who was John Ray, and why did he have the same surname as Mary Ann?
In the convict records she was described as “Single”. That too could be wrong, but we have no evidence that they married. It seemed unlikely that she would have a tattoo of her father’s name, and more likely that she carried the name of a lover. Given its prominent position and the fact that his was the only name spelled out, I decided to look for a man named John Ray who might have been the man with whom she began her life in Liverpool, perhaps after running away from her home in Ireland at about the age of 14. That was the hypothesis to be tested. I did not find anything very convincing under the names of Mary Ann or John Ray. To find a possible location in Ireland, I looked for a Mary Ann Clarke, rather than Ray, born at a time consistent with the age of Mary Ann Ray at her trial and upon arrival in Tasmania, which pointed to the later months of 1823 or early 1824, if those ages were accurate which they might well not have been. There was only one such birth in the IGI, for Ireland,
