and Phoebe Hart (q.v.).
John Moses arrived in New South Wales on 28 December 1820 and on 9 November 1821 was sent on the Caledonia to be ‘Cook and Confectioner’ to Government House in Hobart Town.
On 13 January 1824 Moses was fined ten shillings for riding in a cart without reins. By 7 August 1824 he held a ticket of leave and was reprimanded when he was found to be absent from the muster and from church. The Rev Knopwood found him to have been absent from church on 20 September 1826 and he was again ‘reprimanded’. On 3 January 1828 he was bound over to keep the peace for three months following a public dispute with Robert Southey. In Hobart Town, on 5 December 1826, Moses married Mary, the daughter of Mr Charles Connolly. Mary was aged sixteen when she married, having arrived as a convict on the Lord Sidmouth in 1823. In late 1828 John Moses advertised the opening of a general store in Hobart Town at the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets. He wanted to purchase gooseberries, raspberries, kangaroo and seal skins, wheat barley, butter and cheese. He had also imported confectionery from Sydney. It was apparently a very brief colonial attempt to set up a business in Hobart Town. Moses moved back to Sydney and before leaving asked for his assigned servant Lewis Barnett (q.v.) to go with him and help set up in business as a confectioner in George Street. Permission for Barnett to leave for Sydney was denied because of his ‘bad record’. Moses, however, eventually returned to Sydney, opened a shop in George Street, and boasted to potential customers that he had supplied His Excellency the Governor with confectionery.
A Jewish marriage ceremony was performed on 10 July 1831 in Sydney and the traditional ketuvah, or marriage document, still exists. The bridegroom was ‘Jacob the son of Joseph’, and the bride was ‘Rebecca the daughter of Abraham our Father’, indicating that Mary had converted to Judaism. The traditional text was written in Aramaic by an expert and the personal details and Hebrew date appear to have been written by the Rabbi Aaron Levy (q.v.). The witnesses to the marriage were the twenty-five year old Phillip Joseph Cohen (q.v.), who officiated (as Levy had left the colony), Philip Solomon (q.v.), and Moses Brown (q.v.).
In 1829 Moses became the owner of the licence of the King's Head Inn at Penrith. The Sydney Gazette, on 28 September 1830, reported his ‘excellent, first rate accommodation, said to be provided by Mr Moses, the proprietor of the King's Head Inn, Penrith’, and asked the Colonial Secretary to allow him to put Benjamin Frances (q.v.) in charge of the business while he remained in Sydney. The request was refused as Frances was still a prisoner of the Crown. On 1 April 1830 the Sydney Gazette reported that ‘Mr Moses, the late pastry cook, has been in town the last few days—the only person in the colony who knows … the art’ of making Matzot. ‘John Moses of Nepean, merchant, frequently appeared in the lists of the Windsor Court of Requests during 1829 to 1831, collecting debts owing to him. He returned to England and then came back to Australia, with his family, on the Palambam in 1832, ‘accompanied by an entire Colony of the same [Jewish] nation the money lending tribe’. John and Sarah Moses, with six children, visited Sydney from Van Diemen's Land in 1833. He had established the London Mart in Hobart Town by 1836. In 1839–40 he acted as a shipping agent for the Maria. He was reported to have travelled to Port Phillip and returned to Hobart Town with a cargo of sheep. The Maria plied the Hobart Town to Port Phillip route. In December 1840 Moses sold the ship to a Captain Smith and the Hobart Town Courier reported that there was a dispute about the value of the cargo. The paper noted that John Moses and a servant returned from Sydney on 19 July 1841 on the Sisters.
Moses opened a restaurant and confectionery shop in King and Elizabeth Street, Sydney, in the vicinity of the Supreme Court House. Moses returned to Hobart Town and in 1838 was listed as the licensee of the St John's Tavern at the corner of Murray and Collins streets in Hobart Town.
In February 1839 the Sydney Commercial Journal and Advertiser reported that ‘Mr Moses, formerly a confectioner of Sydney, now a boniface at Hobart has purchased the Hobart Town Theatre for the small sum of £2025 and will open it as soon as he gets the corps dramatique together’. The Hobart Town Catholics wanted to try to buy the theatre to convert it into a chapel, but could not come to the required terms. Moses found that the theatre was not profitable, although he certainly did his best. The Sydney press, quoting the Hobart Town Colonial Times, said that Mr John Moses intended to issue annual tickets for the boxes in the theatre to ‘assure a respectable audience’. When David Moses (q.v.) tried to force his way into the theatre to claim some money back John was assaulted by ‘a huge piece of paling’ (Hobart Town Courier, 30 March 1838). He then proposed building a theatre at the back of the Colonial Bank. The Hobart Town Courier said that he had fraudulently left Hobart Town owing £2000 and on 26 November his assigned estate was put up for sale. Moses had left for New South Wales and avoided being seen in Sydney. On 1 February 1842 John Moses was listed on the Insolvency Index.
In 1844 John Moses was described as a publican at the brand new township of Yass, with his brother Isaac Moses. In November 1844 two of his daughters, Sarah and Hannah, died in an accident and their burials preceded the consecration of the Jewish cemetery in Goulburn. A month later, Moses organised a (successful) petition for the establishment of a Jewish burial ground at Yass. In 1848 John Moses and his son Harry were sentenced to seven years transportation for perjury following a fire that burned down the stables of his inn near Yass. The Governor commuted the sentence to five years. ‘Rebecca, the wife of John Moses’, was buried at Goulburn on 8 January 1854, aged forty-six. The children of their marriage were Deborah (1827–1865), who married her uncle, Michael Hyam (q.v.), in 1853, Henry (Harry) (1828–1887), who changed his name to ‘Moss’ and married Sarah Zorilda Hyam on 25 December 1862, Hannah (1830–1844), and Sarah (1832–1844).
Six years after Rebecca's death, on 23 October 1860, John Moses married a second time, at the Registry Office in Sydney. His new wife was a 23-year-old Irish woman, Mary Ann Shea. He was sixty years old, although on the marriage certificate (no. 686) his age is recorded as ‘fifty’. John and Mary Ann's children were Rebecca (1858–1901), Jacob (Jack) (1860–1945), Joseph (born 1864), and Abraham (1870–1899).
John Moses died on 29 November 1883 leaving an estate of £425. He was buried in the Jewish section of the Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney. Jack Moses was a friend of Henry Lawson and became a popular colonial poet himself. He was the author of the ballad ‘Nine Miles from Gundagai’.
OBSP, 1819–20, case 819, p. 481; Ship Indent 4/4007, p. 272; CON 31/29, no. 413; Petition 36, 4/1863; Petition no. 104, 4/1866, in 1822; 4/3507, p. 98; CS 1829, 4/3828, p. 308, and 4/5689; 4/1760, p. 136; 4/1760, p. 136, 9 November 1821; Hobart Town Gazette, 14 May 1824; Tasmanian, 4 January 1828, 1 April 1830, 28 September 1830; Tasmanian and Austral-Asiatic Review, 4 January 1828, 14 December 1832; Sydney Gazette, 15 August 1835; Hobart Town Courier, 7 April 1837, 30 March 1838, 13 December 1839, 24 January 1840, 11 December 1840, 18 July 1841; Sydney Gazette, 20 February 1839; Colonial Times, 16 April 1840, 10 November 1840, 20 August 1841; CSO 5/243/6338. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 1840, 25 March 1845, 12 October 1848; I. Porush, ‘The Earliest Australian Jewish Marriage Document, 1831’, AJJHS, vol. 8, no. 7 (1979), p. 404f; G. F. J. Bergman, ‘John Moses and Mary Connolly: The First Jewish Marriage in Australia’, AJJHS, vol. 8. no. 7 (1979), p. 410f; Register of Colonial Pardons 4/4494; Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 1848; Bell's Life, 28 July 1849, Rabbi Raymond Apple, Religion and Politics-Mary Connolly Revisited, AAJS Conference February 2011. Family information from Vivien Solo.
MOSES, John
b. London (Bishopsgate), 1825
Duchess of Northumberland (1), 1843; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Central Criminal Court, 1842.
Single; Errand boy; Height: 157 cm.
Dark complexion, black hair, no whiskers, oval face, high forehead, hazel eyes, large nose, small mouth. A Jew. Can read. John Moses was transported for stealing. It was his second offence. He was ‘idle and disorderly’ on board ship.
John Moses began his sentence in Van Diemen's Land with a two-year period of probation and was sent to Fingal. On 26 July 1843 he was absent from work and found attending a boxing match. He was punished with ten days solitary confinement. On 8 December 1843 he was given twenty-five lashes for having in his possession a fellow prisoner's trousers. His first stage of probation concluded on 14 April 1845 and he was assigned to service in Launceston. On 19 February 1846, at the Prisoners' Barracks, he was sentenced to six weeks hard labour for gambling. On 13 July 1846 he committed ‘gross disorderly conduct on the Sabbath day’ and was demoted. On 2 June 1847 he was found to be out after hours and strongly suspected of having committed a burglary for which he received six months imprisonment and hard labour. On 26 February 1848 in Avoca he was convicted of insolence and neglect of duty and sentenced to a further two months imprisonment and hard labour. On 8 July 1848 in Launceston he was found gambling and given two days solitary confinement and on 6 December 1848 he was given a further two months imprisonment and hard labour for being drunk. A certificate of freedom was approved on 19 May 1849.
Prisoner no. 8771; Launceston Examiner, 2 June 1847.
MOSES, Joseph (ANDERSON)
b. York, 1771–1835
Elizabeth I (1), 1816; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, York City, 1815.
Hawker and pedlar; Height: 162.5 cm.
Dark ruddy complexion, black hair, hazel eyes. Joseph Moses was sentenced at York City Quarter Sessions on 13 January 1815.
Joseph Moses, alias Anderson, arrived in New South Wales on 5 October 1816 and was sent to Windsor for assignment. He was listed by the Colonial Secretary as ‘Moses alias McRobinson’! He was sent to Newcastle Prison Station ‘until further notice’ on 11 February 1817 on the Lady Nelson. He was recommended for emancipation in 1821.
Joseph Moses was buried by St Phillips, Sydney in 1835.
Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 199; 11 February 1817, in 4/3495, p. 183; ML, A1214, p. 728, 1835.
Moses, Joseph
d. 1845
Palamban, 1833, Free.
7 children.
Joseph Moses, a widower, was the father of Moses (q.v.), Isaac (q,v,) John (q.v.) and Abraham (q.v.) and Catherine and Susannah Moses and Phoebe Hart (q.v.). He arrived with some members of his family, and in Sydney in 1833 Joseph Moses applied for one assigned convict servant. His grandson Lazarus Hart (q.v.) was assigned to him in 1837. Joseph Moses took over the license of the Red Cross Hotel, on the corner of King and York Streets in 1834. On the list of donors to the Sydney Synagogue in 1839 he was listed as ‘Joseph Moses Snr’ and donated £5 to the building fund. Joseph Moses was named as a publican at Patrick Plains, Darlington. In 1843 a Joseph Moses was a draper in George Street who had stock to be sold in private because of the demolition of his house. He was a seat holder in the new synagogue in 1845 and was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery in 1845. His occupation on his death certificate is given as ‘rabbi’. The subsequent death certificates of his children describe his occupation as ‘dealer’. In 1901 Rebecca Hart (Asher Hart's daughter) applied in 1901 to transfer Joseph Moses' tombstone to Raphael's Ground Lidcombe.
ML A1214, p. 728, 1835, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 January 1843; Sydney Gazette, 5 January 1843. Information by Jeannette Tsoulos.
MOSES, Julia
b. London, 1822–1904
Palambam, 1833; Free.
Single; 12 children.
Julia, the daughter of Abraham Moses (q.v.) and Leah Moses, married Elias Moses (q.v.), on 15 April 1840 at the Bridge Street Synagogue. They had twelve children: Rachel (1841); Deborah (1843); Elizabeth Julia (1845); Fanny (London 1850); Moses, later known as Merton (1852); Joseph (1854); Samuel (1855); Catherine (Melbourne 1856); Sophia (1859); Amelia (1861); Louisa (1863); and Florence (1866). Julia Moses died in Sydney on 27 May 1904 and was buried at the Rookwood Cemetery.
‘One son, seven daughters, 47 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren mourned her death’, Sydney morning Herald, 30 May 1904.
MOSES, Martha
John Craig, 1834; Free.
Single.
Martha Moses came out from England travelling steerage with Maria (Mary) Hart (q.v.) and Rachel Nathan (q.v.), arriving at Port Jackson on 12 October 1834.
MOSES, Mary (Maria)
b. London
Mayflower, 1841; Free.
Single; 11 children.
Mary Moses arrived in Hobart Town in March 1841, having travelled steerage with her mother Sarah (q.v.) and sisters Rachael (q.v.) and Rebecca (Ellen) (q.v.). Mary Moses was a daughter of Emanuel ‘Money’ Moses (q.v.) who, at the age of sixty, was transported to Van Diemen's Land for his part in the great gold dust robbery at Covent Garden.
Mary Moses was also the sister of Angel Moses, who reversed his name to Moses Angel and was the headmaster of the Jews' Free School in London. She married Philip Levy (q.v.), aged thirty-six, in Hobart Town on 3 February 1842. The Minute Book of the congregation recorded that in 1845 Mrs Philip Levy had embroidered the parochet (curtain) for the Ark.
CSO 92/6, p. 65; CON 52/1, p. 107.
MOSES, Michael
1830; Free.
On 9 February 1851 the committee of the Hobart Synagogue received an application for financial assistance for Michael Moses. He was described as ‘a poor man’. It was decided to give him six shillings a week.
MOSES, Moses (MOSS)
b. London, 1791–1858
Marquis of Wellington, 1815; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1813.
Single; Glass cutter; Height: 164 cm; 14 children.
Dark complexion, dark brown hair, dark eyes. He was the son of Joseph and Deborah (née Barnett) Moses, and brother of John Moses (q.v.), Isaac Moses (q.v.), Abraham Moses (q.v.) and Phoebe Hart (q.v.), the wife of Asher Hart (q.v.). Moses was transported for stealing a pocket book containing £7. He was one of four males who hustled a passerby and stole two pocket books from the victim. He was sentenced on 14 July 1813.
Moses arrived in Sydney in January 1815 and was assigned to the farm of Mr Hovell, from which he absconded in July. He was then assigned to work at the Brickfields. On 7 May 1817 Moses Moses and Samuel Lyons (q.v.) were discovered stowed away on board a ship that was about to leave the colony and were sentenced to work on the roads for one month. In the words of a witness, when Lyons and Moses were found aboard the ship the captain asked them how long they had been on board. Samuel Lyons said ‘three days’, to which Captain Jeffreys thoughtfully replied, ‘I thought you were a long time making me a pair of pantaloons’.
Moses was sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Kangaroo in 1817. On 6 January 1818 Moses tried to escape again, but was found concealed on the Pilot and received six months in the gaol gang. Two months later he received fifty lashes for being repeatedly disorderly in the chain gang. On 1 September 1819 he received fifty lashes for disobeying the orders of his master Mr T. Florence. Moses married Sarah Brown on 18 June 1821 and set up shop in Hobart Town selling bread and confectionery. Sarah, aged twenty-seven at the time of her marriage, had arrived in Van Diemen's Land on the Morley in 1820. Moses stated at the wedding that he was twenty-eight, two years younger than he was.
In August 1821 Moses was charged with receiving stolen property, but was released from custody when the Public Prosecutor failed to turn up in court. Moses Moses owned a baker's shop in Collins Street in Hobart Town. In 1824 he was brought before the court for overcharging for bread. The case was dismissed. On 15 July 1825 he held a ticket of leave and was found to have in his possession an illegal weight. He was fined £1 10s for attempting to sell bread that was short of its legal weight. On 20 September 1826 Moses was reprimanded for being absent from church and on 1 November 1827 he was fined £1 for ‘travelling with a cart on the Lord's Day’. Moses was also one of the semi-professional Jewish pugilists in Hobart Town. A conditional pardon was issued on 25 July 1834 (Hobart Town Gazette).
Meanwhile, the marriage of Moses to Sarah had deteriorated. The 1823 Van Diemen's Land Muster recorded that they were married but her convict dossier shows that it was not a happy marriage. On 23 August 1826 she absconded and went to New Norfolk without a pass. She was ‘remanded and returned to her family’ on 4 September. On 12 April 1831 Sarah was sent to gaol for thirty-six hours of solitary confinement on bread and water for ‘very disorderly conduct and making use of violent and obscene language’. She was free by servitude by 14 August 1833.
Following the granting of his conditional pardon in 1834, Moses travelled from New South Wales to Van Diemen's Land and ran into a bureaucratic tangle when it was revealed that his pardon did not have ‘Royal Approval’ and that its conditions differed from the form of approval used in New South Wales. Moses was forced to consult a lawyer for permission to proceed to Sydney on the ship Gulmare. Moses returned to New South Wales and settled in the new town of Yass. He was appointed the Keeper of the Pound in 1837 and in 1840 he opened the Yass Hotel in Conner Street, which, he said, was ‘the best hotel out of Sydney’. The following year the 47-year-old Sarah died ‘of a broken heart from peculiar family trials’ and she was buried at St John's Cemetery in Parramatta on 1 April 1841. The ‘peculiar’ trial may have arisen from the ‘marriage’ of Moses to Hannah Dray in Sydney at Scots Church in 1840. The grave stone inscription reads: ‘Peace to her soul. May the Divine creator receive her soul into everlasting rest—and pardon her former unnatural oppressors’.
In 1842 Moses, single-handed, seized the bushranger Massey in the dining room of his hotel and handed him over to the police (from whom he quickly escaped). For his bravery the citizens of Yass presented Moses with an inscribed silver medallion ‘for his gallant conduct in endeavouring to capture the bush-ranger Massey and in which he failed only in not being supported by the constable present, and upon whose assistance he naturally calculated’. The policeman had allowed the bushranger to escape the moment he had left the hotel.
Moses became a member of the first Yass Town Council in 1843 and a trustee of the Yass Hospital. The hotel prospered and he built a 47-room semi-Gothic mansion called Old Linton. He organised the consecration of a corner of the Yass Cemetery for Jewish burials in 1844. He was a contributor to and seat holder of the Sydney Synagogue in 1845. On 27 February 1846 he transferred his publican's licence from the White Hart Inn to the Yass Inn. Moses died at Yass on 11 July 1858 and was buried in Yass. The funeral service was read by Mr Moritz Michaelis of Burrowa and the inscription on his tombstone reads: ‘He was one of the oldest inhabitants of the Town of Yass. He was much respected by all who knew him’. The inscription stated that he was sixty-eight years old.
Even though Moses was a generous supporter of the Sydney Synagogue, local tradition held that the daughters of his first marriage were baptised in the same year so that they might be able to find a suitable husband to marry. However, this appears to be a myth. A daughter, Sarah Tabitha (born 1 May 1827), died in Yass on 2 February 1843 (aged fifteen), and was buried as a Jew. Another daughter, Maria (15 February 1823), married J. G. Raphael (q.v.) in Sydney on 30 December 1840. Moses and Sarah (née Brown) had four other children: William (12 October 1821), Phoebe (7 May 1825 married Daniel Murray in 1846 and died in 1863. She was buried as a Jew and her remains were transferred to Bunnerong from Devonshire Street in 1901), Joseph William (9 October 1829), and Abraham (8 November 1831).
Moses and Hannah (née Dray) had eight children: Barnett Aaron (born 1841), Jacob (1843), Deborah (Ellen) (25 October 1845), Sophia (16 July 1847), Elizabeth (14 June 1849), Caroline (21 June 1851), Jesse (11 June 1853), and Hannah (8 February 1856).
OBSP, 1813, case 738, p. 404; CON 31/29, no. 10; CON 13/1, p. 59; HRA, series 3, vol. 2, p. 255; Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 34; Petition 4/2650.4; Hobart Town Gazette, 8 September 1821, 15 June 1822, 15 August 1822, 28 May 1824; CP 377; Sydney Gazette, 17 April 1823; Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 1845, 28 January 1846, 27 February 1846; William A. Bayley, Yass Municipal Centenary History; Steve Hart, ‘The Life and Times of Some Jewish Pioneers of Yass Township’, AJJHS, vol. 16, no. 2 (2002), p. 174f; 4/2218, 33/2158; Australian, 31 December 1840, 6 June 1998.
MOSES, Moses (MOSS)
b. London, 1819–1883
Free.
Single; Merchant.
The son of Jacob Moses and Clara (Jonas) of London, Moses Moses was the younger brother of Samuel Jacob Moses (q.v.) of Hobart Town. Moses Moses married Esther Nathan (q.v.) at the Bridge Street synagogue in Sydney on 16 November 1842. Esther was his cousin, and a sister of Rosetta Joseph (Nathan, q.v.) of Sydney. The young couple made their home in Launceston and Moses Moses was a member of the organising committee that built the Launceston Synagogue. At the time of the gold rush on the mainland Moses and Esther Moss moved to Sydney, where he founded M. Moss and Co., which became one of the most important wine and spirit merchants of New South Wales. He served as president of the York Street Synagogue from 1869 to 1875.
MOSES, Nelson (Nisson)
Convict.
Single.
Nelson (Nisson) Moses married Mary McCarthy on 2 November 1812 at St Matthew's, Windsor. Both were ‘free’. Mary signed the marriage certificate with her mark.
A bounty migrant, aged twenty-six, Phoebe Moses arrived in Sydney on 31 August 1837. It was recorded that she had ‘A good character, good health. Jewess. Brother in the country’.
Mutch Index 381/31.
MOSES, Rachael
Mayflower, 1841; Free.
Single.
Rachael was the daughter of Emanuel ‘Money’ Moses (q.v.) and Sarah Moses (q.v.). Her sisters were Mary (Maria) Moses (q.v.), who married Philip Levy (q.v.), and Rebecca (Ellen) (q.v.) Moses. Rachael Moses married Samuel Levy (q.v.) in Hobart Town on 29 June 1842.
MOSES, Rachel
b. London, 1811
Free.
Single; 11 children.
The sister of Elias Moses (q.v.), Rachel married her brother's business partner, Samuel Benjamin (q.v.), in 1835.
MOSES, Rebecca (née DAVIS)
Dora, 1840; Free.
Married; 2 children.
Rebecca Moses came to Australia with her husband, Abraham Moses (q.v.).
MOSES, Rebecca (Ellen)
Mayflower, 1841; Free.
Single; 2 children.
The daughter of the convict Emanuel ‘Money’ Moses (q.v.) and Sarah Moses (q.v), Rebecca arrived with her mother and her two sisters, Mary (q.v.) and Rachael (q.v.), on the Mayflower. Rebecca Moses married Morris Marks (q.v.) in Hobart Town on 30 June 1847.
Rosetta Moses, the holder of a conditional pardon, was listed as a tenant of Mr Edward Churchill at the Hawkesbury in October 1820. On 30 June 1823 she was granted thirty acres of land in the township of Howick, New South Wales, ‘by Government Order of 31 March 1821’.
Bigge Appendix, BT Box 24, p. 5174.
MOSES, Rosetta Blanche
Piscata, 1841; Free.
Married; 11 children.
Rosetta Blanche Moses married Samuel Jacob Moses (q.v.) in 1836.
MOSES, Samuel
b. London, 1806–1844
Phoenix (3), 1828; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1827.
Single; Fishmonger; Height: 161 cm; 2 children.
Sallow complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. Could read. Jew. Samuel put his hand through a broken shop window and attempted to steal five handkerchiefs (valued at ten shillings). Samuel Moses was caught in the act despite ‘a desperate effort to escape’. He had two previous convictions, and was sentenced on 31 May 1827.
Samuel Moses was assigned as a labourer to Sydney Water Works. He was listed in the 1828 Census as attached to the Mineral Surveyor's Department. No religion was noted. A ticket of leave was granted on 11 March 1833, valid for the District of Sydney. Samuel Moses married Emma Hooper at St James' Church, Sydney, in 1830. Moses Samuel was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery on 12 July 1844, and an inquest into his death was held on 3 December 1844.
The children of Samuel and Emma Moses were William (1839) and Louisa (1843).
OBSP, 1826–27, case 1237, p. 476; Ship Indent 4/4013, p. 101; 4/4087; TL 33/118; Sydney Gazette, 17 February 1833; Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 1844.
MOSES, Samuel Jacob
b. London, 1807–1873
Piscata, 1841; Free.
Married; Dealer, merchant; 11 children.
In 1836 Samuel Jacob Moses married Rosetta Blanche Moses (q.v.) the daughter of Henry Moses and Esther (née Nathan). Samuel was both brother-in-law and first cousin of Rosetta's older sister, Harriette Nathan (q.v.), and the brother-in-law of Louis Nathan (q.v.). He arrived with his wife Rosetta, their two children, Clara (born 1837), and Alfred (1839), and two servants. The family spent some time in Sydney in 1840, where their baby daughter, Henrietta Rachael, was born and registered as a ‘Hebrew’. Samuel Moses moved to Hobart Town on 17 February 1841, with his wife, three children and two servants. He was to represent Henry E. and M. Moses of Cannon Street, London. His father-in-law, Henry Moses, had given Louis Nathan and Samuel Moses the sum of £100 each with which to begin business in the colonies.
The Moses family stayed with the Nathan family for those first years and the two men shared the same highly successful business in Hobart Town. Their grand home was called Derwent Park. Moses travelled a great deal, frequently visiting Sydney and returning with the family to the United Kingdom in 1843 and 1846. His family and his fortune grew rapidly. The Hobart Town Courier of 29 December 1843 announced that Mrs Moses had given birth to a son (Lewis Frederick) at the family home in Victoria Place, Macquarie Street. Henrietta Rachael Moses died in Hobart Town on 17 February 1853 at the age of thirteen and was buried at the Harrington Street cemetery. A baby boy, Samuel, born 9 August 1849, died within five days of his birth. Their other children were Edward Hyam (1847), Charlotte (1848), Henry (1851), Laurence (Lawrence) Hyam (June 1852), Lionel David (1854), and Howard Joseph (March 1855).
Moses was active in the life of the Jewish community and undoubtedly helped to give the community some respectability. He was trained as a mohel (ritual circumciser) and brought out with him, handwritten on vellum, an ‘Order of Service for a Circumcision’. He served as the synagogue's first secretary in 1842 and was a trustee of the congregation. He gave £25 to its building fund in 1843 and £10 to the Sydney Synagogue in 1845. He rented seat no. 6 in the synagogue.
On 5 January 1845 Samuel Moses was presented with a ‘beautiful piece of plate’ by members of the Hebrew community of Hobart Town, as ‘a token of respect and esteem’. A testimonial was presented to Moses by the congregation, which declared that he was ‘an upright and enterprising citizen … We rejoice in the hope that the separation between us will only be temporary and we shall hail with feelings of pleasure your re-appearance amongst us’. Moses was about to visit England by the Calcutta and, according to the newspaper report ‘was well known … had been eminently successful. His firm was said to be one the largest importing and exporting houses in Van Diemen's Land’. In 1854 the firm of Nathan & Moses advertised frequently that they were interested in purchases of wool, oil and gold dust. Samuel Moses was the first Jew to be appointed a Justice of the Peace in Tasmania.
In 1857 the Governor attended a ‘sumptuous ball’ held at his home, Boa Vista, in New Town. The family returned to England in early 1859. Samuel Moses continued to support the congregation from London, sending cheques to repair the old burial ground and funds to the synagogue itself. He bought a mansion at 100 Lancaster Gate and died in London on 2 October 1873. Alfred stayed behind for some years to look after the business in Tasmania. All the children subsequently changed their surnames to Walford. The Mohel Book was taken back to England by Moses and is in the possession of his descendants.
Jewish Chronicle, 16 May 1845, 25 December 1853; CSO 92/16 F78; Hobart Town Courier, 10 July 1857.
MOSES, Sarah
1817–1892
Palambam, 1833; Free.
Single; 10 children.
Sarah was the eldest child of Abraham Moses (q.v.) and Leah, and was aged fifteen when she arrived in Sydney with her family. On 1 June 1836 she married Nathan Joseph (q.v.) in Sydney, and their family grew up in Singleton, New South Wales.
Sarah died ‘at her residence’, at 66 Botany Street, Moore Park, in 1892, and was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery. Sarah was said to be the ‘relict’ of Nathan Joseph and mother of Mrs E. Mandelson, Potts Point, Mrs Jacob Joseph and Mrs Coleman Phillips, of Wellington, New Zealand, and Jacob Nathan Joseph of Sydney. Her reburial would be at Lidcombe in 1901.
Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 1892. Family information Jeannette Tsoukos.
MOSES, Sarah (MOSS)
1824–1865
Dora, 1840; Free.
Single; 6 children.
The daughter of Abraham Moses (q.v.), Sarah Moses arrived in Sydney with her parents on 17 March 1840. Sarah married Lewis Lipman (q.v.) of Muswellbrook at the Sydney Synagogue on 23 June 1847. Phillip was born on 10 June 1848 at Patrick Plains, and died, aged seven, in 1855. Abraham was born on 31 December 1849. Lewis and Sarah moved to Sydney in 1850. On 10 April 1853 their third child, Joseph, was born at 58 Phillip Street. Albert was born on 26 August 1856 at 26 O'Connell Street, Sydney, and died in 1860. Rachel was born on 31 March 1858. Joshua was born at the family's home at 199 York Street, a few houses from the York Street Synagogue.
Sarah Lipman died on 8 April 1865. She had borne six children, of whom three predeceased her.
MOSES, Sarah
Mayflower, 1775–1864. Arrived 1841; Free.
Married.
Sarah Moses brought her three daughters Rachael (q.v.), Mary (q.v.) and Rebecca Ellen (q.v.) to Hobart Town, arriving on 26 March 1841. She was the wife of convict Emanuel ‘Money’ Moses (q.v.), who died at the hospital at New Norfolk on 5 July 1841. She gave £10 to the synagogue building appeal in 1843 and paid £2 9s to the Hobart Synagogue in 1844–45. In 1845 the Hobart Synagogue Ledger described her as ‘widow’. Sarah remained in Van Diemen's Land and lived at the corner of Harrington Street and Collins Street. On 27 April 1855 the Hobarton Mercury reported that Mrs Sarah Moses had been involved in ‘a serious confrontation’ with her maid Susan McMahon, an Irish immigrant ‘dressed in a crepe frock and a handsome shawl’. Sarah Moses accused her maid of stealing grapes from ‘an old and valuable vine’ in her garden. Her mistress told her that she was a liar and an Irish bitch and that if she could she would drink her blood and then threw an old carving knife at her. Sarah Moses denied Susan McMahon's charge that she was an ‘unnatural woman’ because, she said, she was the mother of sixteen (sic.) children and thirty grandchildren. The case, which lasted an hour in the Police Court, was dismissed.
Sarah Moses died in Hobart ‘after a long and painful illness’ on 31 May 1864 in her eighty-ninth year.
Hobart Town Courier, 30 March 1841. Mercury, 27 April 1855, 1 June 1864. Family information from Phil Lipshut of Melbourne.
MOSES, Solomon
b. Sheerness, 1800–1875
Arundel, 1832; Free.
Single; Dealer; 12 children.
Solomon Moses, son of Simeon and Caroline Moses of Sheerness, arrived in Port Jackson on 10 September 1832. Moses was elected a member of the first Sydney Synagogue committee in September 1833. On 8 February 1834 the Sydney Gazette reported: ‘Solomon Moses, a dealer, who keeps a stall in the market place was robbed of some black silken handkerchiefs’.
Moses married Deborah Hart (q.v.) on 28 January 1835. Deborah was the child of Asher and Phoebe Hart (qq.v.). It was Sydney's seventh Jewish wedding, and they arrived in Goulburn in 1835. In 1837 their first child, Lewis, was born in ‘Bungonia, Goulburn’, the first Jewish child to have been born in the district. On 1 July 1836 Moses opened the Travellers' Home Inn, Goulburn Plains. He later built a new hotel and transferred his licence to it in 1841, calling it the Royal Hotel. It cost £9000 to build and he borrowed £1500 from John Isaacs (q.v.). On 10 July 1838 the Sydney Gazette reported: ‘Mr Solomon Moses, formerly of Sydney, lately of Goulburn, was forwarded to Sydney last week on suspicion to be implicated in the robbery of the Maneroo Mail’. Malicious information had been laid against him concerning the purchase of stolen goods. Bail was set at £400. On 24 July the Sydney Gazette reported that ‘after interrogation Moses was discharged as he was shown not to have been implicated in the Mail Robbery’.
The Royal Hotel became the social centre of Goulburn. The Sydney Morning Herald of 3 September 1845 described the ‘great bachelor ball, with great supper and excellent band of music’.
Solomon Moses of Goulburn was appointed the local official representative of the Sydney Synagogue on 13 November 1843. He was a seat holder in the new Sydney Synagogue of 1845 and in that year gave £100 to its building appeal. His children were registered at the Sydney Synagogue. They were: Abraham (born 25 December 1835, at Goulburn), who died in June 1896 (in Auckland); Lewis (Eleazar) (2 September 1837, in Goulburn), who married Minni Phillips, and died on 11 April 1903 (in Auckland); Caroline Deborah (27 September 1840 to 2 November 1921), who married Sydney Levi Emanuel; Simeon Simon (18 September 1842), who married Mattie Jones; Morris (30 July 1844 to 28 March 1909), who married Emily Taylor; Joseph (20 June 1846 to 13 February 1933), who married Caroline Phillips; Moses (4 December 1848); Leah (13 October 1850, at Bathurst); Rebecca (22 May 1853), at Sydney; Fanny (1855 to 8 September 1927); Rachel (14 November 1856, at South Lambeth, England), who died on 8 February 1938; and Jacob Israel (18 November 1858, born at Cumberland Street, Sydney).
Solomon Moses died at Bishopthorpe Terrace, Glebe Road, Sydney, on 7 October 1875. His widow Deborah died on 7 December 1884 at Dunedin.
Mutch Index 7/135; Errol Lea-Scarlett, Queanbeyan District and People; Cecil Roth, The Rise of Provincial Jewry, p. 96; Sydney Gazette, 8 February 1834, 19 July 1836, 10 July 1838; Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1844, 3 September 1845; 4/5218, 2 November 1840; family research by Nigel Meinrath, Phillip Moses and Mrs Mim Segal.
MOSES, Solomon (Moses SOLOMON)
b. 1805; Convict.
Single.
At the Old Bailey on 16 February 1814 a nine year old ‘Moses Solomon’, together with two other boys, John Morris (q.v.) and Joseph Burrell, was sentenced to death for breaking and entering a shop in Holborn and stealing some oranges, nuts and a pair of shoes. The prisoners were recommended to mercy on account of their youth'.
On 20 June 1818 the Hobart Town Gazette reported that a boy was among the convicts who had secreted themselves on the ship Harriet, which had left Van Diemen's Land for the Cape of Good Hope. They were discovered and brought back to Hobart Town in the Neptune and sentenced to 100 lashes each. They were to work in a gaol gang for twelve months. In February 1819 Solomon Moses escaped from the brig Elizabeth Henrietta.
On 28 June 1826 Moses received an eighteen-month sentence with colonial transportation for stealing.
OBSP, 16 February 1814, case 208., Hobart Town Gazette, 20 June 1818; Sydney Gazette, 16 May 1818, 20 February 1819, 28 June 1826.
Solomon Moses had one of the first stores in Queanbeyan and remained there until September 1851, when he moved to Bungendore to open the Victoria Stores. Shortly after the store opened it was flooded out. On 5 November 1856 Solomon Moses married Phoebe Levy, the daughter of Abraham Joseph Levy (q.v.) and Catherine (née Phillips). Their two children born in 1858 and 1860 both died in infancy. In 1853 he founded the Beehive Stores in Bungendore, which was barely profitable until he opened the Beehive Hotel next to the original store at the corner of Gibraltar and Molonglo streets. Moses drowned in Deep Creek, Queanbeyan, on 27 October 1860 and was buried in the Goulburn Jewish Cemetery. He left an insolvent estate.
Errol Lea-Scarlett, Queanbeyan District and People.
MOSES, Sophia
b. London, 1796–1853
Duckenfield, 1831; Free.
Married.
Sophia Moses came to Van Diemen's Land in 1831 with her husband David Moses (q.v.). She died in Hobart Town on 6 May 1853 and was buried in the Harrington Street Jewish Cemetery.
MOSES, Uriah
b. Whitechapel, 1778–1847
Royal Admiral I (2), 1800; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1798.
Single; Glass cutter; 9 children.
Uriah Moses entered a house in Whitechapel on 8 December 1796. Moses stole linen, lace and silk (valued at £5) from the display window of a draper's shop in Whitechapel by using a diamond cutter to cut the glass from the window. His father lived in Petticoat Lane and, as Uriah had cut his hand on the glass, his father took him to Guy's Hospital, where Uriah was arrested. At the same trial his landlady, Mrs Hannah Benjamin, was implicated and was found guilty of theft. Moses was sentenced to death on 10 January 1798, though this was later commuted to transportation for life. Mrs Ann Benjamin was sentenced to fourteen years transportation but her name fails to appear on the lists of those sent to Australia.
Moses arrived in New South Wales in November 1800. In the 1806 General Muster Moses was listed as living in Sydney. A ticket of leave was granted on 1 January 1812. The latter was reaffirmed on 22 January 1812 while Moses was living in the Hawkesbury District. The 1814 General Muster listed him as a ‘landholder’. By 1818 he was shown as renting three acres of wheat, seven acres of maize, fourteen hogs and as the owner of three bushels of wheat. In 1819 his holding had increased to twelve acres. By 1820, together with Abraham Elias (q.v.) and John Moses ‘of Nepean’ (q.v.), he had begun to supply significant quantities of wheat to the government. A conditional pardon was issued to Uriah Moses on 25 October 1821.
In 1823 Moses sold 300 bushels of wheat to the commissariat at seven shillings and sixpence per bushel and a further 1000 bushels on 18 December 1823. In the 1828 Census Moses was listed as a baker in Windsor and the holder of a conditional pardon. In 1832 the convict William Poulston, a ‘baker's boy’, was assigned to him. By 1832, now described as a ‘merchant’, he had begun to make frequent appearances in the Windsor Court of Requests collecting debts owed to him by the small farmers.
On 9 March 1830 Uriah Moses married Ann Daley at St Matthew's Church in Windsor. According to the 1828 Census, Ann was the former assigned servant of Abraham Elias of Windsor. In the General Post Office Directory of 1835–36, Uriah Moses was listed as a ‘dealer’ living in George Street, Windsor.
Moses donated £10 to the Sydney Synagogue in 1845, the year of its dedication. However, in December 1847, Uriah Moses lay on his deathbed and asked the local vicar in Windsor for baptism. Bishop Stiles of Sydney was asked by the local vicar whether this could be done without proper instruction in the catechism. Stiles answered: ‘Yes, should our fallible judgement after our best efforts to discuss the truth be misled, we may humbly hope that He will not lay it to our charge’. The episcopal answer came just in time. Uriah Moses died on 5 December 1847. The Parish Register of St Matthew's proudly described him as a shopkeeper who was a ‘converted Jew’. His will had been witnessed by Abraham and Harriet Elias (qq.v.).
Nine of the twelve children of Ann and Uriah Moses survived infancy. Ann Moses remarried on 4 March 1869 (when aged fifty-nine) to James Powell, a ‘gentleman’, at Randwick. Uriah's second child, Henry Moses, born 6 November 1832, and baptised on 2 December 1832, became a leader in commerce in New South Wales. He was a director of the Perpetual Trustees Company, the Commercial Bank, the Commercial Union Assurance and the owner of many rural and metropolitan properties. Henry Moses died in June 1926.
OBSP, 1797–98, case 73, p. 87; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Registers of CF 1810–14, 4/4427, p. 464; Bench of Magistrates, Singleton, Letters Sent, 1836–37, 4/5658-9; Correspondence of the Rev. Stiles, ML, A269, p. 77; Governors' Despatches, 1833, p. 669, ML, A1211; Sydney Gazette, 27 February 1823, 18 December 1823, 16 August 1832.
MOSS, Abraham see TAYLOR, Thomas
MOSS, Abraham Alfred
d. 1843
Free.
Abraham Alfred Moss was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery in Sydney on 25 October 1843, and the grave was moved to Rookwood in 1901. The exhumation permit was signed by Montefiore Moss.
A daughter of Marcus Warschauer (alias Mordecai Moss) (q.v.), and stepdaughter of Abigail Moses (q.v.) (née Barnett), Catherine was known as ‘Hinda’. Catherine Moss married Aaron Isaacs (q.v.) in Sydney on 11 May 1842. They had nine children: Solomon and Amos (twins) (born 1843), George (1844), Michael Joseph (5 October 1845), at Paterson in New South Wales, Hinda (1847), Rose (1848), Sarah (1849), Raphael (Ralph) (1851), Mendel (1852), Rachel (1852), Solomon (1853), and Louis (1857).
Aaron Isaacs died in 1866. Catherine died on 17 November 1885 and her death certificate noted that her father was ‘Mordecai Moss, Jewish Rabbi’ [sic].
MOSS, Emily (née GOLDING MORGAN)
1817–1902
On 17 August 1841 Emily Golding Morgan married Phineas Moss (q.v.), who would become the honorary secretary of the Hobart Synagogue. She had been converted to Judaism before the marriage. She was aged twenty-four and he was forty-six years old. Moss died in 1866, leaving Emily in financial distress.
The Hobart Synagogue granted Emily the sum of ten guineas ‘in recognition of the services rendered by the late Mr Moss’ in May 1866. In 1894 the congregation began to pay her a monthly allowance as she was obviously living in poverty. Part of her rent was paid in February 1902. The synagogue paid the doctor's account in April and her funeral expenses on 23 May 1902. She was buried in the Hobart Jewish Cemetery on 27 January 1902.
MOSS, Gabriel (Hopping Moss)
b. London, 1813
Mary III (4), 1833; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Middlesex, 1832.
Single; Hawker; Height: 166 cm.
Ruddy dark complexion, dark hazel eyes, large nose, scar corner left eye. Jew. Could read and write. No previous convictions. Moss was a member of a group of six pickpockets who worked a crowd in a London street. A witness testified: ‘He put one of his arms up to his throat and took the watch with his other hand’. The victim said: ‘The prisoner struggled me about’.
Gabriel Moss arrived on 6 January 1833 and was assigned as a hawker to J. T. Bayles of Sydney. In 1837 Moss was arrested on George Street with no pass in his possession and seven shillings and ten pence. At the time the constable was also taking a woman into custody. Moss interfered and the woman escaped. Moss was then sentenced to a year in prison (16 October 1837). In 1838 he petitioned the Colonial Secretary for a pardon from the Woolloomooloo Iron Gang and his plea was rejected. He was given permission to marry in 1839 while he was still on assigned service. His wife-to-be was Sarah Ann Davies, aged twenty-one, who had come to the colony as a free settler. The officiant was the Rev. W. H. Walsh and the official document included the note that: ‘The usual engagement having been entered into by the assignee of Moss to keep both partners in his service’. In the Registry of Flash Men he was described as ‘Hopping Moss having returned from the Iron Gang, dresses well, smokes his Havana and is a friend of Hyams’.
OBSP, case 1014, p. 422; Mary III (4) Printed Indent, p. 5; Sydney Gazette, 28 February 1833; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Register of Convicts' Applications to Marry 1839, 4/4513, p. 97; CS Letters Received 1838, Police, Sydney, 38/1501, in 4/2421.2; W. A. Miles, Registry of Flash Men, 2/673.
MOSS, George (MOSES)
London, 1809–1854
1832; Free.
Single; 5 children.
George's father was Marcus Warschauer (Mordecai Moses) (q.v.), who was transported to Sydney in 1836. His mother was Amelia (née Cohen). His siblings who came to Australia were Alexander (Moses, q.v.), Catherine Moss (q.v.) and Rosetta Moss (q.v.). George Moss was elected secretary of the Sydney Synagogue at the first General Meeting of the Jews of Sydney in 1833. Moss was a newspaper man who wrote regular contributions from Sydney for the Jewish Chronicle in London. On 15 October 1833 in the Sydney Gazette, ‘George Moss informed the gentlemen of the Hunter that he has taken over the Rose Inn at Maitland’. In January 1834 Solomon Levien (q.v.) became the inn's owner and Moss moved to Sydney, where he served on the Sydney Synagogue Committee from 1833 to 1838.
By 1835 the 26-year-old Moss had acquired a 15-year-old non-Jewish common-law wife, Louisa Wilkes. In 1836, their daughter Maria (Miriam) was born in Sydney and registered as a Jew. George jnr was born in 1837, and Rosetta was born in 1838. Three children must have been too difficult for the congregation to ignore and, following Rosetta's birth, George Moss resigned as a member of the committee of the congregation and ceased to be its honorary secretary. On 2 November 1839 Moss wrote to the president of the congregation stating that he wished to be married ‘agreeably to the rites and customs of the Hebrew nation’. He ‘sincerely trusted that the person in question [his de facto wife] would become a Geyoureth and his marriage be solemnised according to our religious tenets … To prevent any misrepresentation he would attend the Committee any time to answer all that may be required’. The letter concluded ‘with the profound respect for the religion of our forefathers’. The marriage (and conversion) was authorised and took place on 23 March 1840 ‘according to the Jewish Mosaic tenets’. Louisa Wilkes became ‘Leah Abrahams’, and the marriage was performed by Moss's father, Mordecai Moses (q.v.), who, at the time, was the shamash of the synagogue. Three more children were subsequently born, Abraham (1842, who died a year later), Montague (3 May 1844), who called himself ‘Montefiore’ M. Moss, and Lewis (April 1846). Their mother, Leah (Louisa), died on 8 May 1851 at the age of thirty-one.
On 4 July 1837 the Australian newspaper announced that Moss had been appointed ‘collector’ on behalf of the newspaper and, on 31 March 1839, George Robert Nichols, the proprietor of the Australian, announced that without Moss's signature no receipt for money for the newspaper would be valid. Moss gave £15 to the Sydney Synagogue building appeal in September 1839, and was a seat holder in the new synagogue in 1845. He founded the short-lived Sydney Jewish Library in 1846 and was the editor of Australia's first Jewish newspaper, Voice of Jacob, which briefly appeared in the early 1840s. He served as secretary of the York Street Synagogue and became the regular Australian correspondent of the London weekly edition of Voice of Jacob.
Moss was listed as having a house at Bridge Street and a house in Kent Street (Sydney Gazette, 9 September, 19 September 1842). When Nichols ceased to be involved in the Australian, Moss became a proprietor in partnership with the Rev. W. M. Hesketh, and on 12 July 1843 that partnership was dissolved. Moss held a licence for the City Hotel in George Street near Hunter Street (18 January 1844) and a night licence was granted on 1 July 1844. In December the licence was transferred to George Howell. On 27 October 1845 Moss was appointed collector for the Sydney City Council. His sureties were Moses Joseph (q.v.) and Lewis Leon (q.v.).
A few weeks before Moss's 17-year-old daughter Miriam died, on 14 March 1854, Moss had unwisely written an article for the Sydney Morning Herald called ‘Jewish Intelligence’ that made fun of the Sydney Synagogue for failing to have found a rabbi. It is possible that the letter was a Purim joke or that it was written at a time of great stress. The synagogue's committee was not amused and believed that Moss had published an article that reflected poorly on the Jewish community. Moss was suspended. He apologised but the committee was adamant. A Special Meeting of the congregation approved an annuity of £100. However, this was disallowed, and a grant of £50 a year was approved for a single year and was to be subject to confirmation each successive year. The dispute broke both his heart and his mind. George Moss died on 19 November 1854 at the Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum at the age of forty-four. His tombstone, commissioned by the congregation at the cost of £4 10s, reads that he had been ‘Secretary of the York Street Synagogue until infirmity overtook him’.
On 24 August 1856 Moses Moss asked the York Street Synagogue's Board of Management what was to happen to the children of George Moss. They had been in the care of the Rev. Jacob Isaacs, who had decided to return to England. Almost a year passed until, at the meeting of the board on 9 August 1857, it was reported that ‘the children were not properly provided for’, although the two boys were costing the synagogue £50 per annum. One of them was now ‘old enough to be apprenticed to a good trade so as to be capable of obtaining his own living’. Two weeks later, it was resolved that the children be handed over to the Jewish Orphan Society and that £50 be given to the society for their upkeep. In August 1859 that sum was halved, as the older boy had ‘been placed in a position to obtain his own livelihood’.
Siren Indent 4/5211; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1839, 23 March 1840, 15 September 1842, 12 March 1846; Sydney Gazette, 15 October 1833, 12 August 1841; Australian, 4 July 1837, 31 March 1839, 18 January 1844, 1 July 1844, 11 December 1844, 27 October 1845; G. F. J. Bergman, ‘George Moss, An Early Worker of the Sydney Jewish Community’, AJJHS, vol. 9, no. 2 (1981), p. 77f.
MOSS, George
b. Old Gravel Lane, 1810–1842
Argyle, 1831; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1830.
Single; Labourer; Height: 163 cm.
Dark complexion, dark brown hair, brown eyes. He had a tattoo ‘MM’ on his right arm and ‘SM & DM on his left arm. He could read and write. Moss was transported for stealing a watch. He had served a previous seven-year prison sentence, on the hulks at Chatham and Sheerness, for stealing a purse. His father was David Moss, a chiropodist in Aldgate. He said that his brother, Martin (aka Morton) Moss (q.v.), had been transported to Australia in 1825.
Moss began life in Van Diemen's Land as a convict servant on 5 August 1831 and, on 2 June 1837, Philip Marks (q.v.) of the New Town Road had George Moss assigned to him. Moss was repeatedly charged with disobedience and neglect of duty. On 23 June 1837 he was found guilty of stealing a large case of tobacco and was sentenced to three years at Port Arthur to work in the chain gang. On 13 February 1839 Moss was one of the eight prisoners who stole the Commandant's Whale Boat. The Sydney Gazette of 1 June 1839 reported about the ‘Port Arthur Runaways' and told the story of ‘seven’ men who had been captured at Twofold Bay in New South Wales. They were to be returned to Van Diemen's Land, where Moss was sentenced to be imprisoned at Norfolk Island. Moss was shot and killed at Norfolk Island when a group of convicts tried to capture the brig Governor Phillip in an attempt to escape.
CON 14/2; Sydney Gazette, 1 June 1839; Hobart Town Courier, 19 July 1842; Aaron Price ms., Norfolk Island History (Dixson 249); I. Brand, Escape from Port Arthur.
MOSS, George
Siren, 1836; Free.
Married; 2 children.
The Siren arrived in New South Wales on 14 October 1836. George Moss married Leah Abrahams (q.v.) in Sydney in 1840 and their children were Abraham (1842) and Lewis (1846). Both children were registered by their parents as ‘Hebrew’. Rachel Moss, a sister of George, married Henry Gershon (q.v.) in Sydney in 1846.
Isaac Moss may not have been Jewish even though the listed names of his family would indicate that he was. His wife was Lydia.
Nearly all the references to Isaac Moss involve his intention to leave New South Wales. He had been ‘about to leave’ on the schooner Brothers on 7 December 1811 and on the Governor Macquarie on 26 June 1813. Lydia Moss and daughter were to travel on the Seringapatum on 10 September 1814 and sailed on 8 October 1815. He was ‘shortly to depart’ on the brig Governor Macquarie on 11 March 1815 and on 8 November 1815 (with Francis Silver).
Moss was granted a licence for the Cherry Tree Inn at Sydney on 19 April 1817. Finally, on 13 September 1817, Isaac Moss, Lydia Moss, Susannah Jane Moss and Joseph Moss were to leave Sydney ‘at the earliest opportunity’ and all claims were to be directed to 18 Castlereagh Street in Sydney, where Moss lived, as he was ‘about to leave’ on the Admiral Cockburn on 22 January 1820.
Notices in Sydney Gazette for dates cited.
MOSS, Isaac (MOSES)
Free.
Married; 4 children.
Isaac Moss had a house and shop in George Street, and married Miss Maria Folk (q.v.), daughter of Samuel and Amelia Folk (qq.v.), at the Sydney Synagogue on 19 October 1842. Rosette and Elizabeth (twins) were born on 11 May 1843. The last issue of the Omnibus and Sydney Spectator of 1 April 1843 mocked the pregnant Maria, ‘Mrs Folk, your daughter, dear lady, is no doubt a beautiful creature, and as to the swelling, it merely reminds one of a Moss Rose’. Moses was born in Sydney in 1845. Deborah was born in 1849 and died on 26 October 1851. Isaac Moss gave £5 to the York Street Synagogue in 1845 and was a seat holder in the synagogue.
Marriage 2685/74, in Mutch Index; Sydney Gazette, 5 January 1837.
MOSS, John
b. London, 1810
Waterloo (5), 1838; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Central Criminal Court, 1837.
Single; Skin dyer; Height: 165 cm.
Dark ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. Two small scars over right eyebrow. Two small moles on lower part of throat. Breast hairy, brown natural mark beneath left breast. Could not read or write. John Moss was sentenced on 8 May 1837, and transported for stealing the harness of a horse as it stood at the corner of a London street after midnight. Moss had been stopped and questioned by a policeman.
The Waterloo arrived in Sydney on 8 January 1838. The Newcastle Gaol Entrance and Description Book recorded that he was bound over in 1843 and sentenced at Maitland to fourteen days in the cells. He was sent back into government service on 30 September 1843. He was listed as ‘Jewish’ and a ‘labourer’. A certificate of freedom was issued on 15 June 1844.
Waterloo (5) Printed Indent, no. 227, p. 30; Newcastle Gaol Entrance and Description Book, 1841–45, 2/2008, no. 658; CF 4/4392-44/0925.
MOSS, Lewis
Free.
Lewis Moss was listed as a seat holder in the Sydney Synagogue in 1845.
MOSS, Moses (MOSES) (Morris MOSS)
c. 1840; Free.
Married.
The son of Henry Moses of London and first cousin of Louis Nathan's (q.v.) and Moses Joseph's (q.v.) families, Moses Moss married Esther Nathan (q.v.), sister of Arthur Isaac Nathan (Asher Isaac Nathan, q.v.), in Sydney on 16 November 1842. Moss was an active member of the Launceston Jewish community. In September 1843 he supported the petition to free Isaac Jacobs (q.v.) from debtor's prison. His name appeared on the 1843 petition for the establishment of a synagogue in Launceston and he gave £2 9s 6d to the Hobart Town Synagogue in 1844 and a further donation of ‘offerings’ adding up to £7 16s. He gave £50 to the Launceston Synagogue building appeal in June 1844 and a £25 donation from his father ‘Henry Moses of London per Moses Moses of Hobart Town’. Moses Moss was the honorary treasurer of the Launceston Synagogue at the time of its dedication in March 1846. Moses Moss represented Nathan, Moses and Company of Hobart Town during the 1840s. Launceston's second Jewish cemetery was acquired on 16 April 1847 and Benjamin Francis (q.v.) and Morris Moss, ‘gentleman’, were named as trustees. In 1847 the Launceston Examiner reported that Moss had taken over ‘new and extensive premises at the corner of Charles and York Streets’. Apart from the presence of Joseph Solomon (q.v.) in Evandale, who left the Jewish community, his business was the only ‘Jewish’ firm of any significance in Launceston.
Launceston Examiner, 29 June 1844, 11 May 1857; CSO 8/169/2350.
MOSS, Martin (Morton)
b. London 1803.
Convict, Transported twice. Medway (2) 1825, 7 years and Lotus 1833, 7 years.
Single.
Fair complexion, black hair, hazel eyes, black whiskers meeting under the chin, aquiline nose. 174cm. ‘A Jew’. Indicted for stealing two bags of seeds valued at eight shillings from a cart in the yard of the White Horse Inn, Cripplegate on 26 December 1824. He was tried at the Old Bailey two days later and arrived in Van Diemen's Land 14 December 1825. His ill- fated brother George Moss (q.v.) was transported in 1831.
After serving his period of probation Moss became a servant working for Mr Marshall at Macquarie Plains in February 1828 when he absconded from his master and was found to be in Hobart Town. His term of imprisonment was extended by two months and he was returned to his master. On 11 September 1828 he was charged with neglect of duty and disobedience and was sentenced to work in irons for one month in the New Norfolk road gang. On 22 September 1828 his sentence was extended by fourteen days for neglect of duty. He continued to work for the government at New Norfolk and on 24 November 1828 was sentenced to one month in irons for neglect of duty and disobedience. On 30 March 1829 he was sentenced to fifty lashes for stealing potatoes from the field of Mr Thomas Able. On 19 April 1829 he absconded from his road gang and was at large for ten days before being captured and placed in irons for one month. His sentence expired and he returned to London where he married ‘Ann’. On 29 November 1832 at the Old Bailey he was found guilty of stealing from the back of a cart.
The Lotus arrived in Hobart Town on 16 May 1833. On 7 November 1835 Martin Moss was serving his initial period of probation with the government when he was convicted of being drunk and neglecting his work and was returned to the service of the Crown. On 21 September 1836 he was sentenced to hard labour one month for being drunk. On 8 September 1836 he was sent to the cells for ten days for ‘gambling in the Colonial Hospital’. On 2 February 1837 he was ‘out after hours’. On 8 August 1837 he was said to be in possession of a stolen pencil case and was sentenced to six months hard labour and sent to the Snake Banks road party. On 11 August 1837 he was again found to be drunk. On 2 July 1838 he was found to have ‘various article in his possession for which he cannot satisfactorily account’ and he was returned to the government. On 6 November 1838 he was again found to be drunk and sentenced to seven days solitary confinement on bread and water. He received a certificate of freedom in 1839 and presumably, once again, returned to England.
OBSP 1827 case 503, CON 31/1/30, CON 18/1/13 p. 69.
MOSS, Nathan
1839; Free.
Dealer.
Nathan Moss was one of the earliest Jewish arrivals in Melbourne and signed the address of loyalty to the Duke of Edinburgh.
L. M. Goldman, The Jews in Victoria in the Nineteenth Century, p. 235.
MOSS, Phineas
b. Hampshire, 1795–1866
1835; Free.
Single; Clerk.
Phineas Moss was born in Portsea, Hampshire, in 1795 and received a fine secular and traditional Jewish education. He described himself as a ‘gentleman’ on the manifesto of the ship that brought him to Australia in 1835 and his first job was as clerk at the police station in the remote Tasmanian town of Bothwell at an initial annual salary of £80.
On 30 April 1840 Moss resigned. He had done his duty to the best of his ability but he had been subjected to a ‘system of tyranny, oppression and contumely on the part of the Assistant Police Magistrate [in Bothwell] which has more recently developed itself in attacks on my fair name in quarters where it is impossible for me to vindicate myself, and where indeed he forbade me the opportunity of exposing his misrepresentations. With the resignation of my office I depart from a Colony where I had hoped to share the advantages which it might have offered’.
The Bothwell community published a public testimonial to Moss for his ‘unremitting exertions’ on behalf of the Bothwell Literary Society. In Hobart Town it became his task to keep all the convict dossiers up to date and, in 1842, he received an extra £10 ‘for preparing returns of offences committed by convicts at Probation Stations with their punishments from July 1841 to June 1842’. He was also obliged to be a storekeeper and supplier of books and stationery in the department and to keep and deliver all books to all schools at the different penal stations. On 22 October 1842 he asked for an increase in pay. He detailed his duties and explained that he also had to arrange for the interchange of all books from the central library in Hobart Town. His request was refused because his superior ‘has not seen him working beyond office hours’. Moss became a popular lecturer at the Mechanics Institutes of both Hobart Town and Launceston, lecturing on scientific subjects such as ‘pneumatics’, astronomy and mathematics.
On 17 August 1841 Phineas Moss married Emily Golding Morgan (Emily Moss, q.v.) (a proselyte) in Hobart Town. It was the island's sixth Jewish wedding and was conducted by Rheuben Joseph (Reuben Joseph, q.v.) at 55 Brisbane Street, Hobart Town. The witnesses were Robert Hart (q.v.) and Louis Nathan (q.v.). Moss became the honorary secretary of the Hobart Town congregation in 1842 and was assigned seat no. 22 in the newly built synagogue in 1845. Moss was a fine calligrapher in both English and Hebrew and the early minute books and convict dossiers reflect his skill.
In 1842 Moss became a chief clerk in the Principal Superintendent's Department. He was promoted to the Comptroller General's Department in 1843 and then remained in the Convict Department until 1865 at a salary of £180.
In 1846, when the colonial administration needed to find the whereabouts of Anszel Davidowicz Davis, it turned to Moss for information. He replied: ‘very few foreign Jews retain their common Judaic or surnames on their arrival in England’, but identified him as Oscar Davis (q.v.), formerly of New Norfolk.
The 1857 Hobart Town Directory recorded that Moss lived at 29 Murray Street and was a ‘bookseller and stationer’. In 1853 he arranged to have printed in London, and published in Hobart Town, the first Jewish calendar for Australia in the Hebrew and English languages, dedicated ‘To the honourable and pious matrons of the House of Israel in this island, and in other lands of the Southern Hemisphere. Anno Mundi 5612’. In 1859 he published a paper with the Royal Society of Tasmania, The Science of Astronomy Among the Ancient Jews. He died in Hobart on 13 April 1866, aged seventy-one and was buried in the Harrington Street cemetery. His widow died on 26 January 1902. The synagogue in Hobart owns a colonial portrait of Phineas Moss, attributed to William Dowling.
CSO/50/16, in 1835; G. F. J. Bergman, ‘Phineas Moss’, AJJHS, vol. 6, no. 5 (1968), p. 267f; CSO 19/1, p. 254; CSO 22/52.304, 22 October 1842; CSO 22/41/13, 10 September 1842; CSO 20/29/681, 1846; Peter Elias and Ann Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, p. 41f.
MOSS, Rosetta
1836; Free.
Single.
The daughter of Marcus and Abigail Warschauer (q.v.), Rosetta Moss married Woolf Lewis Pyke (q.v.) on 8 August 1844.
MOSS, Sarah
1820–1845
Free.
Single.
Sarah Moss married Laurence Phillips (q.v.) at the Sydney Synagogue on 24 January 1844. Sarah died, aged twenty-five, on 21 June 1844, and was buried at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery.
MURRAY, Joseph
b. Edinburgh, 1815
Agincourt, 1844; Convict; Sentenced to life, Central Criminal Court, 1844.
Single; Upholsterer; Height: 157 cm.
Fair complexion, curly light hair, grey eyes, medium nose and mouth. Jew. Can read and write. Joseph Murray was transported for housebreaking. It was his second sentence of transportation, as he had been previously transported. He was tried with James Davis and they were sentenced on 4 March 1844.
Joseph Murray was immediately sent to Norfolk Island on the Agincourt for the initial three years of his sentence, arriving there on 9 November 1844. On Norfolk Island he was sentenced to three weeks in chains for having made a false statement (25 June 1846), six days in solitary for insolence (9 July 1846), one month hard labour in chains for idleness, six weeks hard labour in chains for having a pipe in his possession, and, for having two figs of tobacco in his possession, he was punished with six days in solitary confinement (11 January 1847). On 9 April 1849 he arrived in Van Diemen's Land on the Pestonjee Bomanjee and for six months was the assigned servant of Aaron Mendoza (q.v.) of Bathurst Street. He was then transferred to New Norfolk and on 6 November 1849 he was charged with having been in the cell of an insane patient at the asylum and strongly suspected of having beaten him. He was sentenced to six months hard labour. Murray absconded from Australia and between June 1857 and 10 November 1857 he was officially gazetted as ‘missing’.
CON 33/83, no. 19314.
MYERS, Abraham
b. London, 1801–1881
Guildford (5), 1822; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1821.
Single; Pedlar; Height: 174 cm.
Pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes. On 27 October 1821, together with accomplice Robert Day, Myers stole two parcels from a cart in which were twenty-eight pieces of calico worth £22 and four hearth rugs valued at £4. The cart had been parked at the Saracen's Head Inn at Aldgate. The arrest was made by a watchman who testified: ‘I went up and collared Myers—he begged of me to stash it, which means say nothing of it. He offered me £2 to let the property go’. Myers was a relative of Joseph Levy (q.v.), who had been transported on the Mangles in 1820. Myers was sentenced at Middlesex on 5 December 1821.
Abraham Myers arrived in New South Wales on 15 July 1822. Myers was listed in the 1828 Census as a government servant. He was described as a Jew who was employed as a labourer working for James Grono in Pitt Town. A certificate of freedom was issued on 2 March 1829. On 1 February 1830 Myers married Sarah Hobbs at Pitt Town's Church of England. He was admonished and discharged from the Police Court for street fighting with Andrew Fitzsimmons on 7 April 1831.
Myers had a business in George Street in Sydney in 1832 when Joseph Levy (q.v.) asked permission to join him. On 21 March 1836 Mr and Mrs Abraham Myers found themselves charged with serious and aggravated assault by Catherine Davis (Catherine Solomon, q.v.), who had been thrown out of their hotel for insulting other clients in the hotel. The case was dismissed.
In 1845 Abraham Myers was listed as a seat holder in the York Street Synagogue and donated £10 to its building appeal.‘Myers and Alexander’ advertised their ‘Yass Store’ in December 1845 under the bold headline ‘Advance Australia’, and announced that they were ‘real estate agents’.
Myers was designated the collector for the York Street Synagogue for the District of Goulburn. Myers died, aged eighty, on 17 June 1881 and was buried at the Old Jewish Section, Rookwood Cemetery.
OBSP, 1821, First Session, case 94, p. 65; Ship Indent 4/4008, and 2/8261, p. 429; CF 4/4296; Great Synagogue Burial Register; Sydney Gazette, 9 April 1829; Sydney Monitor, 31 December 1835; Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1845.
Fair complexion, freckled, brown hair, grey eyes, medium nose. Jew. Can read and write. Abraham Myers was tried for ‘feloniously assaulting, Robert Clayards, and stabbing, cutting and wounding him in and upon the left side of his chest and right hand with intent to murder him or to maim and disable him’. Clayard testified ‘I believe he keeps an open house in North Alley. I believe he did keep some wine rooms in Windmill Street but he keeps a house of ill fame’. Myers attacked Robert Clayard with a knife and stabbed him in the chest after an exchange of ‘vile words’ in a public bar.
Myers was sent directly from England to Norfolk Island on the convict transport ship David Malcolm, which arrived on 25 August 1845. On 14 November 1846 he was admonished for ‘misconduct’. In May 1847 he was sent by the Tory to Van Diemen's Land and to Port Arthur where he remained until 7 August 1847 when he was assigned to Lazarus Levy (q.v.), of Murray Street, Hobart Town. He received a ticket of leave on 9 March 1852. A conditional pardon was granted in 1854 after which his ticket of leave was revoked and cancelled on 19 August 1859.
OBSP 21 October 1844, case 2429. CON 33/80, no. 18604-b.
MYERS, Abraham
d. 1893 Free.
Tailor.
Myers was one of the first Jewish settlers in Western Australia. He was naturalised in 1849. He was said to have been a tailor in Fremantle.
David J. Benjamin, ‘Western Australian Jewry’, AJJHS, vol. 2, no. 5 (1946), p. 238.
MYERS, Charles
b. Whitechapel, 1813
Augusta Jessie (1), 1835; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1834.
Single; Labourer; Height: 168 cm.
Dark complexion, brown hair, dark brown eyes, sharp pointed nose. Stout. Mark under right eye. A Jew. Transported for stealing in a dwelling house. Hulk report: ‘Very bad’. Charles Myers had been found guilty of breaking into the house of Solomon Aaron in Duke Street, Aldgate. He had already served an 18-month sentence ‘for stealing from my Master’. Surgeon's report: ‘Good’.
The Augusta Jessie arrived in Hobart Town on 7 January 1835. At the end of the year Myers was placed in a chain gang for ‘disorderly conduct and disobedience of orders’. On 12 March 1836 he absconded and when caught was sentenced to six months hard labour in irons. In August 1836 a further charge was brought against him, while he was in No. 2 Chain Gang and he was sent to the hulk chain gang. On the hulk he received two separate sentences of fifty lashes, one for striking an overseer and one for refusing to go to work.
From June to August 1837 Myers worked in the Hobart Town Gaol and in December was sent to Port Arthur for two years for striking the overseer of the chain gang in which he was working. In November 1838 his sentence of hard labour at Port Arthur was extended by a further three years for insubordination to his overseer. In December 1840 Myers attempted to escape from the coal mines of the Tasman Peninsula and received an additional two years hard labour as punishment. Twenty-four further charges followed in the ten years of his servitude, including two charges of assault, four of refusing to work and ‘disobedience’, six for being ‘absent without leave’, four for ‘insubordination’, three for ‘theft’, and three for ‘misconduct’. Finally, in June 1853, Myers received a ticket of leave and, although this was revoked twice in 1854, his conditional pardon was approved on 17 July 1855.
CON 34/5; CON 18/3, no. 1264.
MYERS, David
b. London, 1790
Almorah (1), 1817; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1816.
Married; Watchmaker; Height: 164.5 cm.
Fair ruddy complexion, hazel eyes, sandy hair. Illiterate. David Myers was convicted of receiving stolen property from a prostitute and sentenced on 18 September 1816. He was ‘very well behaved’ on the convict transport.
Myers arrived in Port Jackson on the Almorah on 31 August 1817 and was immediately sent on to Van Diemen's Land on the Pilot, where he was first assigned to Barnard Walford (q.v.). By February 1818 he held a ticket of leave and found employment in the police force in Hobart Town. On 5 June 1819 his ticket of leave was forfeited as he had been insolent to three military officers as he passed them on the street. On 4 April 1821 a temporary ticket of leave was confiscated for ‘fraudulently removing three silver ornaments from a liquor stand and other-ways defacing it. The said stand being given to him to repair’. On 3 July 1821 Myers and Daniel Garcia (q.v.) were found guilty of stealing nine hats from the premises of A. Bethune, and Myers was sent to Newcastle to serve the remainder of his sentence. He was returned on the Midas (with the prisoners Daniel Garcia and Farrel Garcia).
In May 1822 he received twenty-five lashes at Newcastle for ‘holding intercourse, trafficking and quarrelling with a soldier’. In 1826 Vaiben Solomon (q.v.) applied for David Myers to be sent down from Port Macquarie to be his assigned servant. Solomon claimed that Myers was a relative and that he could help him run his shop. The petition was refused. Solomon was a pencil-maker not a watchmaker and it was doubted that they were related. They had, however, both been at Port Macquarie as prisoners.
In August 1828 Myers petitioned the Governor to grant him a ticket of leave. He claimed to have acted as an overseer for Lieutenant Governor Sorrell who ‘had granted a ticket of leave which he held for four years when he was suddenly ordered to Newcastle by W H. Humphreys, Police Magistrate’. In fact, Myers served two and a half years as an overseer and then worked as constable in the Newcastle prison settlement. When the settlement was cleared of convicts he was transferred to Port Macquarie where he was constable under the four successive commandants. He had been allowed to come to Sydney as an assigned servant to Mr Robertson, the Government Watchmaker. His petition was refused as the documents showed that he had been sent to Newcastle by the Deputy Judge Advocate. This Myers denied.
The 1828 Census shows Myers to be working for James Robertson in George Street and the List of Convicts in New South Wales in November 1828 stated that he was a Jew and that he was thirty-six years old. A ticket of leave was issued on 24 August 1829. After having worked for Robertson for three and a half years he set himself up in business on his own. Only six months later the Sydney Gazette reported (17 April 1830) that there was, in the Supreme Court, ‘a man named David Myers, Prisoner of the Crown for fourteen years, holding a ticket of leave, charged with having in his possession a stolen watch valued at £20. The prisoner said he had it to repair and mentioned a man's name from whom he said he had received it’. P. J. Cohen (q.v.) went to court and gave him ‘a good character’. The court, however, sentenced Myers to seven years colonial transportation and on 21 May 1830 Myers was exiled to Norfolk Island. By 1837 Myers was back in Sydney and working as an assigned servant to Mr R. Broad, when he was sentenced to two months at the Hyde Park Barracks for ‘disorderly conduct’, after which he was returned to assigned service. Myers was granted a certificate of freedom on 22 November 1837.
OBSP, case 938, p. 430; Almorah Indent 4/4005, p. 346, and 2/8240, p. 226; 4/3504, pp. 198–9; 4/1718, p. 148, Petition 109; Hobart Town Gazette, 10 April 1819, 7 July 1821; Sydney Gazette, 17 April 1830; HO 10/43; CON 21/39, p. 125; CON 13/11; CS In Correspondence 4/1750, p. 20; Petition 109, in 4/1817; Petitions A2167, pet. 99, dated August 1828; Governors' Despatches, A1206, p. 486; House of Correction Register 4/4569, 1 September 1837, p. 23.
MYERS, Edward
b. London, 1819
Free. Single; Teacher of languages and music; Height: 145 cm.
Edward Myers was the brother of Moses Myers (q.v.) and Mary Hartnell (q.v.). Edward first settled in Adelaide, South Australia where, on 9 March 1840, he was convicted of ‘obtaining money under false pretences’ when he forged a note for £15. He was sentenced to seven years. The description recorded of him read: ‘Pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, medium nose and chin. Jew. Can read and write. Large scar inside right hand. A cripple who uses crutches’.
Myers came to New South Wales on the Mary Ridgeway, arriving on 20 April 1840. After obtaining his ticket of leave, Myers lived in Bridge Street, Sydney, where he taught languages. He was also well known to the police and was written up in the Registry of Flash Men: ‘Edward Myers, brother of (Moses) Myers the fishmonger. The most arrant little rogue. He wrote a novel Frederick or the Reclaimed opening a subscription in 1844. He declared himself to be a teacher of music, drawing and language’.
Myers was sentenced at Maitland in December 1844 for claiming to have a valid ticket of leave for the district. He was gaoled for fraud, and recommended for imprisonment on Cockatoo Island or Port Macquarie. According to the Registry of Flash Men, ‘his sister is the celebrated Miss Hartnell, a prostitute … The fellow has gone to Maitland without giving notice to the Police. In for it again’. On 1 March 1845 he appeared in the Newcastle Gaol Entrance Book, having been committed at Maitland to be sent to the gaol at Port Macquarie and then forwarded to Sydney. His behaviour was ‘orderly’. His initial period of probation in Van Diemen's Land was thirty months and, in July 1852, he was sent to Port Arthur.
On 26 May 1853, having been returned to Hobart Town, he was convicted of misconduct for (again) falsely representing to the senior clerk that he had received a ticket of leave. He was sentenced to three months hard labour. On 4 July 1853 he was found guilty of a second charge of misconduct for ‘preparing a false return by which William Ryder (by the London, 2), was discharged from the Prisoners Barracks before completing his sentence.’ His existing sentence of hard labour was extended by six months. On 19 November 1854, while still at the Prisoners' Barracks in Hobart, he was sentenced to an additional three months hard labour for being absent without leave. Another ticket of leave was issued on 16 January 1855 and a conditional pardon 24 August 1856.
Union Indent, 1851, no. 2125; Printed Indent, 40–859; W. A. Miles, Registry of Flash Men, p. 105, 2/673; Newcastle Gaol Entrance and Description Book, 1841–45, 2/2008, no. 108.
MYERS, Elizabeth
d. 1834
Mary, 1829; Free.
Married; 3 children.
Elizabeth and her husband, Joseph Myers (q.v.) of Parramatta, arrived as free settlers on 20 January 1829. Elizabeth Myers was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery on 27 May 1834.
MYERS, Emanuel (Monkey Myers)
b. London, 1795–1855
John Barry (1), 1819; Convict; Sentenced to life at the Old Bailey, 1819.
Single; Tailor; Height: 162.5 cm; 4 children.
Fair pale complexion, dark brown hair, dark chestnut eyes. A taylor, Myers was one in a gang of thieves who surrounded and jostled a man at an election meeting in the vicinity of Covent Garden and was sentenced to transportation for life on 17 February 1819. Myers declared at the trial, ‘the evidence is false’.
Myers arrived in New South Wales on 26 September 1819 and was assigned to William Pendray, a merchant tailor and draper in Sydney. He was listed as a tailor in George Street in the 1828 Census. He was refused a ticket of leave in 1828 because of offences he had committed in 1825 and 1826 when he absented himself from work and for which he had been given twenty-five lashes. Myers was charged with having harboured the runaway Susan Courtney in his house and was sentenced to the treadmill for ten days. On 17 March 1828 he had received twenty-five lashes for being absent without leave and on 31 May 1828 he was put in the gaol for five days for drunkenness and absence from work.
Greg McCarry, a descendant of Emanuel Myers, has published a detailed biography of his ancestor. In 1827 Myers applied for permission to marry Lydia Shaw, who was aged twenty-two. She had come to Australia as a convict and approval was refused ‘Being both prisoners of the Cown’. The next year he applied for permission to marry Charlotte Byfield. This application was approved but the marriage did not eventuate and, within a few months, Emanual Myers married Mary Anne Burnsides on 4 March 1829 at St James in Sydney. Six months later, Emanuel applied on 24 September 1829 for an exemption from ‘Government labor’ so that he would be able ‘to reside with his wife Mary Ann (sic), formerly Burnsides, born in the colony’. Marry Anne had been working as a servant in Windsor and was one of the children of a soldier, Ambrose Burnsides. A ticket of leave was granted on 11 September 1833 (33/573) for the district of Sydney on 27 October 1836 requiring Myers to remain in the Windsor district. The ticket was issued ‘In lieu of No 3/573 dated 10 September 1833 returned mutilated and cancelled’. On 8 September 1836 Myers received a conditional pardon. The Sydney Times (25 March 1837) advertised that he had just ‘opened a general store next door to the sign of the Bull's Head opposite the Market Place, George St’. An absolute pardon was granted on 10 June 1843 and, in that year, Myers was shown to have a shop in King Street, Sydney.
In the list of ‘Bridge St members 1835–42’ Emanuel registered his first three children. Benjamin born 9 July 1830, Joseph born 19 October 1833 and Hannah born 24 July 1836. The first two children were born in Sydney and Hannah in Windsor. Hannah appears to have died as a young child and Priscilla was born between 1841 and 1843. By this time Mary Anne had become ‘Rebecca’. A son, Henry, was born on 7 July 1839, Priscilla was born 19 December 1841 and Abraham on 5 December 1843. On 10 August 1840 Emanuel (re)married his wife in a Jewish religious ceremony. Mary Anne, or Rebecca, had been accepted as a convert by Isaac Simmons (q.v.) and the officiating minister at the ceremony was Jacob Isaacs (q.v.). The marriage had not happened without drama within the congregation with a special committee meting of the synagogue in May 1840 followed by a second debate in August.
By this time Myers was known as an ‘auctioneer and dealer’ who lived at Castlereagh Street and for a brief time was a partner of Abraham Moses (q.v.). On 2 January 1845 the 34-year-old Rebecca Myers, ‘the wife of a dealer in Castlereagh Street’ died ‘in her sleep’ and her funeral was held immediately after her death in accordance with Jewish custom. It was reported that ‘certain suspicions’ were ‘caused by the extraordinary haste with which she was interred’ (The Australian, 6 January 1845). However no inquest appears to have been held and on 19 June 1845 Emanuel married Abigail Barnett (q.v.) at the York Street synagogue. Abigail signed the marriage certificate with a mark and within six months her marriage appears to have collapsed, ‘Emanuel Myers, better known as “Monkey Myers” was charged by his better half “Abigail” with thrashing her repeatedly where she could not show her marks—the case was settled out of court’ (Bell's Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 3 January 1846). By 1847 Myers was living in York Street. In 1855 the three young children of Mary Anne (Rebecca), ‘Henry, Priscilla and Abraham Myers, three juveniles, taken into custody for protection, were forwarded to the Asylum’ (the New South Wales Benevolent Asylum), from which they ‘absconded’. In June 1856 ‘Emanuel Myers, of York Street, dealer' charged Abigail with having threatened to take his life’. Later it was stated that Emanuel thought that his wife was made and unless restrained would do him ‘some serious bodily harm’. Indeed, it appears that Abigail was placed in prison. Reunited, Abigail and Emanuel continued to haunt the courts with mutual accusations of violence while apparently various customers stole objects from Emanuel's shop.
Emanuel Myers died on 3 September 1855 aged ‘about 60 years old’ and, seemingly abandoned by his family, was buried in the ‘Jews’ Burial Ground.
OBSP, 1818–19, case 437, p. 181; Ship Indent 4/4006, p. 387; CS 29/7573, in 4/2047; 4/6671, p. 85; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Register of Convicts' Applications to Marry, Permission Granted 1826–33, 4/4508; TL Register 4/4089, TL 38/573; CF/721; HO 10/53; Exemption from Government Labour, no. 30/16, 4/4283; Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1832, 2 December 1841, 24 January 1842, 15 September 1842, 23 June 1843, 26 April 1844, 24 August 1844; August 1853; 2 March 1855; 25 June 1856; Sydney Times, 25 March 1837. ‘The Myers Line, Emanuel and Joseph: a Limp on a Branch of the McCarry–Brother Family Tree’, in AJHSJ, June 2012, vol. 20, part 4, p. 534.
MYERS, Emanuel Moses (Emanuel Myer MYERS)
London, 1827
1845; Free.
Single; Trader; 6 children.
The son of Moses and Sarah Myers of Great Poultney Street, Golden Lane in London's East End, Emanuel Myers was born on 19 June 1827, and named at the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place.
Emanuel Moses Myers must have been in Hobart Town in 1845 when the synagogue in Argyle Street was built. Myers painted the trompe l'oeil depicting the Ten Commandments above the Ark on the synagogue's eastern wall. In January 1848 the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation voted to pay Emanuel Myers of Swanston Street the large sum of £11 for ‘so much labour and expense’ for painting a canvas of the Ten Commandments to be placed above the Ark in the new synagogue building. Myers subsequently failed to join the congregation and, on 8 November 1848, the president wrote a ‘reminder’ to him that if he failed to join as a founding member he would have to pay twenty-six shillings in addition to the membership fee when he finally decided to affiliate.
Emanuel Moses Myers married Matilda Caspar (Casper, q.v.), the daughter of Ellis and Elizabeth Casper (qq.v.), in a Jewish ceremony in Hobart Town on 26 May 1853. The Rev. Emanuel Myers was minister of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation from 1857 to 1864 and presided over the consecration of Melbourne's completed Bourke Street Synagogue in 1858. The famed Jewish traveler Rabbi Saphir wrote ‘There are about 1000 Jews in Melbourne, the majority English, a minority Polish. There are two synagogues-the larger, more beautiful ‘Shairith Yisroel’ where the English Jews worship … They have a cantor, a reader who sometimes preaches and teaches, a wise and respected man, the Rev E. M. Myers'. He was said to be a relative of the Hon Nathaniel Levi and in October 1860 was charged with burying the child of Nathaniel Levi without permission of the congregation's president and consecrating a tombstone with ‘a peculiar expression on it.’ (There is no evidence of a strange phrase on the stone as it now still stands).
Bankrupt and ill, Myers and his family moved to Montreal Canada in 1864. His book The Jews, Their Customs and Ceremonies was published in Brooklyn, New York, in 1880. The Myers eventually moved to Waco, Texas, where Matilda died in 1895.
Their children were: Dinah (born 1854), who died in infancy, a son (1855), who also died in infancy, Andrew (1856), Miriam (1858), Henry (1860), and Elizabeth (27 September 1862).
Family information from Simon Marks-Isaacs, Sydney.
MYERS, Esther (née SOLOMON)
b. London, 1809–1869
Palambam, 1833; Free.
Married; 8 children.
Esther Solomon was a daughter of Samuel Moss Solomon (q.v.) and Elizabeth (Betsy). Esther, ‘the daughter of Sh'muel’, married Israel Myers (q.v.), son of Asher, at the Great Synagogue, Duke's Place, London on 27 June 1832. In 1833 Esther and Israel Myers arrived in Sydney. Esther Myers died in Sydney on 3 December 1869, and was buried at the Rookwood Cemetery. Her children were Samuel Israel, Anne, John, Phillip, Sarah, Eve, David, and Julia.
MYERS, Esther
1845; Free.
Married; 1 child.
Esther Myers was married to Isaac Myers (q.v.) and came out to Australia with him in 1845.
Felix Myers was sentenced for receiving stolen silver spoons. Gaol report ‘good’. Hulk report ‘Good’. The surgeon on the transport wrote that Myers acted as a school master on board and that he had behaved ‘very well’.
The Neptune arrived in Hobart Town on 2 January 1838. Myers acted as ‘Sub Overseer’ of the Bagdad Road Party until he was found guilty of overstaying his pass and representing himself to be free on 11 September 1838. He was sentenced to hard labour on the treadmill for fourteen days before being returned to his road party. A charge of ‘misconduct’ on 22 August 1839 earned him three months hard labour. He was sent to Green Ponds to work on the roads. On 2 December 1839 he was admonished for ‘refusing to work on the plea of inability’. On 24 October 1840 he was working as a post office messenger when his repeated absence from duty earned him five days in the House of Correction. On 21 October 1840 he repeated this behaviour and was sentenced to five days on the treadmill. On 16 November ‘neglect of duty’ put him in the cells on bread and water for six days and on 18 December 1840 he was placed back in the cells on bread and water for three days for ‘misconduct in attempting to avoid his duty’ at the Post Office.
A conditional pardon was granted on 31 May 1843 and a certificate of freedom in 1844 (no. 592). ‘George Meyers’ gave £2 to the Hobart Synagogue building fund on 9 June 1843 (Hobart Town Courier).
CON 31/32, no. 1602.
MYERS, Gabriel
1787–1841
Fanny I, 1816; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Middlesex, 1814.
Gabriel Myers was tried for attempting to steal a piece of cotton netting from a stocking shop in the East End. His friend John Abrahams stood by the door as Myers put the cloth into his pocket.
Myers arrived in Sydney by the Fanny on 18 January 1816 and was quickly sent on to Hobart Town on the Emu. Myers was free by servitude by 8 December 1821, according to the Hobart Town Gazette, when he advertised that all claims against him should be presented so that he could leave Van Diemen's Land ‘by an early opportunity’. Myers settled in Sydney and worked as a trader. He was recorded as arriving in Sydney on the Dorset from Port Phillip on 11 March 1840 (he travelled steerage). Gabriel Myers married Clara Hayter at St Lawrence's in Sydney in 1840 and was listed as a voter in the first Sydney council election, with a house in Parramatta Street. Fate intervened and he was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery in April 1841.
OBSP, 1814, case 69, p. 47; CON 21/39; CON 13/1; ML 4/5216; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1842.
MYERS, George (MARKS)
Vittoria, 1829; Convict; Sentenced 1828.
George Myers arrived in New South Wales on 17 January 1829. He was sent on to Port Macquarie on 19 June 1830 on the Isabella. George Myers may be the ‘crown prisoner residing at Port Macquarie’, who was referred to as ‘Myers or Miers’ when he was sentenced to twelve months transportation for receiving stolen goods (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February 1844).
Prisoners to Port Macquarie, 19 June 1830, 4/3505.
MYERS, Godfrey
Emma, 1842; Free.
Godfrey Myers arrived in Hobart Town from Sydney on 5 November 1842 He was a young activist in the Hobart Hebrew Congregation. He gave £2 on 11 April 1843 to the synagogue building fund. Myers officiated at Jewish wedding no. 4 in Launceston and was an official witness at a number of other weddings, where he signed his name with the title ‘Registrar’.
A ‘Mr Myers from Hobart Town’ started a Jewish school in Melbourne in 1856 after having tried his luck at the goldfields at Sandhurst.
CSO 92/9, p. 94; AOT, CB 7/10, p. 18.
MYERS, Henry
b. England, 1815–1856
1849
Sadly nothing is known about Henry Myers apart from his year of arrival, his age and his place of birth. He died on 2 May 1856 and is buried in an unmarked grave in the West Maitland Jewish cemetery.
Maitland Court Register of Deaths. Information from Gary Luke.
MYERS, Isaac
Troubadour, 1845; Free.
Married; 1 child.
Isaac and Esther Myers (q.v.) had a child named Israel John Myers on 10 May 1845, and the child was registered at the Sydney Synagogue.
Israel Myers was convicted for picking pockets and stealing a handkerchief on 5 April 1847. He had been previously convicted at Clerkenwell in February 1846. The City Police Constable reported that Myers was ‘very violent, and asked what we wanted to do with him. There was an attempt made to rescue him’. A witness testified “I have known him since he came out (of prison) and a long time before. When I have seen him he has always been in the company of thieves'.
The Hashemy arrived in New South Wales on 9 June 1849 and was the fourth last convict transport ship to New South Wales. The transportation system in New South Wales was in its last stages and a ticket of leave was issued to Israel Myers four months after he arrived in October 1849! He was hired by R. Fitzgerald Esq. in Mudgee for twelve months, paying the government £12 a year. He was transferred to Cassilis on 14 January 1850.
OBSP 5 April 1847, case 926. 4/4526; TL 49/113; CS 49/4180.
MYERS, Israel John
b. London, 1806–1890
Palambam, 1833; Free.
Married; Dealer; 9 children.
Israel Myers arrived steerage on the Palambam with his wife Esther (née Solomon) (q.v.) on 10 January 1833. No trade was indicated. Esther Myers was a daughter of Samuel Moss Solomon (q.v.) and a sister of Vaiben and Emanuel Solomon (qq.v.). Israel and Esther married in London's Great Synagogue on 27 June 1832.
In July 1833 he acquired the licence for the British Standard Inn in George Street. The children of Israel and Esther Myers were Samuel Israel Myers (1833), born in Sydney, who married Elizabeth (Lizzie) Dorsetta, the daughter of his uncle Emanuel Solomon in Adelaide, on 24 November 1858, Anne (1835), John Michael (1837), Phillip George. (1839), Sarah (1841), born in Sydney, Eve (1842), David Moss. (1845), and Julia (1847).
In September 1839 the Post Office Directory listed him as a butcher in York Street. The voters' list for 5 September 1842 showed that Israel Myers had a shop and house in George Street. In the 1840s, according to the Shipping Gazette, Myers exported and imported cases to New Zealand of such items as kauri gum, slops, and spades. Myers gave £20 to the York Street Synagogue building fund in 1839 and was a seat holder in the synagogue. In September 1840 he stood for election to the Sydney Synagogue's committee. ‘Myers and (Abraham) Moses’ established sales rooms in King Street advertising second–hand clothes and crockery during 1842 and 1843. Israel John Myers was buried at the Rookwood cemetery on 21 May 1890, aged eighty-four. Esther died in Sydney in 1869.
Sydney Morning Herald, 26 June 1843. Family history notes by Ian Nicol.
Ruddy, freckled complexion, dark brown hair, black eyes. Jacob Myers was fifteen years old. He was a Jew. He could read but not write. He was sentenced to transportation for using violence in order to steal a silver hunting watch from a seventeen year old. The prisoner told the court ‘I throw myself entirely on the protecton of your Lordship’. Sentenced to death. Jacob Myers was listed as Jacob Meyer on the ship's indent.
Myers arrived in Sydney on 13 September 1826. He received a colonial conviction at the General Sessions in Bringelli on 10 June 1830 for absconding from his master's service for a second time. He was sentenced to three years colonial servitude and sent on the Governor Phillip on August 1830 to Moreton Bay. He was returned to Sydney on 22 October 1833.
In 1834 Jacob Myers received permission to marry Caroline Thomas, aged thirty-nine, who came on the Princess Royal with a seven-year sentence. They were married by Rev. Cartwright at St Luke's, Liverpool, in 1835. Caroline was still classified as ‘bond’, as was Myers, who received a ticket of leave in 1837 for the District of Liverpool. The 1837 General Return of Convicts in New South Wales noted that he was an assigned servant to Mr Frederick Westmacott of Liverpool. Caroline died on 30 June 1837 and was buried at Liverpool. Jacob married a second time, to Ann Clegg, who was born in the colony and was seventeen years of age, at Liverpool's St Luke's Church on 20 November 1837.
By 1839 Jacob was listed (on a son's birth certificate) as a grocer at Liverpool. Jacob's ticket of leave was altered to Campbelltown on 12 April 1840.
Jacob Myers ‘of Yass’ bought land at Gundagai for £14 on 17 September 1841. Myers signed the petition for a Jewish burial ground in Yass. A conditional pardon (no. 178) was issued on 1 February 1845. In Noel Chapman's (q.v.) letters of administration, his widow Rebecca was noted as living at Yass and working as a housekeeper for Jacob Myers, following her husband's death in 1849.
The Myers family conducted a general store in Yass from the latter part of 1843 where Jacob seems to have been in partnership with Jacob Alexander (q.v.) of Goulburn. In 1851 Jacob Myers owned an Inn on the Bathurst to Sydney, road eight miles from Bathurst. In April 1853 Myers was issued with a licence for the White Horse Cellar in George Street, Sydney, where he offered accommodation to ‘settlers, up country gentlemen and gold diggers’. His career as a publican prospered. However, on 31 July 1857, Ann, ‘formerly of Yass’ and thirty-five years of age, died after giving birth to her eleventh child, named Leah (Lucy) Ann. Her tombstone at St Stephen's Church in Camperdown bears the Hebrew and civil date and the child Leah was named at the Sydney Synagogue.
Jacob Myers' third wife was Caroline Jane Dunlop (née Solomon), who had been born in Sydney ‘about 1832’ and was the daughter of John Solomon (q.v.). She married Jacob on 30 May 1858, and they had four children. The family moved back to Yass and Jacob conducted business at the nearby goldfields. In November 1872 he was in business with Maurice Lazarus in Gulgong at the Capitol Cordial Company.
Jacob Myers died in Sydney on 5 June 1880 and was buried in the Jewish section of the Rookwood Cemetery. His widow Caroline died on 13 August 1914 at her daughter Anna's house in Arncliffe.
Ann and Jacob Myers' children were William (born 1838), Henry, Sarah, Joseph, Alexander, Abraham, Edward, Charles, Lewis, Frederick and Leah (Lucy) Ann. Jacob and Caroline's children were Emily (1860), Alfred (1861), Ewan (1864), and Anna (1866).
OBSP 13 January 1825, case 924. Ship Indent 4/4111, with TL 37/734, and 4/4011; Chronological Register of Convicts at Moreton Bay, no. 2141; Permission to Marry Book, 1834, 4/4512, p. 156, entry 422, and 4/4509, p. 139; Governors' Despatches, A1295, p. 55; CP 178, Land Purchase 2/7936; HO 10/53, series 1, no. 2078, New South Wales Office In, Letters of Administration; family information from Peter Meyer, Sydney, and Julie Skellern, New Zealand.
MYERS, John
b. London, 1802
Hercules II (1), 1825; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1824.
Single; Chair-maker; Height: 156 cm.
Pale complexion, little pock-pitted, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, stout. Together with Thomas Jones, a 20-year-old accomplice, Myers stripped an empty house of its lead and copper and was caught in the act. He had taken 200 pounds (weight) of lead and 200 pounds of copper. Myers told the court: ‘It was a very wet night and I had no place to go and seeing this empty house and all the windows broken, we went in for shelter’. He was sentenced at London on 7 April 1824. He was ‘Very well behaved’ on board the transport.
The Hercules arrived in New South Wales on 7 May 1825 and Myers was assigned to the District of Evan. He was registered in the 1828 Census as a member of No. 4 Iron Gang. On 11 March 1833 Myers was still a prisoner at the Hyde Park Barracks working as a member of the ‘Garden Gang’ when he was found to have escaped from the group. He was captured and given ten days on the treadmill.
John Myers, aged forty-five and a holder of a ticket of leave, married June Young, alias Forbes, on 24 December 1844, the marriage conducted by the Rev. John Dufus of Liverpool. He received a certificate of freedom on 30 June 1843. Despite his surname, Myers may not have been Jewish.
OBSP, 1823–24, case 668, p. 244; Ship Indent 2/8262, and 4/4010, p. 120; Description Book 4/6299, no. 1391; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Register of Convicts' Applications to Marry, 1842–51, 4/4514, p. 81; TL 43/1038; CF 4/4383, X 825, 11 March 1833.
MYERS, John
Earl Grey, 1838; Convict.
A certificate of freedom was issued for John Myers on 13 May 1854.
CF 4/4416, 54/0045.
John and Rachel Myers arrived in South Australia in 1849 with their five-year-old son Alfred. John Myers was listed as a member of the committee of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation in September 1850. The family settled in Kooringa and at Wallaroo, which were copper-mining towns in the mid-north of South Australia.
Jewish Chronicle (London), 30 May 1851; family information from Mrs Margot Bailey, Adelaide.
MYERS, Jonas
b. London, 1805
Maria I (2), 1820; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1820.
Pen-cutter; Height: 163 cm.
Brown hair, brown eyes. A Jew. Jonas Myers was outside Covent Garden and deliberately ran against a passerby and stole his watch. On the way to the watch house a crowd attacked the accuser and his jaw was broken. Jonas explained: ‘I went to the play with my sister and lost her coming out, heard the cry “Stop Thief!” and ran. The gentleman stopped me. I never saw his watch!’ He was aged fifteen, and had been in custody before. He was sentenced on 12 April 1820. Hulk report: ‘indifferent’.
Myers arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 1 December 1820. The List of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land (1820) recorded that he was ‘Now servant of Mr Dowell of Hobart Town’ where Samuel Joseph (q.v.) was also assigned. On 28 March 1821 Myers was sentenced, for ‘neglect of duty’, to labour the same hours as the gaol chain gang for one week. His convict dossier then has the word ‘RUN’ written over it. Myers escaped from custody before any further misdemeanours were recorded and a reward of £2 was offered for his recapture. In the 1841 Muster of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land it was recorded that he had ‘absconded’. He was struck off the list of convicts in December 1853.
Samuel Joseph's dossier is also blank and it is possible that the two teenagers escaped from the colony together.
OBSP, 1819–20, case 411, p. 299; Ship Indent 4/4007, p. 21; CON 31/29, no. 255; HO 10/43, 10/49.
MYERS, Jonas (MYER)
1824–1909
1909; Free.
Single.
Jonas Myers married Sarah Benjamin on 7 December 1853. She was aged twenty-five, and the marriage took place at the home of Samuel Hart, at Franklin Street, Adelaide. Sarah was the youngest child of Lyon Benjamin and his third wife Rachel. Sarah and Jonas had eight children. Henry Jonas (1856–1876), infant (1858), Rachel Ada (1859–after 1926), Lionel Benjamin Myers (1861–1862), Rebecca Judith (1862–1939), Edward Myer (1864–1926), Rosetta (1866–1867), Florence (1868–1943). Jonas died in Brisbane 8 January 1909. Sarah died in Brisbane 20 January 1899. The inscription of his tombstone reads: ‘This stone is erected by the members of the Jewish Community in Brisbane, in deepest reverence and devotion to the memory of heir late minister, teacher and friend who served them faithfully for 45 years’.
MYERS, Joseph (MEYERS) (MEERS)
1777–1814
Calcutta, 1803; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Shropshire, 1802.
Pedlar.
Joseph Myers was transported for felony. Despite his name and his occupation, Myers may not have been Jewish.
Myers was a member of the initial attempt to settle Port Phillip Bay as part of the Collins Expedition, which then moved to the Derwent. In the General Orders Book of Lieutenant Governor Collins, 1803–1808, there is an entry dated 21 December 1803 dealing with the embarkation of the men to Van Diemen's Land: ‘The Superintendent will select two able groups of fifteen men each under the overseers Joseph Meyers and John Whitehead who will attend every day at the store and assist in the moving of the provisions to the boats’. On 17 May 1807 the Hobart Town Gazette announced that Joseph Meyers had absconded from the Van Diemen's Land settlement: ‘Any person who shall be found to have any communication with [him] shall be deprived of all Indulgences from the Crown’. The Rev. Knopwood noted in his diary of 15 August 1807 that Joseph Myers, ‘a bushranger’, was still at large and that he had ‘plenty of dogs’. Joseph Meyers gave evidence before the Bench of Magistrates in December 1813 in the case of Denis McCarty. He was buried in Hobart Town on 6 October 1814, aged thirty-seven.
HRA, series 3, vol. 1, p. 555; CS Muster of Hobart Town, Port Dalrymple and Norfolk Island, 1811, 4/1233-4; ML, A341, General and Garrison Orders—Lieutenant David Collins 1803–1804, AOT; CSO 201/33.
MYERS, Joseph
Mary, 1829; Free.
Married; Dealer; 3 children.
Joseph Myers was listed in the New South Wales Calendar and Post Office Directory for 1832, living in Campbell Street, Parramatta. Joseph and Elizabeth Myers (q.v.) had a daughter, Charlotte, in 1834, whose birth was registered at St John's Church of England, Parramatta. Elizabeth Myers, wife of Joseph Myers, died on 27 May 1834 and was buried at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery.
MYERS, Judith
Free.
Married; 3 children.
The wife of Michael Myers (q.v.), Judith came out to New South Wales with three children in order to join her husband, and was sent on to Van Diemen's Land.
Dark complexion, oval face, sloping forehead, straight nose, thin lips, broad chin, stout. A Jew. The surgeon reported that on the journey out to Australia he was ‘quiet and orderly’. Lewis Myers was transported for stealing a silver soup ladle worth £3 from his brother Henry Myers who was a stationer and rag merchant. His brother had spent £100 to send Lewis overseas but he had left the boat and come home. His sisters and mother lived with Henry.
Lewis Myers arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 18 November 1831. By May 1833 Myers was working as a constable in Hobart Town but, in November 1833, was sentenced to twelve months in prison and dismissal from the police force for allowing two prisoners to escape from his custody. On 25 November the Launceston Police Book recorded that he was a member of a road party who rendered assistance to the police in the recapture of some escaped prisoners. It was recommended that, for his own safety, he be moved to another part of the island colony. On 23 April 1834 he was sentenced to fifty lashes for absconding from his road party. By 1836 he was working as an assigned servant and on 30 June that year he was returned to the Public Works Department for ‘idleness, neglect and filthiness’. He was not to be assigned again as ‘his head was so full of vermin’. He was sent to the Surveyor's Gang at Hobart Town. During 1837 Myers was charged twice with drunkenness, once with neglect of duty, once for being dirty at church and once for refusing an order to work. He was punished with forty-nine lashes and three months hard labour in chains. A further three months hard labour was imposed on 24 August 1837 when, as an assigned servant, he offered two sheep for sale to Mr Benjamin. Later in the year he was tried at Hobart Town for breaking and entering and stealing 3000 cigars, and was sentenced to eight years incarceration at Port Arthur.
OBSP, 1830–31, case 907, p. 460; CON 31/30, no. 925; CON 78/2, p. 440; CON 18/12; CON 37/9/2967; VDL Papers, ML, A1059-7, p. 184; Hobart Town Courier, 22 November 1833; Independent, 15 September 1832.
MYERS, Lewis (William JONES)
b. Leadenhall Street, 1822
Mangles (8), 1837; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Central Criminal Court, 1837.
Baker; Height: 164 cm.
A fresh complexion, dark brown hair, clean shaven, hazel eyes, long nose and large chin and mouth. He had a scar under lower lip. Heavily tattooed with bottle, anchor and crown, half moon, seven stars, sun and the initials M.M. H.M.C.M. J.M. S.M. A.M. A Jew. Can read and write. Lewis Myers was sentenced on 30 January for ‘Perjury. I swore falsely about a robbery that had occurred relative to an order for money’.
William Jones, alias Lewis Myers, arrived in Sydney on 10 July 1837. On 18 July he was sentenced to fifty lashes for disorderly conduct, and on 6 September 1839 to fifty lashes for absconding. On 23 March 1840 he was put in irons for one month for stealing bananas. On 25 March 1840 he received a further fifty lashes for absconding.
Following a trial at Berrima he was sent to Norfolk Island from 19 December 1840 until 1843. Returning to the mainland it seems he encountered trouble almost immediately. On 23 February 1844 he was placed in irons for one week for ‘threatening to take a policeman's life named Lewis Solomon’. On 22 March 1844, ‘for smoking in the barracks and insolence to the superintendent’, he was sentenced to a punishment of 150 lashes. ‘Only’ twenty-nine lashes were inflicted before the medical officer stopped the flogging. On 19 November 1844 he was put on bread and water for assaulting his overseer. Seven days later a further sentence was imposed for obscene language. On 3 April 1845 he was sentenced to seven days in irons for giving tobacco to a gaol gang. Myers was sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Lady Franklin on 12 October 1845. On 28 July 1846 he received six months hard labour in chains for ‘sleeping in another man's berth’. On 10 August 1846 at the Hobart Town Prisoners' Barracks his sentence was extended by six months for absconding. He was transferred to the Cascades Prison, where he was put in solitary confinement for twenty days as a punishment for assaulting a fellow prisoner. He was granted a certificate of freedom on 22 August 1846.
OBSP, 1836–37, case 508, p. 489; CON 33/71, no. 16640; Register of Convicts on Norfolk Island in August 1844, ML, COD 2.
MYERS, Michael (MIERS)
b. London, 1775
Surrey I (1), 1814; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1813.
Married; Slop seller; Height: 155 cm; 3 children.
Dark complexion, black to grey hair, black eyes. Michael Myers pulled a coat off the driving box of a chaise that was standing in Portland Place. He put the coat into a green bag that he had tucked under his arm. He was sentenced on 7 April 1813. He was thirty-eight years old.
Michael Myers arrived in New South Wales on 28 July 1814 and on 18 August was forwarded to Parramatta for assigned service. By 1821 he was free by servitude and permitted to leave the colony. On 17 March 1821 he gave notice that he would be leaving in the brig Campbell Macquarie. The Principal Superintendent's Office on 25 August 1821 recorded the name of Judith Myers (q.v.) (who was free) on a list of prisoners to embark on the Campbell Macquarie for Hobart Town: ‘Judith Myers and three children, to join her husband by order of his Excellency … the Governor’. Myers remained in Hobart Town until 1827. On 21 May 1827 he was fined five shillings for misbehaviour and was listed as ‘Free by Servitude’. Myers returned to Sydney and was listed (as Michael Miers) in the 1828 Census as free by servitude, a Jew, a labourer, and lodging at Patrick Conlon's in Clarence Street, Sydney. Judith and the three children were not with him.
OBSP, 1813, case 477, p. 273; Surrey I (1) Indent 4/4004, p. 549; Sydney Gazette, 17 March 1821; CS In Correspondence, 4/1750, p. 76.
Moses Myers, known in the colony as ‘Fishmonger Moses Myers’, was the brother of convicts Edward Myers (q.v.) and Mary Hartnell (q.v.). William Augustus Miles, in the Registry of Flash Men (p. 105), wrote, in the mid-1840s, that Moses Myers was the brother of ‘the most arrant little rogue in Sydney and his sister is the celebrated Mary Hartnell’.
MYERS, Phillip
b. London, 1803–1865
Free.
Married; Merchant; 2 children.
Phillip Myers was the owner of a residence in George Street, Sydney, in September 1842. On 28 October 1842 Phillip Myers, a butcher at Brickfield Hill, was listed as insolvent. A child, Eve, had been born on 15 January 1842 and registered by the Sydney Synagogue (she died on 5 July 1860, aged eighteen). A male child was also born that year. Phillip Myers was an unsuccessful applicant who applied to the Sydney Synagogue for the post of ‘Keeper of the Jews' Burial Ground’ on 7 August 1844.
He died on 2 October 1865, age sixty-two, and was buried in the Devonshire Street Cemetery by the Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society.
Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1842, 28 October 1842, 8 December 1842; Australasian Chronicle, 8 November 1842.
MYERS, Rebecca
Free.
Single; 1 child.
Rebecca Myers married Elijah Joel (q.v.) in Sydney in 1848. A son, Moss Joel, was born in 1849.
MYERS, Samuel
b. London, 1791–1831
Fortune (2), 1813; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1812.
Single; Groom; Height: 158 cm.
Fair complexion, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Samuel Myers, Israel Saunders and Mordecai Julian robbed a sailor of his purse in which was £57. The other two men stood by as the deed was done. Saunders was found not guilty and Julian was not brought to trial. At the Middlesex Gaol Delivery of 1 July 1812 Myers was sentenced to transportation for life.
Samuel Myers was assigned as a convict servant to Captain Piper from 1813 to 1815 and sent to Newcastle for two years from March 1816. Myers volunteered for work at Moreton Bay and arrived there in 1824. On 14 April 1825 he absconded from his work detail and he was listed as a labourer who was absent from Byrne's Road Party in 1827. It was assumed by officialdom that he had been killed by the Aborigines in the bush in 1831.
OBSP, 1812, case 541, p. 348; Convicts Sent to Newcastle, 23 March 1816, in 4/3494; Chronological Register of Convicts at Moreton Bay, no. 1128; HO 11/3; 1814 Muster, A1225; Sydney Gazette, 14 April 1825, 24 March 1827.
MYERS, Samuel (MEYERS)
b. London, 1803–1846
Agamemnon, 1820; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1820.
Single; Pen-maker; Height: 152 cm.
Dark complexion, black hair, dark eyes. Samuel Myers was transported for stealing the coat of a servant while it hung on the railings outside a house. The coat was valued at seven shillings. On being confronted with the evidence, Myers, aged seventeen, declared: ‘Not a word he has spoken is true!’ He was sentenced to seven years transportation on 17 February 1820.
Samuel Myers arrived in New South Wales on 22 September 1820, and five days later was sent to Emu Plains for work distribution. On 31 March 1824, while serving Mr Thomas Perry, he was punished at Evans. Samuel Myers received a certificate of freedom on 19 February 1827. In 1832 he was refused permission to marry Eliza Watson, who was still serving a seven-year sentence, because, according to government records, she was already married. Myers married Mary Ann Woodbury at Scots Church in Sydney in 1834. Mary Ann had arrived as a bounty migrant on the Bussorah Merchant. The 1837 General Return of Convicts in New South Wales listed a ‘Robert’ Myers, living at Camden and holder of a ticket of leave.
On 17 July 1839 the Colonial Secretary noted that ‘Samuel Myers and his wife are of intemperate habits’. They lived in George Street and were not to receive any more assigned convict servants. He was named in the first Sydney voters' list as the owner of a house in George Street. Samuel Myers ‘of Chippendale’ was buried in the Devonshire Street Cemetery by the Poor Fund of the Sydney Synagogue on 10 March 1846. An inquest followed his death and the verdict was that he ‘died after visitation of God’.
OBSP, 1819–20, case 481, p. 201f.; Agamemnon Indent 4/4007, p. 219; 4/6671, p. 68; CF 047/6055; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Register of Convicts' Applications to Marry, 1831–37, 4/4512, p. 13; Convict File from CS Out, 4/3687, p. 53; Atlas, 14 March 1846.
MYERS, Sarah
b. London, 1803–1832
Providence II (1), 1821; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1820.
Single; Prostitute; Height: 150 cm; 2 children.
Sarah Myers' first offence occurred when she was aged seventeen and, together with Edith Waterhouse, aged fifteen, she stole a necklace of beads from a 15-month-old baby. The second, much more serious, offence concerned the assault, intimidation and theft of a man enticed into a house of ill repute. Sarah was tried and sentenced for felony with Emanuel Lyons (q.v.), who was her brother. Her gaol report was ‘very bad’.
Sarah Myers arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 18 December 1821. On 22 October 1823 she was accused of ‘neglect of duty’ while working as an assigned convict servant to Mr F. Barnes and sent by the magistrate, the Rev. Knopwood, to the Female Factory. The following year her master James Neill accused her of insolence and she was returned to the Female Factory. On 5 June 1826 she absconded from the service of Mr Munday; she was apprehended fourteen days later at Kangaroo Point and returned to the factory.
Thomas Arnott, a watchmaker in Hobart Town, married Sarah in 1827. Arnott had come to Van Diemen's Land on the Calcutta in 1803 and was therefore one of the first Europeans in the colony. At the time they married, Thomas Arnott was described as a turner and chair-maker. Sarah and Thomas had two daughters. Hannah was born in 1830 and Priscilla in 1831. Sarah died ‘of fits’ in November 1832. The Hobart Town Courier of 30 November 1832 noted: ‘An inquest was held on Wednesday on the death of Sarah Arnett [sic], a Jewess, the wife of a chair maker at Kangaroo Point, who being subject to fits, was found dead in bed. Mr Row who attended was prevented by the form of the Jewish religion from opening the body, in order to give evidence as to the immediate cause of her death, until the Coroner decided that it should be so’. We are left wondering who tried to prevent the post mortem. It may well have been her brother. The Jewish cemetery in Hobart Town had been newly established and this brief newspaper paragraph indicates that the community had begun to establish its own profile of observance.
Sarah's daughters were placed in the Queen's Orphanage in Hobart Town, until Thomas remarried in 1834. His new wife, Sarah Ainsworth, died in 1839, and the two girls were sent back to the orphanage.
CON 40/7; HO 10/41; Hobart Town Gazette, 28 October 1826; historical research by Julie M Skellern, Auckland, New Zealand, who reported (in 2004) that she had located 529 descendants of Sarah Myers.
MYERS, William
1787–1834
Surrey I (1), 1814; Convict; Sentenced to life, Chambley Court Martial, 1813.
Soldier; Height: 169 cm.
Sallow complexion, dark brown hair, brown eyes. A soldier in the 100th Regiment, William Myers was tried at Court Martial and initially sentenced to death.
William Myers arrived on 28 July 1814. Myers was granted a ticket of leave in 1829, and a certificate of freedom in 1832. In the General Return of Convicts in New South Wales, William Myers, aged fifty, was listed at Patrick Plains holding a ticket of leave.
In 1834 Joseph Nathan of Singleton and Maitland arranged the Jewish funeral of a William Myers, a prisoner at Patrick Plains. Nathan was reimbursed by the Sydney Synagogue £6 15s 4d for the funeral expenses incurred. Myers had died when a cart ran over him, and his few personal effects—clothes, shoe horn and cigar box—were sold by the police to help defray the cost of the funeral.
CS 39/4902; TL 29/857; CF 32/484.