The William Webb Wagg investigation (2)
Part 2: Where did the “Webb Wagg” name come from?
One of the most persistent questions in the Webb Wagg family has always been: where did the name “Webb Wagg” come from? Why does “Webb” sometimes appear as a surname, sometimes as a given name, and sometimes not at all?
This post explores how that question was answered.
Connecting through Ancestry
In early 2017, while this research was underway, I connected through Ancestry with a third cousin descended from William Webb-Wagg (1873–1974), a son of William and Sarah. After corresponding online, we arranged to meet.
At that meeting, she shared two original documents that had been passed down through what I now think of as “the Williams” — successive generations bearing the name William. I was able to examine these documents in person at the time.
While they do not answer every question about William’s origins, they do explain how and when “Webb” entered the family’s naming practice.
William as “Webb” at Sea
The first document is William Webb’s discharge from the ship Gwalior, dated 4 March 1853. The Gwalior was a vessel operating around Australia and the Pacific during the 1850s.
What matters most here is the name under which William was working: Webb, not Wagg.
This aligns with later references describing him as “old Billy Webb” and suggests that Webb was the name he used in his working life, at least in maritime contexts.
William as “Wagg” at Marriage
Just six weeks later, on 18 April 1853, William married Sarah Turner at St James’ Church, Sydney. In the original parish marriage register, he appears as William Wagg.
One of the witnesses was Jane Turner, Sarah’s sister, who later married John Trickett.
By early 1853, William was therefore operating under a dual identity:
Webb in employment and working contexts
Wagg in formal and legal records
This dual usage appears to have continued for many years.
When “Webb” enters the official record
In the New South Wales birth registrations of William and Sarah’s children, the family surname is consistently recorded as Wagg.
However, beginning in 1862, when their fourth child Charles was born, “Webb” begins to appear as a given name. From that point onward, several children carry Webb as part of their recorded name — for example, Charles W. Wagg.
This pattern suggests that Webb was:
not originally a family surname, but
significant enough to William to be deliberately preserved and passed on.
Rethinking William’s origins
For many years, it was assumed that William’s parents were William Wagg and Sophia Kitchen, who arrived in Australia in 1837 with a five-year-old son named William.
As established in Part 1, this assumption is incorrect. That William died near Bathurst in 1873 and cannot be the man who married Sarah Turner and died in 1905.
Our William died on 8 January 1905 at his home, 54 Blues Point Road, North Sydney, with the cause of death recorded as enteritis and hypostatic pneumonia.
The informant on the death registration was his son Charles W Wagg, who recorded:
his father’s name as William Webb Wagg
age as 77
time in the colonies as 60 years
birthplace as Yarmouth, Norwich, England
father as William Wagg (mother unnamed)
A crucial death notice
An additional and very important piece of evidence comes from a death notice placed by Sarah:
“WAGG.—January 8, at his residence, 54 Blue’s Point-road, William Webb Wagg, husband of Sarah Wagg, late of Norwich, England, aged 79 years. Home papers please copy.”
The final instruction — “Home papers please copy” — is particularly significant. It strongly suggests that William still had family or close connections in Norwich, and that his death was expected to be of interest there.
This reinforces the conclusion that William’s origins lay in Norwich, not in a family that migrated to Australia in 1837.
What we think we know — and what we don’t
Taken together, the evidence suggests that our William was:
born about 1826 in Norwich
in Australia by about 1845
using the name Webb in working contexts
marrying as Wagg in 1853
passing Webb down as a given name to his children
Only one known arrival appears to fit this profile: a William Wagg who arrived as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land in 1845, failed to report for muster in Launceston in 1849, and then disappears from Tasmanian records.
But this raises further questions.
The questions that remain
After meeting my Webb Wagg cousin in early 2017, the emerging evidence was already pointing in a clear direction.
On the balance of probabilities, it appeared that our William Webb Wagg was the convict who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1845, later absconded from the probation system, and then took work at sea under the name “Webb” before meeting Sarah and settling in Sydney by 1853.
What remained unresolved at that point was not whether William had left Van Diemen’s Land, but how that transition occurred in practice.
Crew lists and maritime employment records from this period are notoriously difficult to trace, and many simply do not survive. As a result, the precise sequence by which William moved from probation in Van Diemen’s Land to maritime work — and then to marriage in Sydney — could not be documented directly.
Even so, the evidence available by 2017 was sufficient to explain how the Webb name entered the family: it was the name William used in his working life, and one that clearly mattered enough to him to be passed on to his children.
The next part of this investigation sets out the convict records themselves, bringing together what the Tasmanian material can — and cannot — tell us about William’s early years and disappearance from the record.
