Esther was the daughter of John De Young, a Spanish Merchant from Gibraltar, and Ann Harris (of Irish ancestry) from Lisbon, Portugal.
In late 1853, the Forwoods, accompanied by their first two children, Catherine Ester (b:1850) and Charles Henry (b:1852), left Portsmouth, England bound for Australia.
They arrived in Melbourne, Victoria on Christmas Eve 1853 and were met by Charles’s mother Mary Ann Forwood, his brother William Henry and sister Emma Catherine who had completed the voyage earlier in the same year.
In mid-1871, aged 45, Forwood was elected to the board of the Polynesia Company and sailed to Suva, Fiji aboard the SS Baclutha on 4 October 1871.
He was buried at St Kilda Cemetery beside his first and second wives Esther and Prudence, his mother Mary Ann Forwood and three of his children, Alice, Ellen Marion and Florence M.