By way of disclaimer I should first point out, before anybody else does, that I know that coats-of-arms do not descend by right to all holders of a name, nor really to any member of a family, even living relations, but are the personal prerogative of the individual to whom they were granted. Nevertheless, they serve well to add a splash of colour and interest to a page.
Having said that I can add that I feel very certain that "my" Morses would almost certainly not be armigerous. They seem to have come from fairly humble stock.
The first Morse whom I "met" was my wife's great great grandfather Edwin Morse when we first began to take an active interest in family history. Edwin arrived in Tasmania in 1855 on the ship Commodore Perry with his wife Jane Hucker and three children. With them were his brother Charles and some of his children. A few years earlier their brother, James, had also come to Tasmania. So their influence on that island was quite great, especially with their descendants' predisposition to having large families.
I will not lay out the full family lists here; they can be found on the "genealogy" pages (A link will be established here soon.) Rather I will provide a broad outline of how and where they settled and how they have spread across Australia and to other parts of the world. An important task will be to present some detail of the Morses who stayed in Britain, and to add the story of those who went to the U.S.A.
The Morse family originated in Somerset as far back as we know. As noted above, three Morse Brothers, James, Charles and Edwin came to Tasmania in the middle of the 19th Century. Their father was a William Morse. William's brother James also gave rise to a line of emigrants who set off to the United States, one descendant of whom is "Taffy", Mathilda Morrissey of Tennessee. Living descendants and researchers of the Morse families in Australia today include myself and Christopher Riley and Bev Richardson in Hobart, Tasmania.
While there is no really momentous event in the lives of this family we do know of one or two episodes other than the migrations. There was the occasion when one member bigamously married, the fault being on the part of the wife who did not admit of her prior marriage for some time afterwards. The ultimate outcome was for a family feud to develop over the esate of the wronged man, eventually leading to felonious behaviour on the part of some members of the family and their subsequent minor terms of imprisonment.
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