#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 28 Multiple

#52 Ancestors 2020

Week 28 - Multiple

All family historians are familiar with the perils of childbirth in the 19^th century.  We all have ancestors who died too young, and families where many children did not live past infancy. Multiple births were particularly fraught – for twins (and their mother) to survive birth was a rare achievement.

Twins are more likely to be born prematurely and to have birth complications which further imperilled the mother if she was living at a distance from medical care, as so many of our forebears did.

When my great grandmother Charlotte gave birth to twin boys in 1878, she was 36 and already mother to seven children.  The babies were born on the family property “Lowestoft”, several miles from the nearest town.  I understand from family stories that her daughter Jenny, who would have been only 10 at the time, was at the birth, and there may only have been one other woman to assist her.

The boys were born alive and named Richard and Joseph, but Richard died only three weeks later.  Joseph lived to celebrate his second birthday but died shortly afterwards.   According to family legend, they are buried in the orchard at Lowestoft.  

 

Charlotte recovered and went on to have four more children, the last one when she was 43.

Charlotte’s sister Phoebe also had twin boys who died.  Phoebe was the second wife to Stephenson Moore, who was more than 20 years her senior.  He and his first wife had married in Ireland and already had three children when they arrived in New South Wales as assisted immigrants in 1841. There were four more births between 1843 – 1851, but the last baby died, and so did the mother.

When Phoebe married Stephenson she was only 20, and she became an instant stepmother to six, the oldest two of whom were just a few years younger than she was. 

She and Stephenson went on to have 13 children, but four of them died in infancy.  When the twins were born in 1871, Phoebe was still recovering from the birth and death of a baby boy the previous year.  Born on 8 September 1871, David lived for two weeks, dying on September 22. His brother Robert died the following day.   

These are tragic stories, but in my search for multiple births in the family tree, this one, from my husband’s tree, is both tragic and shocking.

Ruby Vera Lee was another of the many grandchildren of convict Agnes McMillan of whom I have written before.  Born in Lismore in 1905, she was married at 17 to Henry Gill of Byron Bay.  By the age of 29, Ruby had 8 children and was pregnant again.

This birth made the National newspapers.  On 15 September 1935, Ruby gave birth to conjoined twins, also known as Siamese twins.  The babies, both girls, died.  Ruby died the following day.

In 1935, Lismore was a town of about 10,000.  It’s doubtful that any hospital in Australia could have coped with such a birth in 1935, but in a small country town it must have been a cause of panic.  There were no ultrasounds to predict such an occurrence, and I doubt if there was even a specialist obstetrician.  Ruby was young and had already delivered 8 children, so the birth was probably predicted to be routine.

Twins are much more common now than at any time in history.  One reason is that women are having their families when they are older, and older women are more likely to have twins.  Another is that Assisted Reproduction Technology has increased the likelihood of multiple births.  Technology has also given us the ultrasound for early detection of in utero problems. Even conjoined twins now have a chance at a normal life – in recent years there have been several successful attempts at separating twins.   

For hundreds of years, pregnancy and birth were both painful and dangerous.  Before reliable contraception, a woman who married in her early twenties could expect to give birth every two or three years until her mid-forties.  Every birth carried the risk of complications and possible death from excessive bleeding, prolonged labour or infection.  And even if the mother survived, the baby may not.  For a multiple birth, the odds were worse.

I look at the women in my past with admiration for their strength and fortitude in triumphing over these difficulties. 

Brisbane Courier Mail 16 September 1935

#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 27 Solo

#52 Ancestors 2020

Week 27 "Solo"

Solo Whist, sometimes known as simply Solo, is a trick taking card game whose direct ancestor is the 17th-century Spanish game Ombre, based on the English Whist. Its major distinctive feature is that one player often plays against the other three. However, players form temporary alliances with two players playing against the other two if "Prop and Cop" is the current bid. It requires four players using a standard 52 card deck with no jokers. Aces are high and the deal, bidding and play are clockwise.

When I was a small child, my father and some of his friends had a regular weekly card game, taking it in turns to go to each other’s houses for an evening of cards.  Their game was Solo.

Dad came from a card-playing family.  They were a working class family in a country town where evening entertainments were few. (In my mother’s family, it was singing around the piano, but Dad’s family had no such fineries) All of the family played cards – especially Crib (cribbage) and Euchre.  Old Lismore newspapers have accounts of “Crib and Euchre” parties held in district halls all over the Northern Rivers during the first 50 years of the 20^th century.  They were social gatherings but they were also fundraisers for every imaginable cause – in a quick browse I found card party fundraisers for the Red Cross, the Firemen, a tennis club, a few P & C associations, the hospital, various Patriotic causes and for band uniforms. 

In this clipping from The Northern Star of 4 December, 1929 I recognise at least three members of my father’s family – his aunt Violet Goldsmith, uncle Walter Day and cousin Nell Kuskey.

The Northern Star 4 Dec 1929

It was inevitable that we children would all learn to play cards and a perfect opportunity arose during the long Christmas holidays of 1958/59 when the family went to Brunswick Heads for our annual beach holiday.  It rained. And rained.  Every day for two weeks it rained.  We were a family of 5 children ranging in age from 13 to 2.  There was no television.  Dad went to the local shop, bought two packs of cards, and came home to teach us.

This is when we learnt to play Euchre and Five Hundred and Crib.  Even 2 year old Margie learnt to recognise cards, and to play Snap. On a later holiday, when she was about 8, she horrified our other grandmother with her proficiency.  Our late grandfather had been a staunch Methodist for whom playing cards were “the devil’s pictures’, so there were certainly none in that household.

When my other (cardplaying) grandmother was old, she loved nothing better than a visit from my father with his pack of cards and the crib board he had made lovingly from a piece of Northern Rivers red cedar. They would sit at her kitchen table, chatting quietly between hands and drinking cups of tea.

At the end of his life, Dad developed dementia.  I knew that he had really gone when I sat with him one day to play Euchre and realised that he had forgotten how.  It still makes me cry