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Welcome Aboard the Australian

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A Webb Wagg family day at Berrys Bay, 1903 Have you ever stared at an old photograph and almost heard the chatter beyond the frame? That’s exactly how this image feels to me. The boat you see is  the Australian , and the cheerful crowd aboard and ashore are Webb Waggs — perhaps gathering for a day out on Sydney Harbour. At the heart of it all stands our patriarch, William Webb Wagg — surrounded by his sons, grandchildren, and extended family, marking not just a moment on the water, but a legacy taking shape on the shoreline. Meet the man on the left Standing tall at the rail is William Webb Wagg — known variously as Bill Webb, Old Billy, or Grandpa Webb, depending on who was speaking. He’s 76 here, clearly proud to be flanked by so many of his descendants. As the family patriarch, he anchors the scene — a steady presence at the centre of a growing clan. Who’s sharing the deck? Grandpa’s four grown sons crowd the cockpit: Charlie  (Charles) Hayden  (Albert Hayden) Bill ...
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The William Webb Wagg investigation (7)

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Part 7 – The Norfolk landscape: Where the Wegg family lived  A pause to understand the world they inhabited Before continuing furhter along the Wegg family line, it is helpful to paude and consider the world in which they lived. In the previous posts, we have worked closely with parish registers, reconstructing relationships entry by entry and testing those reconstructions against autosomal DNA. This process has allowed us to identify William Webb Wagg’s paternal grandparents and to place the family securely within a cluster of neighbouring Norfolk parishes. But names and dates alone can create a misleading sense of abstraction. These individuals did not live as entries in registers. They lived within a physical landscape — shaped by geography, agriculture, economy, and community — and that landscape influenced where they worked, whom they married, and how their families moved across generations. The parishes that appear repeatedly in the Wegg family record — Cley next the Sea, Bac...
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The William Webb Wagg investigation (6)

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Part 6: Extending the Wegg line — Testing WWW's paternal grandparent  In Part 5, the combined documentary and autosomal DNA evidence demonstrated that William Webb Wagg (referred to hereafter as WWW for clarity) can be securely placed as a child of William and Mary Ann (Clark) Wegg of Norwich. This conclusion was not derived from a single match or isolated record, but from the convergence of independent documentary and genetic evidence aligning as expected. The next step is to extend that structured approach one generation further. Having established WWW’s position within the sibling group of William and Mary Ann (Clark) Wegg, attention now turns to the generation above them: his four grandparents. This analysis will consider both the paternal and maternal lines. For clarity, it begins with William Wegg’s own parents — the paternal grandparents of WWW — before turning in the next post to the Clark family and the maternal line. As we step back another generation, both the genetic an...
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