Thomas Jopson, Captain's Steward aboard HMS Terror

Thomas Jopson was a Captain's Steward aboard the Terror on the 1845 Franklin expedition. In the expedition's muster books his birthplace is given as Marylebone, Middlesex, and his age as 27, which would put his birth around 1818. He previously served in the navy aboard the same ship as part of the 1839-43 Sir James Ross' Antarctic expedition. 

Prior to the Antarctic expedition, he had served aboard HMS Racer in 1838, which was his first entry into the Navy, according to Ralph Lloyd-Jones in The men who sailed with Franklin. He was 5'5" tall with a fair complexion, hazel eyes, brown hair, and a scar on his right leg. 

George John Cann, Able Seaman aboard HMS Terror

In 1845 Sir John Franklin and his crew of over 120 men left England on board the expedition’s two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. Their goal was to finish charting the Northwest Passage, a sea lane through the Canadian Arctic. They did not achieve this goal. All members of the Franklin expedition died, and since no one was left to tell the story, what happened to them is shrouded in mystery. 

George John Cann was one of the men on board HMS Terror. The crew of the Franklin expedition were recorded in a document called a muster book or muster roll in 1845. George J Cann’s entry listed him as an AB (able-bodied seaman) on the Terror and gave his birthplace as Battersea, Middlesex. He gave his age as 23 years old, so he was born sometime around 1822. In actuality, as we'll discover later, he was born in 1825 and was 20 years old when the expedition left England. 

William Sinclair, Able Seaman aboard HMS Terror

When I began researching genealogy for men who died as part of the Franklin expedition, the first person I seriously looked into was steward William Gibson. From research articles written about him, I knew his family had moved to Australia, and I was able to trace a maternal line from his sister Charlotte Donaldson Gibson to a handful of living descendants in Australia and New Zealand. In the end, my research didn’t amount to anything – it turns out the study already had a DNA profile for a Gibson descendant – but it did give me experience in working with Australian and New Zealand records. I felt comfortable with them, and I wanted to stay within that domain if I could.

 

One of the things I found when looking into Charlotte Donaldson Gibson was that her obituary actually mentioned that she had a brother who died sailing with Sir John Franklin. Seeing that, it made me wonder if other obituaries might mention having relatives who died on the expedition. Australia and New Zealand both have great websites that archive historical newspapers, Trove and Papers Past, respectively, so I did a search in both and found the obituary of a Mary Isabella Smith (nee Young). It states she was the niece of the late John Sinclair of the Sir John Franklin expedition. 

 

A complication: there is no John Sinclair of the Franklin expedition.

 

An Introduction

In September of 2024 it was announced that the remains of Captain James Fitzjames of the Franklin expedition had been identified. This immediately caught my interest. I’ve been fascinated by the Franklin expedition for several years now, but my interest was of a more casual nature. I’d google it a few times a year to check if Parks Canada had posted any new artefacts they’d retrieved. When the weather got cold enough for sun dogs, I'd bunker down and watch The Terror. That kind of thing.  

But the Fitzjames announcement really lit a fire. He'd been identified as part of a University of Waterloo study comparing the DNA of Franklin remains to the DNA of their living descendants. Suddenly, inexplicably, I've found myself spending my evenings researching members of the Franklin expedition and trying to find their living descendants in the hopes of contributing to this study as a third party. 

I intend to use this blog to post my genealogy research on the sailors that I've looked into, and what I learned about them and their families. My primary goal is to find descendants in a qualifying line for the DNA study; learning about the sailors themselves comes secondary to that. My hope is with more men identified, we'll be able to identify trends and learn more about the circumstances of the expedition's fate.