In 1841 Jonathan Pearn and his wife Elizabeth made the bold step of leaving their home in Cornwall, England to begin a new life on the other side of the world. Their story, and that of their extended kindred, has been told in the book titled "New Horizons" by John Pearn and Vena Pearn and published in 1992.

New Horizons: the biographies of Jonathan Pearn and of William Henry Pearn, cornishmen and their families. With an account of their ancestors and of their colonial emigration and lives as pioneers in the Antipodes. 366p ISBN 0 86776 470 8 Includes Index

The lives of ordinary men and women so easily pass unrecorded; yet it is such lives that form the real essence of history. Time brings an insight and a true interpretation of the deeds of such common folk.

New Horizons. Perceived by many, but sought with courage and a spirit of adventure by very few. The courage to travel to an unknown world, and to an unknown life in order that one's family might have wider opportunities, is surely the stuff of which proud dynasties are made.

The short biographies described in this book capture a glimpse of an artisan family from Cornwall and the chronology of their lives. The adventures of one family are perhaps insignificant in the broad scheme of things. The lives of even one pioneer family may reveal, however, a glimpse of a broader tapestry - a picture of a whole generation of ancestors who left the conservative patterns of former generations, and who carved a new life in unknown parts across the Anitpodean world.

The "new horizons" encompassed not only a new physical environment 20,000 kilometres across the world, but also a new social order within a new society. Most of the early colonists in New Zealand, and the free colonists in Australia, were not men and women of status. The men were not landed farmers, but farm labourers; were not independent business owners but assistants. Some were journeyman craftsmen, but most were not independent tradesmen. Rather, they were artisans on large estates or craftsmen-employees in firms or businesses. The women were all these and mothers and homemakers as well. It was the vision of the future social and material independence that formed the major stimulus to start a new life.

By the courageous act of emigration - albeit in middle life - these pioneering families were able to become land-owning farmers, tradesmen and businessmen. Often, within the space of one generation in the mid nineteenth century, a colonist to New Zealand or Australia left the ranks of tenant-holders, the first of his line for perhaps a millennium. One sees in the lifespan of a single emigrant, this great quantum leap to social independence, with much greater freedom for individual successors to choose the destiny of their lives.

History asks what were the qualities needed to emigrate from the British Isles to New Zealand and to Australia? A study of the extended kindred described in this book suggests that a spirit of adventure, a sense of humour, resourcefulness, independence and above all, perseverance formed the makeup of those who survived.

An extended family of common folk has its hallmarks of success not in public notice, and not in the public record of famous person or events, but rather in the initial survival and subsequent expansion of kindred members into every walk of life.

Vena Pearn and John Pearn

Contemporary evidence indicates that there were two demographic concentrations of Pearns in Cornwall - one with successors still in North-east Cornwall, and another with successors in the Looe area in the south. In both areas, however, there was the same emphasis on carpentry as a trade among male members of the kindred, a family tradition which extended to the twentieth century. This tradition was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century. One may speculate that an early ancestor had a flair for working with wood, and had sons to whom he passed these skills and his name.

This account begins in two regions surrounding Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, and passes to the north-east in the middle 1700s, to the parishes of St Gennys, St Trudy and St Juliot and finally to Minster and Forrabury near the sea, in the late eighteenth century. It settles on a Cornish harbour village where the son of a carpenter married the daughter of a stonemason and talked of new horizons and a new life.