Ancestor Story
The story of William Henry Ruby, ship deserter, mine manager, and the man who started it all.
The name was William Ruby. Age twenty-two. Deserted his ship, the Tudor, at Williamstown, Melbourne, on 31 October 1864.
It is the most useful record we have of William Henry Ruby's arrival in Australia. He did not come through the formal channels. He came on a ship, looked at Victoria, and decided to stay.
What he was walking towards was the gold rush, and a colony that needed men who knew how to work hard. He had joined the merchant navy as a seaman from Devon, having lived with his grandparents since his father died when he was nine. The sea had been his way out. Australia was something else entirely.
He married Ruth in Sebastopol, Victoria in 1868. For the next two decades the birthplaces of their children trace a working life across the central Victorian goldfields. Ballarat, Timor, Inglewood, Craigie, Majorca, Maryborough. Each one a mine. Each one a chapter.
By 1884 he was managing the Napier Freehold Mine at Majorca, sinking the first shaft himself and holding full charge of the mine for seven years. He was associated with the Kong Meng Mine in its early days, and connected with the North Duke at Timor, the New Langi Logan at Ararat, the Prentice Freehold at Rutherglen, and mines at Landsborough, Dunolly and Havelock. Two regional newspapers marked his death in December 1917 as the passing of a man connected with some of the principal mines of the district.
The young man from Devon had become a founding figure of the Victorian mining era.
His eldest son James Henry Ruby became general secretary of the Engine Drivers and Firemen's Association of Australia. Another son, William John, died in circumstances that a coroner's inquest in 1909 could not fully explain, leaving four young children and questions that the family has carried ever since. William Henry's children raised families of their own in and around Melbourne, with one becoming the subject of this site's own case studies when the story of a granddaughter's birth was finally untangled more than a century later.
Victoria has been the family's heartland since William Henry first walked away from his ship. One branch moved north to Queensland. That branch includes me, a fourth generation Ruby descendant. I have spent years piecing together the documentary record of where this family came from and how they got here.
A family that now spans at least six generations.
Six generations from a deserter's notice in the Victorian Police Gazette. A family built on the goldfields, shaped by two world wars, spread across the country, and still here.
William Henry Ruby arrived with nothing and left something that has lasted a hundred and sixty years. The records prove it, generation by generation.
This story was reconstructed from primary source records including the Victorian Police Gazette deserter notice (1864), marriage registration (Sebastopol, 1868), mine management records, regional newspaper archives, and the coroner's inquest into the death of William John Ruby (1909). The research follows the principles of the Genealogical Proof Standard.
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