I've seen William attached to this family namely on the Virtual War Memorial Australia site:
https://vwma.org.au/explore/people/322302
The article has plenty of references so would seem well researched, but the sources it takes are not. Namely it refers multiple times to an Ancestry tree of Steven Kennedy.
https://www.ancestry.com.au/family-tree/person/tree/67885038/person...
Steven's tree appears to have cited all relevant sources but has the inclusion of William Johnston 1833 Dundee, Scotland with no relevant facts to make the inclusion seems very suspicious. Following the chain of ancestry trees attached to Steven's the progenitor of this relationship appears to have been a Gab Zorko.
https://www.ancestry.com.au/family-tree/person/tree/109665023/perso...
There are problems from the onset with this information, not to mention the leaps the writer of the War Memorial article made to tie all these discrepancies together. Regardless of how poorly researched or checked it appears to have permeated through many trees with many people erroneously adding this William, and accepting the story of Thomas and Margaret's illegitimate love child and her removal to Ireland and later their marriage in Australia. Quite the love story and quite contentious when compared with the facts that remain of Thomas and Margaret's life.
Thomas worked as a ships scullion, After his marriage he and Margaret resided in Maitland. Before their daughter Margaret was born they had removed to Victoria, Eventually, the family took up a mining run at Fryer's town. It was here that Thomas and his family faced an onslaught of racism leading to assault, possible razings of their property, and community exclusion from employment leading to bankruptcies and further convictions.
Thomas was a man of colour, this is evidenced in a number of altercations and reports of him and his children being called 'black' or 'half cast'. His origins are said to be Gibraltar, and this could explain the 1-5% of West African heritage many descendants five generations from him exhibit in Ancestry's DNA admixture. It's also worthy to consider the many variants of the name Antonio; Antonie, Antony. Thomas and Margaret married their daughter to a Frenchman at a very young age. While this in itself requires large a leap to reach this conclusion it could be reasonable that somewhere in Thomas' heritage is a connection to the French West Indies.
