The first Australian member of the Flower family was brought to Australia after being convicted of stealing a comb worth 1 shilling and 10 pennies.
His name was Abraham Charles Flower, and after his seven-year transportation sentence, he became the start of a long line of Flowers in Australia.
Brian Ellis, Mr Flower's great-great-grandson, has extensively studied his family line, and discovered photographs and documents that connect his historic family to the River Captain's Cottage in Moama.
“There are over 200 of his descendants in the Moama cemetery,” Mr Ellis said.
Abraham Charles Flower’s son was Charles Flower, whose daughter was Mary Elizabeth Flower.
Mary married Edward Henry Ellis, Brian’s grandfather and, including Brian’s grandchildren, the family is seven generations strong in the region.
Mr Ellis was able to find a lot of his family history on the internet and by looking through convict and migration records and was helped in large part by the Echuca Moama Family History group.
Echuca-Moama Family History Group is a volunteer organisation of about 50 members who collect and preserve documents and resources relevant to those in the Murray River Council area and wider NSW, as well as Victoria.
Members of the Family History Group are residents of the Murray River Council Area and the Campaspe Shire.
The group promotes its facilities, equipment, and resources across the border.
This includes outlying Victorian and NSW communities such as Kyabram, Rochester, Barham, Lockington, Mathoura, Deniliquin, Womboota, Picola, and Patho.
All these records have been completed by volunteers who are members of the group.
The Echuca Moama Family History Group has been providing this community service for 41 years.
The group has obtained and preserved transcripts of honour rolls, cemetery records, microfilmed rate books, marriage records and hospital admissions.
It has developed and distributed newsletters, indexed local parish maps, published a series of Pioneer Books with information dating back to pre-1900 and answered thousands of research requests.
In the past seven years, the group has indexed the records of the small cemeteries in the Campaspe Shire.
Other major projects have been indexing of the Echuca Cemetery, and still ongoing is finding and restoring the records for the Moama Cemetery during the past 150 years.
Many of these records have been lost and the group is systematically tracking every death in the district to ascertain who is buried in the Moama Cemetery.
The group recently moved from the Port of Echuca heritage district to Old Telegraph Station in Moama after being offered residency by the Friends of Old Moama group and the Murray River Council.
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