Most of the past month has seen a continuation of reorganising all of my records. I also started looking at better ways to search Trove and manage the results.

Searching Trove using the “text:” option reduces the number of resulting records, so I have been concentrating on “text:Teaguer” and finding some interesting results:

An Elizabeth Teaguer was reported to have died in Subiaco, Western Australia, in February 1937. The death notice gives her age as 63 [01]. This would mean that she was born in 1873/1874. If she was related to our family, this is too late for her to have been a daughter of Jim and Ellen Taker and certainly too early to have been a child of Edward Teaguer. What are the possibilities?

1. Unrelated to the Taker/Teager/Teaguer family.
2. Another wife of our Edward Teaguer.
3. Wife of the possible second Edward Teaguer (see below).
4. Related to “Inspector Teaguer” (see below).

Further investigation showed her to have been Elizabeth Taguer, so unrelated to our family and the death notice carrying a spelling mistake by either the typesetter at the newspaper or by the the person placing the notice. She does, however, have a sad story and a connection to another .

So far, the apparent rarity – if not uniqueness  – of the Teaguer surname and particularly Edward Teaguer have allowed a confidence that references are to our Edward Teaguer.

So far, most of the references to Edward Teaguer (Taker) in Perth have been to his work as a Chinese interpreter. These are currently from 1898 to 1900.

We also have:

• E Teaguer & Co, greengrocers, located in Commercial Road, Midland Junction. They advertised in 1897.
• Edward Teaguer, “restaurant-keeper,” apparently near Fremantle Park in 1899.

This also returns us to another minor mystery…

The majority of Google “hits” when searching for “Teaguer” in Australia are references to Teaguer Street in the suburb of Wilson, Western Australia. So far, no information about who the street was named after. The street runs between Wendouree Road and Bungaree Road.

Several newspaper shipping reports in December 1879 and January 1880, mention a 60-ton (or 84-ton) schooner, the Lily, that arrived from Teaguer Harbor via Eucla on 23 November under its master, H J Theakston. I have not found any other references to Teaguer Harbor (sic). Research so far shows that the Lily spent much of its time sailing around South Australia to places like Port Victor, MacDonnell Bay, and Edithburgh in South Australia. The mention of an arrival from Teaguer Harbor via Eucla – on the Nullabor/Great Australian Bight just to the west of the Western Australia/South Australia border – suggests that this Teaguer Harbor is further west. It’s either an error in the reports or perhaps an old name for somewhere else, in which case who was it named after and what is it called now? [02].

One of the newspaper reports about the “Chinese Gambling” in 1898 that involved Edward Teaguer as court interpreter mentions an Inspector Teaguer of the Waterside Police Station. As this seems to be the only reference to this person, I believe that the reporter confused the name of Edward Teaguer – the interpreter – with the Police Inspector [03].