Chessell Family History

My cousin David Chessell went to Melbourne, Australia a few years ago, in search of his Chessell ancestors, and he shared his findings with me. A little later, my son Martin and his partner travelled through Australia and in addition to performing family history research in Canberra and Perth they also visited the descendants of William Powell and Louisa Chessell in Casterton. William and Louisa's granddaughter Phyllis Faroe gave Martin a good deal of information which he has passed on to me, and Phyllis has subsequently contacted me several times and sent me more photographs and documents. All this material, together with the results of subsequent research I have made, have been incorporated into the database.

The Chessell family had it's origins in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, where records show Chessells throughout the seventeenth century and probably earlier, but more research is required to identify with certainty the parents of a certain John Chessell who married Ann Corbitt in Stoke Damerel, Devon in December 1800. Stoke Damerel was the parish in which the Devenport Naval Dockyard was situated and John and Ann's son, Charles Bartholomew Chessell, joined the Navy there as an apprentice ship-builder at the age of sixteen. There were no Chessells in the parish before John's arrival and it is probable that he, too, was employed in the Naval Dockyard and that he had moved there from the Naval Dockyard on the Solent, but this has still to be proved.

It isn't clear how long Charles Bartholomew Chessell remained in the Plymouth area after completing his apprenticeship, but by the time he was 30, he had emigrated to Australia and by 1838, he had already built a 288-ton three-masted vessel named the "Maria Orr", in partnership with a certain William Pender, in Hobart, Tasmania. The building of the "Maria Orr" seems to have been a major achievement - the first substantial ocean-going vessel ever built in Tasmania which succeeded in trading all over the world (including at least one voyage from England to Tasmania with a full load of convicts! ). At least two more ships were attributed to him in Tasmania over the following three years, one in partnership with William Pender, and one - a 2 masted schooner of 28 tons - attributed solely to him. It seems that at this stage he was ready to set off in business on his own, and in 1841 he moved to Melbourne, and set up his own yard at Emerald Hill on the Yarra. Here, he met a young Irish lady from Limerick by the name of Margaret O'Shea, and in 1845 at St. James Church, Melbourne, they were married. Their first child - a boy, born in Melbourne in 1846 - was named Charles Lawford Chessell. The couple went on to have seven more children - two girls and five boys, but two - one girl and one boy - died in infancy, leaving a family of five boys and one girl to grow up in Emerald Hill, Melbourne. In the 1850's Charles senior built his biggest and best ship to date and named it the "Margaret Chessell" which, under a Captain William "Billy" Jones, was reportedly a "very successful trader to the South Seas and Tasmania". Some time later he built a sister ship "The Brothers and Sister" presumably named after his children.

In 1873, Charles Lawford Chessell married Mary Anne Harvey at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the district of Bourke in Melbourne. Mary Anne was born in Essex, England in 1849, daughter of Captain Robert Harvey, a master mariner, and Elizabeth Todd. The couple lived at Emerald Hill, Melbourne until the mid-1880's, by which time they had a family of five young children - four girls, including "grandma Chessell" (Louisa Mary who married William POWELL, younger brother of our grandmother Sarah Powell), and a boy, Arthur Charles. They then moved a few miles further out of Melbourne, to Williamstown, where another son, David Lawford, was born. Some thirty five years later, in Western Australia, David married Annie Martha Davies, my father's sister. So the Chessell family are connected to both our Powell and Davies ancestral lines.

See all Chessell entries on the database