FHACT April Monthly Meeting
23rd March 2026
By Engagement Committee
FHACT April Monthly Meeting: Tuesday 7 April at 7pm. (In person at the FHACT Education Room, Cook Community Hub, Templeton Street, Cook, or online via Zoom].
All welcome. Members and guests interested in attending should register for this event here.
Topic: Shall we gather at the river – the search for George Murray Burne
Special Guest Speaker: Dr Jennifer Allard
George Murray died a lonely death on a winter’s night, caught up in a wire fence near Uriarra, New South Wales. The Queanbeyan Observer reported both the circumstances of his death and the results of the subsequent autopsy. However, George’s beginning remained a mystery to all who knew of him.
George Murray Burne's tragic story has waited more than a hundred years to be told. All anyone knew about the third eldest son of Natal pioneer, John Burne and his second wife, Isabella Tyson, was that after becoming an attorney, he left abruptly for Australia sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century, leaving behind his wife and five children to live under a cloud of shame.
Join us as Jennifer Allard discusses the journey she took and paths followed to conduct the genealogical research that proves conclusively that the rabbiter, George Murray, whose death was reported in the Queanbeyan Age and Observer in 1917, was her missing third great uncle, George Murray Burne.
Dr Jennifer Allard lives with her husband, Raymond, in Ottawa, Canada. Jennifer is a native of South Africa. After completing her degree in engineering at the University of Natal, she moved to Canada to complete her doctorate and stayed. Now retired, Jennifer has found her passion in researching and documenting her family’s stories. Her goal is to capture those heroes from her past and preserve their experiences for her cousins, her children and her grandchildren. Her research has taken her to England, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and back to South Africa, as she and Raymond did their best to walk the places her ancestors knew and to see the sights they saw.