My first encounter with the name Teager was the marriage certificate of my great-great-grandmother, Victoria Julia Hiah, née Teager, when she married the Amoy Chinese storekeeper, Ah Hiah, in 1873. My initial assumption was that both of her parents listed on the marriage certificate – James and Ellen Teager, née Farrell – were Irish. Or perhaps it was Teague. My great-great aunt Maude Hiah identified as Maude Teaguer. There were also references to a Jim Taker.

But which was it – Taker, Teager, Teaguer, or even Teague? As it turned out, it was Taker, Teager, and Teaguer!

Let’s get Teague out of the way as we have no references to it in the family history. The Forebears web site has it as the 14,262nd most common surname with 3,656 in the United States in 1880. SurnameDB has it as a Manx, Irish, or Cornish surname with quite a few variations.

Forebears has Taker as the 404,308th most common surname with 21 in the US in 1880. It does not appear in SurnameDB.

SurnameDB has Teager as an “unusual and interesting surname… possibly Ancient British.” Forebears gives it a German, Dutch, Swedish, English, or French origin and ranks it 628,294th with 64 in the US in 1880.

Teaguer is 11,630,812nd in Forebears, with 24 in the US in 2014 and none in 1880. Well, there were some in Australia!

Internet searches for Teaguer only show it as a rare first name or a term for inhabitants of Chincoteague Island in Virginia, USA. Occurrences in things like Trove seem to be mainly Optical Character Recognition (OCR) failures. I have not found any legitimate occurrences of Teaguer outside the ones who are part of the family, though – interestingly – there is a Teaguer Street in Wilson, a suburb of Perth. My great-great-great uncle Edward, his wife Gertrude, and children seem to be the only Teaguers who lived in Perth. It is likely that the street is named after him as many of the streets in the Canning District are named after early land owners. This is still being investigated.

There also seem to be more than the usual variations encountered in documents, indices, and signatures include Teager, Teaguer, Teagar, Teagner, Teagher, Teanger, Teague, Toager, Tager, Taker, Teker, Tucker, Seager, and Yeager. Many of them are transcription errors when the indices were created or OCR errors.

Trying to find information about James Teager and his ancestry seemed to be a dead end. Overall, I was getting nowhere for anything earlier than the marriage certificates of James and Ellen’s children.

Ellen Farrell was definitely Irish, so that part was correct – though she may have been O’Farrell.

It turned out that James Teager was an Amoy Chinese man who went by the name Jim Taker in Australia. This was a game-changer for the course of further research and making sense of the names [01]. Was the family name originally a misheard Chinese name? Possibly. Perhaps Jim or James chose a Western or Western-sounding name, like my other Chinese ancestor in Australia, Ah Hiah, who also used the Western alias John Williams.

Jim had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1844 as a convict from Mauritius where he had been known as “Ovel.” We don’t know the origin or significance of this name except that it may have been influenced by French speakers in Mauritius. He used the same name in Van Diemen’s Land. He absconded in late 1853 and made his way to Adelaide where he married in 1855 as “James Ovel.” By 1856, he was using “Jim Taker” in Victoria and New South Wales.

Further investigation led to several discoveries: Jim Taker had used aliases of Ah Coe, Ah Tick, Ah Taker, and perhaps more. He signed his name in Chinese characters to his deposition at his 1857 trial. This gave his name as 張 得 – Cheong Dak, if pronounced in Cantonese, as seems to have been more likely in Australia [02]. Indeed, his son Edward was said to have been of the Cheong clan in a 1896 newspaper article. Being from Amoy, though, Jim is more likely to have pronounced it more like Chang De in the Hokkien dialect of Amoy.

So we have established the use of the name Jim Taker. Most references to him between 1856 and 1887 use this name. Jim could apparently neither read nor write English, so he probably never wrote his “English” name. His wife, Ellen, could at least sign her name and could apparently read. Almost all news reports or references initiated by him are to Jim Taker. Documents initiated by Ellen – their marriage certificate, their daughters’ marriage certificates, as examples – are James.

Then something strange happens: from the mid-1870s, the surname becomes Teager. And then in the 1890s, it becomes Teaguer.

So, Taker seems to be the original documented spelling of the surname in Australia. Teager is used fairly consistently in official documents – often initiated by Ellen (senior) – from 1873 (the marriage of Victoria Julia) to around 1894. With the second marriage of Edward James in 1895, the Teaguer variant is generally used. An anomaly is a newspaper reference to Ellen (senior) and Edward in 1880 as Teaguer.

After discussing the surnames and global statistics earlier, it turns out that all of that probably had no bearing on the evolution of Taker to Teaguer within the family.

There is some evidence that Jim was baptised in Adelaide which is where the “James” came from. “Jim” was probably his choice for everyday use. “Taker” was probably derived from a variation of the “Dak” or “De” in his Chinese name.

There are a couple of other factors at play: Ellen’s probably strong Irish accent and a desire to make her children as “white” as possible. She was a country girl imported to Adelaide to work as a domestic or farm servant.

English pronunciations of Taker, Teager, and Teaguer were probably “take-er,” “tee-ger,” and “tee-ger,” respectively. But what about how Ellen would pronounce them? Perhaps “Tay-kr,” “Tay-gr,” and “Tay-gr.”

By the later part of the 19th Century, true Teagers from England started arriving in Australia.

The spelling of Teaguer seems to have been a deliberate choice as it is a rare spelling that Europeans would not have encountered and the inclusion of the “u” does not come naturally from any pronunciation or phonetics. Other than the anomalous mention in 1880, Edward was the first to use that spelling after being released from prison in 1894 and resuming work as a Chinese interpreter. His marriage in 1895 uses Teaguer. Some court news reports still used the old spelling as the reporters would have been familiar with that. When the family moved to Perth, they used Teaguer.

Summing up, Taker is effectively a made-up name in this context, as is Teaguer. Originating with “Jim Taker” from Amoy, China, the children were born as Taker, generally married as Teager, and died as Teaguer if after 1894 – including Ellen – unless they died in childhood as Taker. As a result, Jim and his children are listed as Taker on this web site. Edward Taker is the only male child who had children, who were most likely Teaguer, but the surname seems to die out with that generation.

For the purposes of this blog and research – and for consistency of record keeping – I have standardised on people’s birth surnames. Categories and menus are be structured to allow access by  married surnames or later spellings, where applicable.

The “Birth” and “Marriage” columns show the surname on the relevant document. The “Death” column shows the father’s surname on the relevant document.

I don’t have birth certificates for most of the children. They may be hiding under other variations of Taker/Teker, but are documented as Taker. Elizabeth Ann’s birth certificate is indexed as Teker. She  died in childhood. Mary Ann Edith had no children. All who married were Teager, with the exception of Edward’s second marriage as Teaguer.

The “Birth,” “Marriage,” and “Death” columns show the mother’s maiden surname on the relevant document.

Ellen Taker (as Ellen Teager – the grandmother) is often the witness on the birth certificate. All have Teager on their birth certificates. but Teaguer on marriage certificates.

The “Birth,” “Marriage,” and “Death” columns show the mother’s maiden surname on the relevant document.

They seem to have retained the Teager spelling until at least 1899.

The “Birth,” “Marriage,” and “Death” columns show the mother’s maiden surname on the relevant document.

Edward apparently married twice – “A Teager” and Gertrude Pearce. There may have been two children, one male and one female. Children of Edward and Gertrude would have been Teaguer. No documents have been discovered so far, other than a travel record for a Miss M Teaguer, who was 26 in 1921.