My first visit to the Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) in North Melbourne was to get copies of a couple of documents relating to Jim Taker. Pauline Rule’s notes about Jim Taker helped to open up search possibilities and strategies.

I had thought myself fortunate that William Hiah had married Victoria Julia Teager. This had started a fairly solid trail of birth, marriage, and death (BDM) registrations, even if it is getting costly to buy copies of each of these. But it is quite limited compared to the previously shadowy James Teager – Jim Taker.

The almost constant run-ins with the law by Jim Taker and his son, Edward Teager, have resulted in a wealth of information about them in newspapers, police gazettes, and prison records. Particularly illuminating was making sense of the two reference numbers on Jim’s prison record held by PROV and available online. The two numbers – 3464 (1857) in the name of Jim Taker and 7433 (1865) in the name of Ah Coe – were linked by the prison authorities at some point after Ah Coe’s conviction when they determined that Jim Taker and Ah Coe were one and the same. A second conviction in 1867 on Ah Coe’s record, notes that he was tried as “Ah Tick”. Oh, the complications of names and aliases. This is all recorded in the article on Jim Taker. I don’t have any BDM records for Jim. Edward, I only have marriage, though there were possibly two marriages for him.