Had a number of children, all with Brookes as a middle name and based in Yarmouth, but the rest of the family seems to have had little contact with them. They included John Brookes Thurtell (b. 1816), who was a sea captain on the Australia run, and now has at least one descendant in Canada; Edward Brookes Thurtell, who emigrated to the US, had five children and was a farmer in Wisconsin when his Aunt Anne rediscovered him on her trip to America; and two daughters who married cousins called Sherrington. Anne was the mother of the Nobel prizewinner Sir Charles Sherrington (born in 1857, 9 years after the death of the father usually claimed for him). Wikipedia says John Thurtell was almost certainly the illegitimate son of Anne Brookes Sherrington and Caleb Rose, an eminent Ipswich surgeon. Anne and Caleb married in 1880 in Ipswich after Rose’s wife died.

In a geni.com website, Garry Marc Howard-Browne claims that another child of John and Mary was James Thurtell (b. 1811) who was a gardener, baker’s apprentice and protestant. He was convicted and sentenced on 28 April 1829 in Norfolk to 7 years’ transportation for stealing shoes as reported in the Norfolk Chronicle of 1 May 1829. He arrived in Sydney, NSW on 19 February 1830. James married Maria Jane Culverson (1825-1903) in Bathurst, NSW on 22 September 1841. A James B Thurtell died at Carcoar in 1904 but the thurtellfamily.net site says he died in the Lunatic Asylum at Parramatta in 1861. Interestingly, newspaper reports show that the Thurtell (aged 45 years) who died in the Parramatta asylum was from Carcoar. Maria Jane Thurtell married Christopher Shandley (1828-1912) in Carcoar in 1867. Ancestry.com lists 9 children for Maria’s first marriage and 2 from her second.