#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.