Week 25 - Unexpected.
Jane was the eldest of Richard and Phoebe Armitage’s
children. She was born in Ballingarry,
County Tipperary in 1815, two years after Richard’s marriage to Phoebe Murray. At
the age of 16 she married Richard Mason, also of Ballingarry. Richard is described in the immigration
documents as an agricultural labourer, but Ballingarry was also the centre of
the coal mining industry in the 19th century, so perhaps some of his
family may have been miners.
Jane and Richard had four children born in Tipperary –
Phoebe (1834), Grace (1835) Giles (1837) and Eliza (1839). In 1841 they set off from Cork for Australia
as assisted immigrants on board the Woodbridge, arriving in Sydney on 8 March
1842.
It appears that Richard and his family travelled almost
immediately to Bathurst, west of Sydney.
It was here that baby Eliza died and Charlotte, my great grandmother was
born (July 1842). On Charlotte’s baptism
certificate, Richard is described as a shepherd, but he is also variously
listed as a “dealer”, a “dairyman” an “ironmonger” and a “farmer”. It wasn’t long before the family left
Bathurst and moved to Emu Creek in the Hunter valley near Singleton where their
next child was born in 1845. This girl
was called Elizabeth but was known as Eliza. She and Charlotte were to go on to marry two
brothers, Anthony and Henry Whitten.
Back in Ireland, there was trouble in Ballingarry. A
rebellion against British rule broke out there on 29 July 1848. A rebellion against British rule broke out
there on 29 July, 1848. The area was
still in the grip of the potato famine, thousands of people had died and there
was a great resentment against the English.
It was here in Ballingarry, during this uprising, that the national
tricolour of green, white and orange was first unfurled, emulating the French
rebels who had also taken to the streets with their tricolour for the first
time earlier that year. The site of this
rebellion, known as the Famine Warhouse, is now a national
monument. (It’s a nice irony that the three
ringleaders of this rebellion were sentenced to be “Hung, drawn and quartered”
but were instead transported to Australia).
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| Famine Warhouse Museum today |
Perhaps this unrest was the catalyst for Richard and Phoebe Armitage
and their four unmarried children to make the decision to emigrate. I wonder though, why they didn’t follow Jane,
but chose instead to go to America. They
sailed from Liverpool and arrived in New York at Castle Garden (the arrivals port
before the establishment at Ellis Island)on 3 December 1849. Sadly, the ship’s list includes the
crossed-out name of Phoebe, and the notation that she had died at sea on 8 November.
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| extract from Shipping record showing Armitage family |
At this stage, Eliza was 30, William about 23, Phoebe about
16 and Richard jnr about 13. They were all
able to go to work. The family settled
in Wayne, New York, but we know that William later moved on. There is a record in a collection of
biographies of citizens of Livingstone County, Illinois, which charts his
progress. He worked mainly in the brick
industry, he married a Miss Ann Thorp and together they had 9 children. He was a devout Methodist and helped to build
his local church.
We know little about the others. Phoebe died in 1852, when she would still
have been a teenager. Richard married
and he died in Auburn, NY in 1901. Eliza
seems not to have married until she was in her fifties. As the eldest daughter she was probably
thrust into the responsibility of looking after the rest of the family when her
mother died.
Back in Australia, Jane and Richard’s family grew to
eventually include 10 children and more than 60 grandchildren. They remained in the Hunter Valley area,
where Richard died at 54 after a fall from a horse in January 1863. He was buried next to the church at Fallbrook
but there is nothing there now to mark the place. After his death, Jane moved
to live near her daughters Charlotte and Eliza and she died there, at Charlotte’s
property Lowestoft on 16 November 1877.
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