Searching for Sam Foo, an elusive branch of the family tree

Sam Foo, my husband’s grandfather, was an obscure figure even during his lifetime. He left a trail of confusing often contradictory and unexpected clues about his date of birth, his marriages, and occupation. The only solid information I had was that Sam came from somewhere near Canton, China, that he was the town baker in Surat, Queensland in the early 20th Century, and that he had produced four children, one of them my husband’s mother Pauline. The family had no documents concerning Sam, no photographs of him; most family members who had known Sam during his lifetime had passed away, and younger generations had only indistinct childhood memories to relate. Until I found out more about Sam Foo (if more could be found) the family tree would remain decidedly lopsided. When and why had Sam come to Australia? What did he do when he got here? How did he meet Kate, his partner of more than 35 years?

The first challenge was to confirm a date of birth. Sam’s tombstone gives his age as 94 suggesting a birth date of 1842, but a copy of the death certificate records his age as 81 years at the time of death in 1936, making his birth year 1855, a 13-year discrepancy. Since his partner Kate provided the information included in Sam’s death certificate, I took her word for it and used 1855 as my starting point. An archival search unearthed several dozen records relating to Sam Ah Foo, Sam Fhou, Sam Fou and Ah Sam, all of which I ordered up from the archives. The pile of records was daunting. There were many ‘improbables’ and some ‘possibles’, and I remember thinking that with no certainty about the spelling of his name my chances of locating documents about Sam were slim to none. And then, the ‘Eureka!’ moment when I turned a page and read a 1916 Application for Registration (War Precautions Regulations)  for Sam Foo, Chinese male, born Canton, China 19 January 1856, storekeeper and baker, Surat. [Persons born outside Australia had to register as ‘aliens’ during World War I even if they had been naturalised.] There could hardly be more than one Chinese named Sam Foo, baker, living in Surat in 1916. This confirmed the little I knew about him, provided some additional facts and a bonus – a physical description of Sam, his height, build, hair and eye colour. Sam was unusually tall for a Chinese, nearly 6 foot. Looking at many of the photographs of the period I realised that the subjects were seated, so gauging height by looking at a photograph was risky, but it might lead somewhere eventually.

In his 1916 declaration, Sam gave March 1874 as his date of entry to the Commonwealth via the port of Melbourne. A search of passenger lists on ships arriving in Melbourne from Hong Kong and China between 1860 (I was playing it safe) and 1906 (the year Sam and his future partner Kate had registered the birth of their first child) was unsuccessful. Immigration records from West Australia, Sydney, and Brisbane were equally unsuccessful.

I took another tack. Had Sam been naturalised? Naturalisation records would surely contain information about his Chinese origins, confirmation of the date and place of entry into Australia, perhaps a handprint or even a photograph. I began by searching the electoral rolls to establish whether Sam had ever voted. He wasn’t included on any electoral roll but hey, not everyone who is supposed to vote, votes. A clue provided by a helpful fellow researcher led to an index of Asian immigrants resident in Queensland in 1913  containing an entry for ‘Sam Foo, baker, Surat, age 60, 'naturalised’. Months of trolling through microfilm of applications for naturalisation, working backwards from 1913, were unsuccessful. Since he’d run a grocery in Surat, I looked at microfilmed Government Gazettes of property registers and hotel and tobacco licenses for the period (a grocer might sell tobacco, and during this period the Queensland government issued tobacco licenses as a means of controlling smoking amongst the Aboriginal population). None of these yielded any additional information about Sam. At this stage I was dejected. Lack of success seemed to be a hallmark of my research to date, but I was not ready to give up.

Conversations with archivists and genealogists suggested that I needed to search records for the colony of Queensland (newly separated from New South Wales in 1859). Colonial records for southern Queensland are housed in New South Wales while others (for the west and far north of Queensland) are found in the colonial papers at the Queensland State Archives. To complicate matters, some records from the far west of Queensland were originally lodged in Rockhampton or Darwin and might no longer exist. But there was a chance, so I examined more microfilm, miles of the stuff. Months later, I discovered a register of incoming correspondence received by the Colonial Office in 1885.  Sam had submitted 6 pages of information in support of his application for naturalisation, giving his birth date as 13 August 1855, his arrival in Queensland as 1874, his first residence as ‘Copperfield’ and then Palmer Goldfield, North Queensland. When this application was submitted in 1885 Sam was 30 years of age and had been a hotelkeeper in Muttaburra for 7 years. He was young enough at the time to remember dates accurately (or so I deduced), although it dawned on me that I now had three different birth dates for Sam, all of them supplied by the man himself at various times. For example, Sam had been naturalised on 19 January 1886. He had given 19 January 1856 as his birth date when he registered as an ‘alien’ in 1916. Was Sam trying to fly under the radar, or was he simply absent-minded? Did he intend to mislead, or was it a recording error? Perhaps he regarded the date of his naturalisation as the day his life began, a kind of rebirth (a romantic notion I admit, but seductive nonetheless).

His application for naturalisation attests to Sam’s first marriage to one Hannah Lock in 1885, and states that there were no children from that marriage. I could find no birth records for children of Hannah Lock and Sam Foo between 1885 and 1900. I could find no record of divorce for Sam and Hannah, and no record of marriage between Sam and Kate (my husband’s grandparents). Perhaps divorce in the early 1900s was a luxury, an expense out of the reach of a storekeeper, or maybe Sam thought of it as unnecessary red tape. Maybe he just decided that one marriage was enough. There is no doubt that Sam and Kate produced 4 children with or without benefit of marriage – the birth certificates of the children are recorded under Kate’s maiden name with Sam as the father – and I have met them all and spoken with them about Sam over the years.

At some stage between 1886 (the date of naturalisation) and 1906 (the birth of Sam’s first child in Brisbane) Sam left Muttaburra, and probably came to Brisbane. This is suggested by the fact that Kate, his partner for most of his life, arrived in Brisbane from Lancashire in 1900  aged 20 years, a domestic servant. Perhaps Kate found work in Muttaburra and met Sam there, but it seems more likely that they met in Brisbane because Kate was unskilled and judging from her family background (cotton weavers all) had extremely limited financial resources. When Kate arrived in Brisbane she would have needed an income, and I think it unlikely that she travelled any great distance to find work. Where-and how-ever they met, Sam and Kate had their first child in 1906 and then moved to Surat, where another three children were born. Queensland telephone directories for the years 1906 through 1922 list Sam as the town baker and grocer . Sam’s ‘alien’ registration (1916) records his home and business address as ‘Burrowes St, Surat’. There are school records for 3 of the children in Surat (the youngest child was not quite 5 years of age when the family left Surat and returned to Brisbane in 1922). My husband, born 1926, remembered living with Sam and Kate in Fortitude Valley. Kate is on the electoral rolls in the Valley from 1923 until shortly before her death in 1954.

I found Certificates of Exemption from the Dictation Test for all four children , all bearing the notation that the exemptions, issued in 1922, had expired and were cancelled in 1925. This suggests that in 1922 there were plans for the family, or perhaps just the children, to travel abroad – the obvious and most likely destination China, because Chinese immigrants customarily sent their Australian-born children back to China for education or to visit relatives. Sam may have intended to make the trip, an assumption strengthened by the fact that in 1922 Sam filed an affidavit in support of his request for a replacement certificate of naturalisation . The affidavit stated that he had lost the original certificate, which he would have needed to produce in order to obtain a passport. As I could find no record of any member of the family leaving Australia in 1922 or thereafter, the trip did not eventuate.

The gold rush was on when Sam came to Australia in 1874. He may have emigrated from China in search of wealth or possibly just a more secure future. Whether his expectations were grand or realistic, I cannot help but think that he might have been disillusioned by the reception given to Chinese immigrants of the period. The Queensland government had become nervous about the influx of Chinese into the goldfields and passed repressive legislation aimed at limiting the number of Chinese entering Australia. These regulations  began with the quarantining of ships carrying Chinese immigrants, followed by a series of increased levies on Chinese goldminers and gold traders and a 30 pound ‘capitation fee’ for Chinese immigrants (a substantial sum of money in 1884). Chinese were excluded from any new goldfield unless an Asian or African had discovered the mine. The number of Chinese immigrants a ship could carry was changed from 1:10 tons of cargo to 1:50 tons in order to discourage Chinese immigration, but still the Chinese came in search of a better life.

Given the paucity of information about Sam Foo in official documents, it is tempting to speculate on the reasons for his apparent determination to obscure or conceal the facts of his life. Why, for instance, is there no record of divorce between Sam and Hannah Lock? Then as now, marriage to a native-born Australian may have been the simplest way to acquire Australian citizenship. If Sam’s marriage to Hannah was one of convenience, he may have been fearful that discovery could lead to deportation. Fear of discovery might also account for the inconsistent information Sam gave about his date of birth. Failing to register on the electoral roll might have been another stratagem for lying low but could also be explained by an inability to read English. Sam could write (his signature is on even the earliest of the documents I have uncovered) but he may not have been fluent enough in English to read a voting paper. On the other hand, Sam ran a successful business in Surat for more than 20 years, suggesting that he had at least a rudimentary command of spoken if not written English. All of this is speculation, and conjecture is risky. What is acceptable or commonplace today might have been uncommon and possibly even scandalous more than one hundred years ago. It’s fair to say that today we are tracked from birth to death but, in Australia at least, our forebears had a much better chance of escaping official scrutiny by supplying contradictory information (no computer cross-checking of data). Contradictions make the job of the family historian so much more challenging.

Trolling through dusty tomes to find long-buried documents is tough work. Finding records is exciting. Fingering pages with ragged edges, reading letters written more than 140 years ago in the quaint deferential English of the period, is curiously satisfying. Researching the history of an era or area is stimulating and informative. For example, Surat was named after an Indian city of the same name by an officer of the British Army who had served in India. Surat was an important stop on the Cobb & Co. Coach route. Bread and mail (amongst other things) were transported by coach. Bread from Sam’s bakehouse could have found its way to Yuleba and Roma. Since one of my aims is to find a photograph of Sam, I researched photographic collections associated with the Cobb & Co. Coach from the 1800s until 1929 (without success, as it turned out).

Knowing where to look for historical documents seems an obvious prerequisite for genealogical research, but I confess that my knowledge base was deficient in this respect when I began my search. I have acquired some knowledge of the collections in the various archival institutions as my research continues. I am concentrating now on colonial records for evidence of Sam’s arrival in Australia and hope at last to find a photograph of him. It would please me to look upon his face for the first time, to include in my family history a photograph of the elusive Sam Foo and pass on to my children an image of their great-grandfather.

Geraldine Lee