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The collective noun for finches is a charm. In this short history of my father’s father’s family, The Charm of Finches begins with a family living in a little lane called Ann’s Place in Bethnal Green in the East End of Greater London. For 120 years, four generations of Finches lived in the same small house. Once, it stood alone on a rural walking track but it was eventually swallowed by urban squalor, poverty and overcrowding. The Finch children could have walked past Charles Dickens on one of his many strolls researching Oliver Twist (1838) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) in their neighbourhood. For the charm of Finches, industrialisation delivered misery and heart-breaking rates of infant mortality and yet they were literate people who sent their children to school while many children laboured in factories. When the social conditions of the 1840s left no choice, they reluctantly took flight, travelling with free choice and courage, not in chains but as self-determining migrants to New South Wales. And there, they sent their children to school and settled on farms, living again in small houses on country lanes.