This is the house that arrives through the marriage at the centre of the record, and until August 2026 it was the one the record could not follow. It can now. Ten generations stand between Charmeon and a font in a Somerset church: from Stogursey, where the family's children were baptised from 1657; west onto Exmoor to Cutcombe; and out, in 1857, to Bathurst in New South Wales.
They were not a family of coats and mottoes. Generation after generation the records call them farmers, yeomen, husbandmen, blacksmiths — people who held land and worked metal. What they left behind is not a shield. It is a set of places you can still walk to, and a body of work that outlived them.
Where they stood
Stogursey
Somerset, near the coast
Where the documented line begins. William Fish and his wife Elizabeth had children baptised here from 1657; their son William married Ann Sweetin in the parish church in 1695; and four generations of the family were christened, married and buried in this one parish before they moved. One register book holds nearly a century of them.
Taunton
the county town
Lewis Fish married Mary Cuniber at St James's church in December 1741, both of them living in the town at the time. Their son carried his mother's surname as his middle name, which is how the family's own thread stays visible across that generation.
Cutcombe and Wheddon Cross
high on Exmoor
The family's Exmoor home, and the one place in this story where you could stand in three separate spots in an afternoon. George Fish married Joany Crockford in the parish church in August 1819, with her kinsman as a witness. At Higher House Farm, the 1841 census lists the household: George the farmer, Joan his wife, and the children — among them Joseph, six, and George, four. Those two boys are the whole later story: one would go to Bristol and brew, the other would sail for Australia and build a foundry. Their father died the following year. Up the hill at Hawkington Farm their grandfather Joseph farmed, and one Sunday in March 1851 he walked into that same church, sat down in his pew before the service, and died there. The county paper reported it, and called him highly respected by all who knew him.
What they made
The forge, and the crossing
1857
George Fish, baptised at Cutcombe in January 1836, left England in 1857 as a blacksmith of twenty-one. He sailed on the Zemindar and landed in New South Wales on the twenty-third of August — a date worth holding for a moment, because Charmeon married on the twenty-third of August, one hundred and twenty-nine years later to the day. Two lists were made of that voyage, and they hold different things. The ship's own immigrant list is the one the record now has, all nine pages of it in the clerk's hand: there he is on page 8, among the single men, between an Easley and a Frape — Fish, George, twenty-one, blacksmith. The second list, drawn up for the same passengers, is the one that recorded a man's parents and any relatives already in the colony, and that is where his are written: his father, who had died back at Cutcombe fifteen years before; his mother, living still in Somerset; and a sister already out here — Mrs Jane Garratt, up near the Hunter. That page the record has not yet seen: it is not among the ones the archive has put online, and it is the next thing to ask for. One thing on the list the record does have is not settled. Where it asks for a man's native place, the clerk wrote Gloucester — not Somerset. Everything else the record holds puts him at Cutcombe: his baptism, his parents, his sister. His sister Jane had married in Gloucestershire the year before he sailed. The record states it and leaves it open. He settled at Bathurst and set up his smithy at the Village, Perthville. The forge became G Fish & Sons, making farm implements, coaches, windmills and later water pumps, with a stand at the Bathurst show from the year it started. By 1860 he had a foundry in Russell Street in the town, and it was not a village smithy: it melted steel and sold it to H. V. McKay, whose harvesters mechanised Australian farming, and to Edgells; and it built coaches for Cobb & Co. The family remembers that he built the first single-furrow mouldboard plough made in Australia, and that one of them was still in the family a century and a half later — a family memory, told as one. He died near Bathurst in 1901, and the local paper carried his obituary.
The mayor's chair
1957
Charmeon's grandfather, George Fredrick Fish — Fred — took the works over in 1925, when it employed a hundred and twenty-five men, and was Deputy Mayor of Bathurst from 1947, then Mayor of Bathurst from 1957 to 1959. A hundred years after his grandfather stepped off the boat with a hammer, the family held the mayoralty of the town he had walked into.
What the works became
1860 to today
It did not stay a foundry, and it did not stop. The works went on making and mending through two more generations, took on retail alongside the manufacturing around 1948, and gave up the foundry itself in 1957 — after that it sold and serviced the machinery it had once cast. Terry took it on in 1960 with his brother John, and turned it to grain and stock feed; in 2005 it moved off Russell Street, where George had lit the first fire, to Lambert Street. It is trading in Bathurst today, a hundred and sixty-odd years on, and still called Fish & Sons.
A schooling, kept up
from the 1870s
The blacksmith made sure his sons were educated, and they went to St Stanislaus' College at Bathurst. The family kept going there: Charmeon's father Terence was a pupil, and so were her people after him — four generations through one school's gates, a hundred and thirty years apart.
The family now
Charmeon's father, Terence Joseph Fish, lived his whole life at Bathurst — Rocket Street, then Kelso — went to St Stanislaus' College, and worked the grain and stock feed at the back of the old family workshop, which is the last working thread from George's forge. He died in 2023. Her mother Robyn is at Bathurst, and Charmeon is the eldest of their five children.
The coat they did not have
There is no coat of arms for this house, and the record went looking properly before it said so — three old books, in three different ways. That search has its own page, because how a record looks matters as much as what it finds.
Going to Somerset
Three of the places on this page are still there, and they are close enough to each other to see in a couple of days. There is a printable version of them — one sheet per place, with what the record holds about each, in the order you would travel them.