Paul Gooding's ancestors were transported to Australia for the theft of a piece of fabric and a load of lead.
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As the president of the Fellowship of First Fleeters in the Riverina, Mr Gooding can track his direct lineage back to Andrew Goodwin and Lydia Munroe, who arrived in Sydney in 1789.
"I have two connections to the First Fleet, [through] Andrew Goodwin and Lydia Munroe," Mr Gooding said.
"They left England on different ships but they were eventually moved on to the same ship and by the time they arrived five months later, Lydia was pregnant."
The couple were married in a tent and transported to Norfolk Island a few years later.
"When that penal colony was closed, the convicts were moved to Hobart," Mr Gooding said.
"Andrew was a free man by then, they'd both been sentenced to seven years."
Andrew had been convicted for stealing lead from the roof of a London church building in 1784, with another man, William Butler.
The load amounted to just 20 shillings.
Under oath, William Butler explained that he had come by the lead as a means of payment for errands he had run for an unknown third party.
He explained, "I have a sick mother to provide for, I have been long out of work".
Found guilty, they were locked up awaiting transportation. Andrew was taken aboard the Scarborough.
Meanwhile, Lydia Munroe and Ann Forbes was convicted for the theft of "ten yards of printed cotton to the value of 20 shillings" from a haberdashery in October 1786.
Their death sentences were commuted to transportation and Lydia found herself aboard the Prince of Wales.
Storms during the journey made conditions on her ship particularly harsh.
The ship's doctor wrote of the hardship: "I visited the Prince of Wales, where I found some of the female convicts with evident symptoms of the scurvy, brought on by the damp and cold weather we had lately experienced".
Many of the ill women were transported to other ships to increase their chances of recovery. It is assumed Lydia was transferred to the Scarborough where she met the man who was to be her husband.
Together, the couple parented 11 children. Mr Gooding is related to the youngest child, Andrew, who was born in Hobart and coincidentally married a woman with the same name as his mother, Lydia.
"It's never been said, no-one called her an alcoholic but it seems like she was one," Mr Gooding said.
"She was locked up and often put into the women's factory. At one point her head was shaved as a punishment and she had an iron collar put on her neck."
The younger Andrew and his bride had nine children together before Lydia died unexpectedly at the hands of her husband.
"He had come home and she was drunk, he'd given her a whack and she'd hit her head on the table then died," Mr Gooding said.
"He [Andrew] was locked up for 12 months for her manslaughter."
The story of Andrew and Lydia is one of many shared among the group of 'First Fleeters' in the Riverina. Each month, the 44 members of the Albury-Wodonga chapter meet to discuss their journey through ancestry.
On May 15, the group will bring their gathering to Wagga's Rules Club for the first time.
"Everyone in our group has had to prove their lineage back to the First Fleet," Mr Gooding said.
"In piecing together your family tree, you can sometimes find you're related to a minister or a deputy prime minister."
With the group's membership spanning the nation, Mr Gooding has been introduced to many extended members of his family he never knew existed.
"In lots of cases, they'll know they're related to those First Fleeters but they don't know about me.
"You've got to remember that there's 11 children from Andrew and Lydia and then each of those children had another 10, and the girls all married men with different surnames so there's hundreds of names in just the first few generations in Australia."