#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.