Hall family

I'm starting to turn back to the Hall family again. My last Hall post described some of the family association with Yass.

I've recently joined the Huntingdonshire mail list and sent out this e-mail that summarises what I know:

This is my first e-mail to this mailing list - I'm Australian, but currently live in the US, and have been working on my family history for a year. I think it's calming to know all my ancestors had to leave their homeland and live on the other side of the world, just like I am now.

My surname is HALL, and I've been trying to trace this arm of the country.

The original HALL to move to Ausrtalia was Samuel HALL, born 1816 in Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire.

A very nice lady named Margaret long performed a Huntondonshire lookup for me at one stage and found that Samuel Hall was batised at Hemingford Grey on 4/9/1816, son William Hall, a shoemaker, and Catherine SETCHELL, abode Fenstanton. William and Catherine appear in the 1841 census, but Catherine was dead by 1851 and the Fenstanton marriage index for Hall shows that William re-married to Charlotte WARRINGTON in Fenstanton in 1853, and appears so in 1861 census in Fenstanton.

Among their children was Samuel. He married Mary Anne WELLS of Isleham (b. abt 1816) in Chesterton, Cambridge, which I believe is within Cambridge proper, and they had at least four children. His 1841 and 1851 census entries seem to show his occupation as 'Brewers Labourer' living at Chesterton Cambridge and St Andrews Kedge? Cambridge respectively. They had a daughter Catharine who must have died, but their two sons William and Thomas, and daughter Mary Ann accompanied them to Australia on the Boanerges in 1857. The arrival records state that Thomas and James were brn in a place called Barnwell.

Interestingly, on arrival under 'Family in the Colony' Samuel answered Cousin Childs, residence unknown. I've found on the Huntongdonshire listserv archives that four CHILDS brothers arrived in Australia, their mother in Huntingdonshire being Elizabeth HALL, and I hope to reconstruct their relationship.

The family of five settled in Yass in country NSW. Mary Ann nee WELLS died soon after they arrived, in 1860, while they established a farm there. Samuel died in 1884.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows anything about the place names I've mentioned, or who can add to the tree - Fenstanton burial transcripts only have a few Hall's for all the births and marriages so there's much still to learn.

I've yet to achieve much on Samuel's father William. I know from censuses that he was born in 1794, married for the first time in 1815 in Hemingford Grey, was a Shoemaker living in Chequer St Fenstanton and must have died between 1861 and 1871. Fenstanton birth entries suggest his father was Edward HALL and his mother was Mary, but no Edward was born or married in Fenstanton so they must have moved there from somewhere nearby.