Government records are always accurate - yeah right!

Great granddad William HENDERSON has been getting some attention of late as more of the dna several of us inherited is identified.

It occurred to me however that I'd never actually looked at his official immigration records.
After all, I have the ship board diary he wrote and knew he arrived in Port Chalmers on the 8th July 1872, and travelling by steamer "Golden Age" to Dunedin the following day, going to the barracks.

With FamilySearch having digitized the assisted immigration records from our National Archives off I went to check the images.
Couldn't find him!
When the obvious fails, start looking at the less obvious.
The voyage has been identified, and thus indexed, as having arrived in Wellington.

Examination of the papers associated explained why.
Although the cover of the file shows the "William Davie" as "for Otago",

 the next page shows it as arriving Wellington.

Newspaper reports

do confirm that great granddad wasn't lost, and his diary does not show the ship landing anywhere at all other than Port Chalmers after it left Greenock.

William recorded most of the daily lat/long values during the voyage.
See the William Davie voyage for more details, click on the voyage link for the map, and the markers on the map for the dates and any notes.

More connections

Yes the LEITH women noted a day or two ago were related, aunt/niece.
And the connections continued!

Sarah Abernethay LEITH married Thomas JOHNSTON, one of my McEWAN rellies.
Their daughter Sarah Margery JOHNSTON married a George Miles, (later Myles) TURNBULL.
An ancestry tree has this family, and shows George's TURNBULL ancestors as being of Melrose, with, wait for it, John TURNBULL and Bessie FAMILTON, who married at Earlston in 1718, at the end of the tree.

Bessie is highly likely to be one of my Earlston FAMILTONs, but we'll likely never prove that given we're back at the start of the Earlston registers here (at least I think we are, yet to fully re-check that bit).
I've not yet checked the reputed link from George's grdfather Thomas TURNBULL (b. abt 1801 Melrose, ROX, d. 1891 Georgefield, Waipahi, Otago) back to John and Bessie (FAMILTON) TURNBULL, but do note that John and Bessie's family were all baptised in Melrose from 1721 to 1737 and John was living at Gattonside when he married Bessie.

A snippet from the 1899 NZ obit of Helen TURNBULL nee TAIT, wife of Thomas, and grdmother of George Miles TURNBULL:
"... born in Berwickshire, Scotland, on the 5th July, 1814, and, with her husband and family, came to New Zealand in the ship Vicksburg in the year 1867 ... the deceased's father, Joseph Tait, an influential farmer on the Borders; sold to Lord Polworth the sheep that formed the nucleus of the world-famed flock of Border Leicesters."