My great-grandfather was a Gilbert (Bertie) Thompson who was born on April 8th, 1879 in Dunedin, New Zealand. He came to Australia sometime between 1900 & 1912 and married my great-grandmother, Angusina Nelson. Papa Bertie, as he was known in the family, was a journalist for The Bulletin magazine.

Now Papa Bertie never talked about his family in NZ much, but he had mentioned that his father was a drinker. He had also said that his father had been a black sheep of the family, which may have been gentry of some sort, coming from Ireland to New Zealand. He also once told my mother that she had inherited the looks of his grandfather, who'd been a Danish sailor washed up on the shores of Ireland and his grandmother found him & fell in love with him (nobody else in my family had heard this tale and it may be that he was spinning a bit of a yarn)

Anyway, on Papa Bertie's birth certificate, it states that his father Robert Thompson was a saddler, was born in Belfast about 1852 and married an Annie Archer in Christchurch on December 20 1877. Bertie was the second eldest of 7 or 8 boys and 1 girl, other children I know about are Harry (b.1881), Stanley (b.1884) and Maude (b.1886 or 7).
Unfortunately, I've been unable to find Robert's death nor marriage certificates, so I don't know his parents. Interestingly, a search on the IGI yields one Robert Thompson christened 22/8/1852 in Belfast to an Alexander Thompson and a Martha Rae (or Rea).