Naftel, Street, Tranter
A link to some delighful 18th-century portrait miniatures that have found their way to Australia, and some photographs from the same collection.
The State Library of New South Wales has an interesting collection of portrait miniatures from these families, connected by marriage, and family papers from 1829-1967. The Street family emigrated to Australia in the 1860s or 70s. There are some genealogical papers including family trees.
When you arrive at the webpage click on the list at the right to bring up the portraits, which can be further enlarged. The quality of the reproductions is high and the earliest two miniatures, of Susanne Thoume and her husband Thomas Naftel, date to c 1803, the year in which they married; this was the time of the artists Matthias Finucane and Philippe Jean, although they are not of high enough quality to be by the latter, and a perusal of the Gazette de L'Isle de Guernesey of the period will show advertisements for the services of a number of other artists working in Guernsey at the time, both local and French refugees.
Thomas Naftel was the son of Thomas Naftel Snr. and Marthe Olliver. He was born in 1768 in St Peter Port. Susanne, daughter of Pierre Thoume and Susanne Gouan De Pradon was born there in 1781; they married in 1803, when Thomas was 35 and Susanne 22. Their children were Thomas (b. 1806), Susanne (b. 1810), Sophie Pradon (b. 1813) and Thomas Pradon (b. 1816). Thomas was a ship's master. The family lived at 25 Hauteville, where Susanne died in 1848. Thomas followed her in 1856.
The third portrait miniature in the NSW collection is of their daughter, Sophia Pradon Naftel. She married a surgeon from Beckington in Somerset, Polydore Tranter, in 1838. They had children: William Naftel (b. 1841), Sophia Alice (b. 1842), Thomas Polydore (b. 1844), and Ferdinand Polydore (b. 1846).ยน 1856 was not a good year for Sophia, for both her father and her husband died, Polydore from heart trouble at the age of 42. Polydore's elder brother William, of independent means, lived with them. She herself died in 1874.
Her brother Thomas Pradon Naftel2 (d. 1876) was a chemist, as was her son William. Thomas Pradon had a shop in the Commercial Arcade, and had a great number of children by his wife, Elizabeth Rivoire Sheppard, daughter of John, born in 1817 of a well-known merchant family. They lived at 19, Hauteville; their children were Elizabeth, Ann, Mary, Thomas, Emma, Alice, Clara, Hannibal (after Hannibal Sheppard, a trader and rich Guernsey worthy), and John.
Sophia and Poydore Tranter's daughter Sophia Alice Tranter married into the Street family in Guernsey, and there are photographs in the collection of both Sophias in their old age.
1 He practised as a surgeon from Hauteville; see, for example, Adam's Pocket Descriptive Guide to the Channel Islands: London, W. Adams, 1851, p. 111. There is a picture of Ferdinand in the NSW State Library collection but it is not available to view on their website.
2 See, for example, Gazette de Guernesey 13 August 1853, report of the presentation of a claret jug by the 1st Rifle company, or East Regiment, of the militia to their captain, Thomas Pradon Naftel.