Announcing 'The Corbins in Australia'

This new site The Corbins in Australia has been launched today to mark the first anniversary of the passing of Ruth van Aaken. She is often thought of and still sadly missed.

Ruth's website Australian Corbin Trees is now offline. I felt it was important to make sure there was a Corbin family presence on the internet in time for this anniversary - in other words, I could picture Ruth scowling at me from beyond the grave! So here it is.

This site, The Corbins in Australia, being a blog site, is fairly basic, with a limited number of pages, but I'm optimistic that the blog format of regular tagged posts will be a good way to present family history research. The research will not extend into present generations, no passwords will be required. Any contributions, such as photos, letters or anecdotes will be very welcome.

The Story (see right hand column) was written for the Corbin Gathering of 2008 and has not yet been updated to reflect recent research. I will post detailed updates progressively on this homepage, and update The Story itself sometime in the future. 

Here's a summary of major recent findings:

- William Corbin & Mary Bentley: marriage details, London 1810.  We now know the exact date and location of this important Corbin marriage. An illustration of the church where the wedding took place, St Michael Crooked Lane, is included (far left) in the header at the top of this page.

- James' ship: The Aerolite, 1864!  It has long been thought that J.B.Corbin came to Australia in 1861, ship unknown, but we now know that he arrived in Sydney in April 1864 aboard the ship 'Aerolite'.

- Victoria Arcade: opened November 1887, drawings discovered.  We now have the opening date for J.B.Corbin's arcade, after finding newspaper reports of the time. And we have found a wonderful set of architectural drawings, one of which was recently on exhibition at the State Library!

- Albert Corbin: photo.  Previously there was no known photo of Albert Corbin, second son of J.B.Corbin, but we have now discovered a splendid photo of him as a young man.

A final word for this first post. Websites can easily stagnate and followers drift away. That might happen here too, except that an email subscription service can be arranged which automatically sends you an email when I add a new post to the site. Set and forget. I have not arranged this yet, but keep an eye out for it.

Steve Corbin
22 March 2012