#52 Ancestors Week 5 At the Library

#52 Ancestors Week 5.  At the Library


When my husband Paul and I moved back to the North Coast of NSW to live in 2008, one of the things we resolved to do was research more fully those ancestors - his and mine - who had lived here in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A trip to the library in Ballina unearthed a treasure - the daily diary of one Richard Glascott, a timber getter who lived on the Teven Creek outside Ballina during the years when cedar cutting was one of the main industries of the area.

This is not the diary of a learned man.  There are no profound ruminations on life.  For family historians it is much more pertinent than abstract thoughts because it is simply a day by day account of Richard Glascott's life, and the lives of those who passed by his camp.  He records the daily traffic on the river - all the names of the early timber cutters are there.  He reveals that the local native population is working with them and there appears to be no antagonism,  but he hardly ever names them.   He describes the weather.  Almost every day he kills a snake or a possum.

 There are simple entries like this:

"28 Sept 1865 "went to work in company with James Ryan, John Williams, Pat Gallagher, Tom McCann, John Johnson. Tom Brennan and blackfellow.  Last three and the black parted company with us at beach road.  Rest came with me to my hut at Skinners Creek."

And this:
"At home getting firewood.  After dark working in barn till 10 p.m. Fine"

For us, the best bit was this, on 14 May 1874.

"...saw Constable Bassman and another Constable and two other men going through camp today going up the river they were all in company together.  Some dog got into my barn last night and took a leg of pork away can't say whether it was my dog or not."

and then the next day,

" Met George Lewis today coming out this morning.  He told me it was Constable Bassman and Hogan and the two prisoners Johnson and McCann that I saw passing through the camp yesterday ..."

The footnotes tell the story.
" Charles McCann was convicted on 9 May 1874 at the Court of Petty Sessions, Ballina before magistrates John Sharp and Edmund Ross of unlawfully receiving a pair of cedar paddles from Joseph Johnson, who was convicted of unlawfully stealing them.  Both were sentenced to be imprisoned for one calendar month in Grafton Gaol where they were admitted on 18 May"

Charles McCann was Paul's 2 x great grandfather and Joseph Johnson was his wife's brother.  The person whose oars they stole was Charles Jarrett, whose descendant, Robert Jarrett Scarff, was to become a dear friend of ours many years later and a long way from Ballina.

Image of cedar cutters from The Northern Star

#52 Ancestors Week 4 I'd Like to Meet

#52 Ancestors Week 4 - I’d like to meet...



I knew both of my grandmothers, but not well.  We didn’t live near them, and our visits were short and irregular.  I knew them really through the stories told by their children, my parents, and other members of the family.

What I knew for certain was that they were as different as chalk and cheese.  So I think I’d like to meet their parents, to find out what had formed their characters and influenced their behavior.

Here are their fathers, George Frederick Power Morgan, father of Josephine, and Robert White, father of Alice.

Unfortunately, not much is known about George.  He was born in Sydney in 1855, to William George Morgan, a wood turner, and Mary Bridget, sometimes known as Bedelia (née Power).  When he married Mary Jane Black on 3 March 1880, he gave his age as 26, and his occupation also as “wood  turner”

In the next 6 years, George and Mary Jane had four children, the second of whom was my grandmother, Josephine, born in 1882.  Tragedy struck when the eldest, Max Pedro Power Morgan, was hit by a cart in the street at Surry Hills and died of his injuries in 1887, but there is a mystery
here.  His death notice refers only to his father, so we assume that George and Mary Jane were already living apart by this time.  We know that when she left, she had taken the baby, Edward George, with her, and George had delivered the others to his mother and sister to be cared for.  Mary Jane’s life from this time is a whole other story.....

To return to George.  Almost nothing is known about his life from this point.  We don’t know if he visited his children in the early years or not.  We don’t know if he is the George Morgan who is the subject of numerous police reports during the 1880s for drunkenness, disorderly conduct and obscene language in the Surry Hills area.  Mary Jane married again in 1899 and gave her status as “widow”.  Did she not know that George was still alive?

He died in the Rookwood Asylum in 1921.  This place was also known as the Rookwood State
Hospital for Aged and Infirm Men, so although George was only 66, it appears that he was frail and
destitute.  The only one of his children named on his death certificate was Elsie, who, like Josie, believed that she was an orphan.  I’d like to have met him for some answers to some of these questions.

My other great grandfather, Robert White, could not have had a more different death.  Crowds of mourners lined the streets of Lismore to watch his funeral procession in July 1932.

Robert was the fifth and last child of English immigrants Charles and Eliza White, and the only one born in Australia - in Lismore, NSW in 1867.  At the age of 21, he married Elizabeth Stanford, daughter of another pioneering Richmond River family, and they began a lifetime of devotion to their family (there would be 7 children) and their community.

Originally apprenticed as a blacksmith, Robert became a farmer and cane grower for a few years,
then returned to Lismore and was involved in various businesses before becoming an Inspector for the United Insurance Co, a position he still held at his death.  At the same time, he held a remarkable number of voluntary positions.

A great believer in social justice, he was a leader in the Friendly Society movement ( the precursors to health funds) and held every position in the Manchester Unity Friendly Society.  He became an alderman of Lismore Council in 1901, and remained an alderman for the rest of his life, filling the Mayoral chair on several occasions.  He was one of the pioneers of hyacinth eradication in the Richmond River, and the inaugural Chairman o f the Richmond River County Council.  He was a keen gardener, and won hundreds of awards and scores of championships for his flowers and vegetables, as well as being largely responsible for the planting of street trees in the town.  At his death he was President of the North Coast Agricultural Societies Association, having been an early supporter of the Lismore Show, and a judge in many categories at shows around the North Coast.

As his grandchildren were growing up in the area around his home in South Lismore, he saw the need for a Primary School in the area, and helped to make it happen.

In the tributes that flowed after his death, he was described as “ forthright and candid”; his Council colleagues regarded him as a man in whom one could place implicit trust and a loyal friend.  I wish I had met him.

#52 Ancestors Week 3 "unusual name"

#52 Ancestors Week 3  Unusual name


The names in my family are very common and ordinary Anglo-Irish.  The English include Stanford, Golding, Slater, Dare and Black and White.  The Irish are Gleeson, Barry, Hehir and - the oddest - Crummy.

The word "crummy" means "dirty, unpleasant, poor quality".  The surname "Crummy" appears to derive from the Scots-Gaelic "crom" meaning crooked, and then the place name, "Crombie" in the West of Scotland former county of Aberdeenshire.  In Anglo-Saxon, it meant a "person with abnormal curviture of the spine".  Alternative spellings include Crummey, Crum, McCrum, Crumie and Cromey, which makes searching in old records something of a challenge.

My 2 x great grandfather was William Crummy, born in Ireland in about 1822. I don't know how or when he came to Australia (he wasn't a convict) but in 1859 he was in Orange,NSW.  Here, at the age of 37, he married  Mary Barry (or Berry). Mary's year of birth is unknown and a birth certificate has never been found.  There are conflicting dates on various documents through her life, but she told her daughter Maud that she had been 15 at the time of this marriage.  William gives his occupation as  "labourer" on the Marriage Certificate; Mary as "servant" and neither could sign their name.  

By the time their fifth child, my great grandmother Mary (Mary 2) was born, William was working as a miner on the goldfields of Spring Creek, also known as Lambing Flat.

This area became the site of anti Chinese riots in 1860-61 when European diggers became incensed by the Chinese and their apparent wastage of water when extracting gold. (There was also no doubt an element of racism) A weak police presence was unable to contain the situation. Six anti-Chinese riots occurred at the Lambing Flat camps over a period of 10 months. The most serious riot occurred on 14 July 1861 when approximately 2000 European diggers attacked the Chinese miners. Although they tried to get away from the violent mob, about 250 Chinese miners were gravely injured and most lost all their belongings. After this tragic event, Lambing Flat was renamed Young.*

The pressure of public opinion against the Chinese caused the New South Wales Government to pass the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act in 1861 to restrict the numbers of Chinese in the colony. Queensland introduced restrictions in 1877 and Western Australia followed suit in 1886.  These were the precursors of the infamous "White Australia Policy"

We don't know how the riots impacted on the Crummy family, or if William ever found any gold.  Mary bore him 10 children in 23 years, and when he died at the age of 62 in 1884, the youngest was only 7 months old.  Mary went on to have two more husbands and another child, (when she must have been about 47).  She died in Lismore, NSW, in 1927.  

* In 1945, William and Mary Crummy's great grandson was appointed to teach at Young High School.  He and his wife lived there for the next nine years, and their first four children, including this writer, were born there.

#52 Ancestors Week 2 Challenge

#52 Ancestors Week 2.  Challenge.

  Many of our ancestors faced challenges that are unimaginable to us, but I’ve decided to write about my husband’s 3x great grandmother, Agnes McMillan, whose life was full of them.

Agnes was born in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland in 1820.  By the time she was 13 she was living on the street - perhaps as a result of the highland clearances which dispossessed many Scots and forced them into cities with no means of support.  We don’t know.

In 1832, she was convicted for housebreaking, and again in 1835 for theft.  When she appeared before the court on 1 February, 1836, she was again charged with theft - robbing shops in the company of Janet Houston, Helen Fulton and Daniel Campbell.  They had allegedly stolen shirts, shifts, a quantity of linen,  a mantle and some stockings, which she was wearing at the time of her arrest.   At her trial, she was described as being of “ bad character, having been three years on the Town”.  She was sentenced to seven years transportation.

So, at barely 17 years of age, only 5 feet, one and a quarter inches tall, Agnes boarded the convict ship, “Westmoreland” and sailed for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

The journey took three months, and the ship appears to have been well run - only one woman of the 185 convict woman and 18 children aboard, died on the voyage.

On their arrival in Hobart, he convict women walked , escorted by soldiers, to the Female Factory where they were to be housed.  This was a distance of about 3kilometres and it was typically
undertaken in the dark early hours of the morning.  This was because women were scarce in the colony, and men had been known to abduct them as they walked to their new lodgings.

The remnant buildings of the Female Factory at Cascades form part of the World Heritage Listed group of Australian Convict Sites.  A visit there today is still a chilling experience.  Up to 1000 people lived there once, in conditions intended to” reform” them as well as punish.  The inmates provided laundry and needlework services in the colony as they awaited release or assignment as servants.

Agnes was not a model prisoner.  Her record is full of transgressions - disobedience, absence without
leave, insolence, refusal to return to her services.  Her punishments were mostly days on bread and
water, or “hard labour at the wash tub”, or solitary confinement.  All of these were brutal.  The wash
tub was outdoors, her hands would have been raw with cold and carbolic.  The solitary confinement
cell was about as big as a phone box, and completely without light.

Somehow, she remained resilient.  In January 1841, she gave birth to a son called Frederick.  His father was another convict, Frederick Lindsay (aka Lee).  There is no record of a marriage.  Frederick remained with her in the nursery at the Female Factory, and survived.  (The death rate for babies here was shocking - almost 50%.)

By 1844, Agnes was free, and married to another convict called William Roberts.  They lived in the
 Huon area of Tasmania, where William worked as a timber cutter, but in 1852 the family moved to
the mainland.  They went first to Melbourne, and then to the goldfields at Ballarat, where they were
living at the time of the Eureka Stockade.  Some of the older children married here, and two more
children were born.  The whole family, including Fred Lee, and the married children, moved to
Ballina in Northern NSW in 1868; Agnes and the younger children travelling in a tilted wagon, with
gold hidden in the baby’s nappy.  The older children, and William, probably travelled by sailing boat up the coast.  They settled in the area, and most of the men, including William, became cedar cutters in the cedar- rich rainforests of the north.

Within a generation, William and Agnes’ children were landowners and farmers and small businessmen.  The rebellious and difficult young woman convict became a respected member of her community, a mother, grandmother and local midwife.  She died in 1877, and is believed to be buried in Newrybar, although there is no known grave.

Another first

I was wrong to describe James and Eliza Golding as the first of our ancestors to arrive from England.  Twenty years before, in 1838, William and Elizabeth Stanford arrived as assisted immigrants on the “Woodbridge”.  (Their son Charles, born at Macleay River, as Kempsey was known, later married the Golding’s daughter, Susan - they were our 2x great granddparents.)

William and Elizabeth were both natives of Wiltshire.  William’s parents, George and Hannah lived near Salisbury, in an area called Great Wishford.  Elizabeth came from Wylie, about 10ks away.  They are described on their arrival papers as being in sound health, both able to read and write, both Methodists.  Elizabeth must have been pregnant as just a few months later she gave birth to twin girls, Hope and Maria, who both died.

They settled on the Macleay River, now Kempsey.  Their five surviving children were born there.  Sarah (1839), Charles (1843), Elizabeth (1844), Stephen (1845), Christina (1847).  William died in 1868, and Elizabeth married again three years later to a former convict called John Rolt Carter.  She died in 1892, and was buried in Kempsey.