Scilla Harvey's Page

Having joined the Society in June, and given my name of interest as ‘Barnardo’ it has been no surprise to me that there have been no responses from anyone with links with the name. It quite obviously is not a German name, and there are no known Barnardos anywhere in Germany these days.

However, my dilemma with the name is that my great great grandfather, John Michaelis Barnardo did come from Germany - born in Prussia around 1800 and emigrated to Dublin in 1820. He set up a successful fur retail business, married into a Protestant family and had several children – one of whom was Thomas Barnardo who was later to work amongst children in the London slums and found the famous childrens’ charity – and the other was my great grandfather. He (JMB) maintained some links with his roots in Germany because 2 of his daughters went to live and marry there in later life – but he stayed in Ireland and later became a naturalised British subject. However, no records remain of his entry to Ireland because of the destruction of immigrants’ documents in one of the nationalist uprisings.

On his naturalisation papers he gave his birth place as Havelberg, Prussia.

There have many biographies written about my great great uncle Thomas Barnardo and those written soon after his death suggested that his father’s origins had been in Venice. He himself thought that there may have been a Spanish link, and Hamburg not Havelberg was the place he came from. Others have suggested that because of the name and the fur-business there is a strong Jewish link.

I made a trip to Brandenburg in September to look up the church records for Havelberg from 1700 to 1850. Unfortunately there were no records of Barnardo births, marriages or deaths. However, there were several ‘Michaelis’ names. A trip to the charming town of Havelberg revealed that there had been a significant Jewish community there in the 1700s-1850s, and that being sited on the Havel river, which flows into the Elbe and on to Hamburg the town had been quite a centre for trade and even ship-building throughout the years. One could imagine this being the place for JM Barnardo to start his business life.

So the questions remain: is the ‘Michaelis’ middle name indicative of a Jewish background? Could the absence of Barnardos from the Havelberg records indicate he was born and registered in a nearby town whose records are held elsewhere? Is it possible to find out when and from where he emigrated to Ireland in the 1820’s? Is it possible to find out if he lived in Hamburg for a while before emigrating? Where do we go from here?

One further mystery: although there are no Barnardos in Germany today (having checked the phone directories) and the only ones listed throughout Britain and N America today are nearly all confirmed relatives of mine, by far the biggest group to be found today is in South Africa – none of whom are trace-able relatives. Some research has been conducted into their origins, but nothing has become clear. Could they have had a common origin with my 2xg grandfather? Does anyone know of a link between eastern Germany and South Africa in the early 1800s – (leaving aside the obvious Hugenot or Dutch settler origins)?