Last week I wrote about four Irish brothers who travelled to
Australia in the second half of the 19th century to make new lives
for themselves.
This week, three Irish sisters who came in very separate and
different ways, my husband’s grandmother and her sisters.
Jane, Agnes and Mary Kilroe were the daughters of Kieran
Kilroe and his wife Catherine (nee Dolan) who lived at Shannonbridge, a small
village on the Shannon River in County Offaly, Ireland. Not much is known about the family – we think
that Kieran was a farmer with a small amount of land.
Kieran and Catherine married in 1878. Their first two children died in infancy, but
they were followed by Rachel (1881), Jane (1883), William (1884), Mary (1885),
Catherine (Katie, 1888), Keiran (known as Joe, 1890), Agnes (1893) and Patrick
(1895).
I have searched for Jane’s arrival in Australia without
success and perhaps one of the reasons I can’t find her is that she was
travelling under another name. Her
grandson has told me that the family believe that she came to Australia as a
nun, but then left the convent to marry.
If this is true, then it’s a secret that seems to have stayed within her
own family – Paul believes that his mother was unaware of it, and that it would
indeed have been seen in the past as a shameful secret to be kept.
Jane married here in 1904, when she was only 21. She doesn’t appear in the family in the Irish
census of 1901, when she was 17, so it
is reasonable to assume that she was by then in the convent, and perhaps
already in Australia. The man she
married was Alexander McMillan, a Cobb & Co coach driver who was 11 years
her senior. How and where she might have
met him, and whether he was the reason she fled the convent, we will never
know. They had four children together,
the youngest of whom – born in 1922 – is still alive but sadly without the kind
of memory that might shed light on some of my questions. Jane died in 1955.
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| Jane McMillan (nee Kilroe) |
Margaret Agnes was the youngest girl in the family. We know nothing of her young life – she had
left home by the time of the 1911 census – until she appears in the outgoing
passenger lists of 1912. Bound for
Townsville on the ship, “Perthshire”, she is 18 years old and gives her
occupation as “Nurserymaid”. In 1917,
she appears in the electoral roll as a resident of Boulia, in Queensland, not
far from Jane’s family, but then in 1930 she marries Frederick Wallace Sewell
in Coonamble. How she came from Boulia
in Queensland to Coonamble in NSW is a mystery.
Fred Sewell was a member of a family of orchardists in Tenterfield and
they were soon living there, amongst his family. She was 37, Fred was 8 years younger, and
there were no children. She died in 1942
aged only 49. Fred married again and did
have children with his second wife.
Mary Josephine Kilroe married Robert Keogh in Dublin in June
1913. They had two children, Kathleen
(1914) and Annie (1918), and then on 21 February 1920 he died, at the age of
31. He died of tuberculosis, after
having been weakened by injury in a shunting accident on the railway where he
worked and was buried in a paupers’ grave in the Dublin cemetery.
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| Robert and Mary Keogh |
There was nothing for Mary to do but to take her daughters
home to her parents in Shannonbridge, but she must have realised that there was
no future for them there, so in 1928 they too came to Australia. Mary had work lined up as a housekeeper for the
bishop in Grafton, NSW and then soon after the family moved to Lismore where
she worked as the housekeeper at the presbytery and then in a boarding house. There are photographs of a visit to the
Sewell family in Tenterfield (about 160k away) but there is no evidence of a renewed relationship between Mary and her big sister Jane.
I am struck by the contrast between the closely connected lives
of the four brothers I wrote about last week and these three sisters. I realise that, as women, they had almost no
control over their destinies; the men they married determined the paths of
their lives, and they had to go where those men led them. Any bond they may have had as sisters was assailed
by the physical distances between them. Their
children and grandchildren grew up unaware of each other until Ancestry and Facebook, which have helped to
piece some of their stories together.
Mary was fortunate that her daughter Kathleen married a man
who was comfortable about having her live with them throughout their marriage
until her death in 1958. A few years
later he and Kathleen returned to Ireland to visit the remaining family – Katie
and Joe, neither of whom married.
In 2017 Paul and Brendan and I visited the Dublin cemetery
where Robert Keogh’s grave now has a headstone (provided by Paul’s sister). Sadly, there are two other paupers buried
there whose names are not recorded. We
also went to the cemetery at Clonmacnoise, near Shannonbridge where William,
Joe and Katie all lie. So many of the Australian descendants of these three women have visited Shannonbridge that we are always welcomed with open arms in the local pub.
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| Robert Keogh's grave in Dublin |
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