Genealogist Paul Jerome Lareau (http://www.genealogywise.com/profile/PaulJLareau), and https://web.archive.org/web/20071029204108/http://www.lareau.org/index.html) assembled a large archive of material on the Bounty affair, the Pitcairn heritage and the Norfolk Island heritage. His dedicated website is no longer functional and Mr Lareau has advised the Society that his computer with the original files has failed. However, fortunately his website has been captured by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine service.
“In 1789, crewmembers of HMS Bounty, led by Masters Mate Fletcher Christian and Midshipman Ned Young, mutinied against the command of Lt. William Bligh. Bligh and his supporters were set adrift in the ship’s launch, and against all odds, Bligh led them over 3,000 miles to safety in Batavia (now Djakarta, Indonesia). The mutineers returned to Tahiti, where some stayed and were later captured. A handful of the mutineers along with their Tahitian consorts sailed the ship to Pitcairn Island where their descendants live today. This web site will tell you much about this famous event in maritime history, about which 6 movies, 1 play, and over 2,000 books and articles have been written.”
Link to Pitcairn and Bounty pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20060925011544/http://www.lareau.org//index.html (Sep. 2006).
Bounty page: https://web.archive.org/web/20071102230922/http://www.lareau.org/bounty.html (November 2007).
Pitcairn page: https://web.archive.org/web/20060925011105/http://www.lareau.org//pitc.html.
Genealogical tree
Paul Lareau has compiled a comprehensive dataset, preserved in a lareau-01.GED file which requires proprietary software GENviewer 2 to open: see the developer’s website http://www.mudcreeksoftware.com/genviewer2.html.
Society members are aware of some errors in Lareau’s work. Any researcher wishing to draw upon these records is invited to approach the Society first.
Background to Paul Lareau’s work
On 8 July 2022 Paul Jerome Lareau generously responded to an inquiry from the then Norfolk Island Institute (subsequently disbanded, its functions subsumed into the Norfolk Island Historical Society – this site – and the Knowledge and Learning Centre).
“Hi Geoff,
I did receive your email NII letter a few weeks ago, and received your “snail mail” copy the day before yesterday…
Sadly, I doubt if I have anything that will benefit the NII from this long ago. I only wish I could have known of the NII back in the day while I was active in my Pitcairn/Norfolk/Bounty project (1994 thru about 2000). I’m 80 years old now and have sort of chancy memory. This is going to be a “collection” of rather disorganized thoughts and memories of what I had here back then, what might have happened to it, and really just a “train of thoughts”.
My project started way back in high school (about 1958) when I compiled a notebook of information I could gather about the Bounty and it’s crew and the various movies that had been made about the affair over the years. About the same time as I started collecting Bounty info, I was just beginning to get involved in genealogy (which has been my lifetime hobby and research interest ever since.)
In about 1980 or so, I stumbled on the old Bounty notebook in the attic, got reinterested in the Bounty Saga, paired it up with my genealogy interests. (I was a public librarian by then.) I added bits and pieces to the notebook and ultimately on to an early PC, but not in any particularly serious way.
By about 1994, I had become very involved in the early Internet, wrote some very primitive programs to use to document my growing genealogy research. Somewhere in that period, I did set up a genealogy database for the families of the Bounty “cast of characters”, both mutineer and loyalist. Later I did find some research (mostly voter lists) from early Norfolk and did include those as well. Eventually I did produce a book, THE HMS (HMAV) BOUNTY GENEALOGIES. I believe that you have seen a copy of the 3rd edition. That sounds like a real formal book, but it was produced from typescript. and printed at “Kinko’s”, a do-it-yourself printing job shop. I do not remember how many copies were printed and spiral bound, but it was something like 50, I think.
As far as the Internet goes, I created and maintained an Internet site for Pitcairn & the Bounty as a part of what ultimately became my became my paul@Lareau.org personal web site. I kept the subsite & the website going for quite a few years (it’s now just my family email provider). I closed down the Pitcairn sub site, which was mounted & broadcasted via the Pitcairn radio network. At the time it went up, it was the 2nd or 3rd internet site in the Pacific, the others being Fiji and Tonga. We actually tried to make a go with advertising and selling Pitcairn Crafts for a few years, but the problems with getting and sending things via the “once in a while” ships that visited back then. Anyway, I never kept up with modern internet capabilities, everything added by hand from here in the USA. So it was very primitive, and when the Pitcairn government set up the official government site, we closed ours down. Unfortunately, the code for the Pitcairn subsite ad the original text of the 3rd edition book were destroyed on my computer during a Microsoft update or some computer glitch sometime in the 2000’s. That’s the story as I remember it, more or less. Now comes the miscellaneous hints or ideas in no discernible order.
* Based on the folks that were followers of our Pitcairn/Bou8nty saga database, we had about 100 followers that communicated via the Internet. Many are probably still around, somewhere, but I have no lists of the people who were involved, and my failing memory cells remember very few names.
* At one point, I had a personal library of about 50 or 75 books and pamphlets, and a lot of file folders full of notes. After we closed down the site, we tried to keep the interest folks together as a interest group, but it quickly faded away in this age of Facebook, Google, and sophisticated search apps. Since we were living in a condo and I wasn’t doing any new research any more, I asked around if any of the still active people wanted to gather and maintain the books & files. One very active woman in Tampa FL offered to take the published books, pamphlets, and some files. …
* The best person you need to find, however, is probably deceased (He was elderly at the time). His name was Herbert …
* I have not yet found any trace of my copy of the Bounty Genealogies book. …I want to coordinate the genealogies with my very enlarged genealogical records (now part of GENI (www.Geni.com), where I am very active. And that brings up another possible hint. On GENI, as part of their “interest Groups”, there is a Special Interest group for PItcairn & the Bounty. I’m theoretically part of it, but I’ve never participated. But the fellow who put it together is one of the folks I had in the internet group.
OK, obviously I’m very happy with your plans to put this stuff together at NII. … I just wish this was all happening back in 1999 when we were trying to find someone to do something like this.”