An amateur historian with a ''bean counter's approach to history'' is leading Australians to an unsung group of ancestors, the first generation of home-grown colonists. These sons and daughters of the Southern Cross have become the devotion, if not obsession, of a Canberra family doctor, Craig James Smee.
Some surprising statistics:
Some surprising statistics:
Forty-eight per cent of these children were ''illegitimate'';
Only 49 per cent were baptised. (Smee wonders whether this may be one small link to the secular nature of the modern nation. Just two churches, St Phillip's in Sydney and St John's in Parramatta, were available to this first generation's parents. However, Smee notes that most of the unchristened were on Norfolk Island, where there was no full-time pastor, and many may have been baptised in later years.)
Eighty-three per cent of first-generation girls were married by 16.You can read much more in the Sydney Morning Herald at http://www.smh.com.au/national/sons-and-daughters-of-the-southern-cross-20091009-gqub.html.
