The D'Arcy Archive
Lives against the state that governed them

The Timeline

Who this family were living under, and what it did to them. The point is not when people were born — it is what was happening around them when they were.

Every page on this site is about people. This one is about the state they lived under — because in an archive built almost entirely out of government paper, the state is not background. It is the reason the records exist at all.

The bands are the state, not the family

Georgian Britain 1714–1837
Convict New South Wales 1788–1840
Colonial Queensland 1859–1901
The Commonwealth 1901–1975
18001850190019502000
Two bands end before the bar begins. The chart above starts in 1770, where this family's records thicken. The hamlet and its people are documented from the twelfth century, but across four hundred years the archive holds perhaps a dozen records — drawing them to scale would squash everything else to make room for almost nothing. They are listed below, and their events are in the list that follows.
Before the surname 1154–1485

The hamlet of Swanhunger is in the free-warren charters of Henry II, Richard I, John and Edward I, and a family takes its name from it. This band is here because the archive's evidence now reaches it, not because the family line does — nothing joins these people to the Sanigers of the registers.

Tudor and Stuart Gloucestershire 1485–1714

The muster of 1608, the Berkeley estate deeds, and Smyth of Nibley writing the survey of the hundred in about 1639. The surname is in all three, in eight spellings, two centuries before the parish registers this archive reads.

Georgian Britain 1714–1837

Robert D'Arcy's whole life, and his son's first thirty-five years. A standing army, a global war every twenty years, and a Board of Ordnance that commissioned engineers without recording where they came from.

Convict New South Wales 1788–1840

Transportation. It is what brought this family to Australia: not free settlement but a garrison posting aboard a convict ship.

Colonial Queensland 1859–1901

Separation from New South Wales. A new colony needed a Government Printing Office, a gaol, an electric telegraph and a police force, and this family staffed all four.

The Commonwealth 1901–1975

Federation, then two wars that took four men out of one family.

What was happening to them

48 events. The marked ones are the hinges — the moments after which this family is somewhere else, or someone else.

48 dated events · 1189–2010

Show

1150–11991

1250–12991

1300–13496

1350–13994

1400–14492

1500–15491

1550–15991

1600–16493

1650–16991

1750–17995

1800–184912

1850–18995

1900–19495

2000–20491

The bands are the state, not the family. Read the two together and the pattern is hard to miss: this family goes where a government sends it, and gets written down when a government writes it down.

The spine → · Places → · How far back →