William Eesley (Australia)
also known as William Eesley of Melbourne, the Australian emigrant
b. 1834, Old Stratford or Charlecote, Warwickshire, England
William Eesley was a son of John Eesley and Susannah Bubb, born 1834 in Warwickshire — older brother of Albert Robert Eesley (b. 1837, the Canadian emigrant whose line runs through Chuck) and of George Bubb Eesley (b. 1836, the U.S.S. Constitution chaplain).
The Australia migration
Mary Eesley Bean’s 1985 family history preserves the one story this archive has about him:
William Eesley b. ___. Migrated to Australia at LaSalle near Melbourne. He was in the shoe business. No record of his family.
The LaSalle near Melbourne reference is to one of the working-class districts of the Victorian gold-rush boomtown that Melbourne had become in the 1850s — possibly La Salle or a phonetically close place name in greater Melbourne. The shoe-making and shoe-repair trades were among the immigrant working-class trades the gold-rush economy created and sustained.
For William to have arrived in Australia would have meant a long voyage by sail or early-steam from England in the 1850s or 1860s — possibly as part of the wave of immigrants the Victorian gold rush (1851 onward) drew from England, Scotland, and Ireland. By the time Bean was writing in 1985, no record of his descendants had reached the family.
The three-direction Eesley diaspora
William’s Australia migration sits alongside two other Eesley emigrations in the same generation:
- Albert Robert Eesley to Canada — the line that runs through Charles Leonard, Will, Charlie, and Chuck.
- The Eesley line to Elizabeth, New Jersey and Newark in 1858 — documented through the 1858 farm-and-bakery arrival and the Newark NJ census record, including their brother George Bubb Eesley and probably their sister Hannah and a younger John.
The Old Stratford / Charlecote household of John and Susannah Bubb scattered its sons across three continents in a single generation — Australia, Canada, and the United States. The Australia branch is the one whose descendants this archive has not traced.
Open
- Australian shipping records — the British and Australian National Archives both hold the passenger lists for the 1850s/60s emigration. A William Eesley on a Melbourne-bound vessel would be findable.
- Victorian shoemaker directories — the Melbourne city directories of the 1860s-1890s and the Victoria state directories would record a William Eesley in the shoe trade.
- Any surviving descendants — the Australian Eesleys (if any) would be the cousins-many-times-removed of the Canadian Eesleys, the Newark NJ Eesleys, and Chuck. None have surfaced.
Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, 1985 (page 1a); migration context from gold-rush-era Victoria.