B is for Blanche. Blanche Harriet Trueman was my great, great grandmother on my father’s side of the family. She always intrigued me with a name such as Blanche. To me, it seems such a sophisticated name which makes me wonder where she got it from as her life seems to be far from sophisticated.

Blanche was born 3 April 1880 in Bathurst, NSW. As soon as I learned of her birth place, I felt a connection with Blanch straight away. For most of my life I have lived in Bathurst and I loved growing up in a place with such a rich history. The fact that Blanche was born in Bathurst really piqued my interest and I spent a lot of time researching her and her time in Bathurst.

I knew that by 1897, she was residing in Molong NSW (about an hour west of Bathurst) with her family. Molong is listed as her residence on her marriage certificate and as she was only 17 years old at the time (and therefore under the legal age for marriage) she needed permission from her father and it was given. So what happened in the intervening years and how long was the family living in Bathurst?

To figure this out, I had to backtrack to Blanche’s parents and locate the births of her elder siblings. I found that after their marriage in 1869, Blanche’s parents had lived in Young, NSW until at least 1875 which was where the sibling before Blanche was born. I have bene unable to pinpoint exactly when the family arrived either after the birth of their third child in 1875, or in the intervening years until the birth of Blanch in 1880. However, I have been able to learn some things about their life in Bathurst.

Blanche’s father Henry Flear Trueman appears in the 1886-1887 Bathurst and Western District Directory as residing in Kepple (sic) Street, Bathurst so that confirmed for me that the family was still living there 6-7 years after Blanche’s birth. The entry in the above publication is a simple name and address listing, similar to what we would find in a phone directory (with the omission of a phone number, of course) and doesn’t really tell you anything about the family aside form the street where they lived.

What I found next did flesh out the continuing story of Blanch and her family, and not in a pleasant way. Like any self-respecting family historian, I turned to Trove to see what I could find.  Now, I didn’t expect to find a lot based on my previous experiences with other ancestors. Much to my surprise, I found four whole articles relating to Blanche’s parents. The first article appeared in the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal on Saturday 30 April 1887 and revealed a very unstable family. Appearing on page 2, the article accounts the attempted suicide of Henry Flear Trueman of Bathurst. An article in May of the same year goes into more detail, relating how Henry took an entire bottle of laudanum in order to scare his wife. Later in the article, he admits that he took it due to being so heavily in debt. Whilst Henry didn’t succeed at taking his life, he was charged with attempted suicide. However, the article doesn’t disclose what his sentence was.

As if the attempted suicide of her father wasn’t bad enough, Blanche’s home life was evidently not a particularly happy one as her father is described as being inclined to fits of anger and physical violence towards his wife. In the same edition of the paper as the first article, and article also appears in the legal proceedings section of the paper in which Blanche’s mother Jane presents a claim to the court to preserve her property from her husband’s creditors. The article relates how Jane had been left to support herself and her children after her husband had deserted her. During this time Blanche was still a fairly young child and these articles don’t paint a pretty picture of Blanche’s childhood.

But in the midst of this misery, I did find something interesting. During the period of her husband’s desertion, Jane had managed to support herself and her three daughters by teaching music. Now, this was the first instance i had come across of one of my female ancestors having a skill beyond the traditional ones of mother and homemaker and it intrigued me.

By doing a bit of digging, I found that Jane’s father had been a pianoforte maker in London and presumably this is where Jane learned music or her father made a good enough living that he could pay for lessons. Perhaps it was this background of her mother’s that led to the name of Blanche. I like to think so.