Mary Martin was my fifth great grandmother, and was the earliest of all my ancestors to arrive in Australia.
Mary was born around 1773, somewhere in England. As is typical with such early ancestors, not much is known about her early life but an event happened when Mary was 16 that would change her life forever. The year was 1789 and Mary had been caught stealing from a haberdasher’s shop in Tottenham Court Road, London. As the crime took place in London, Mary was tried at the Old Bailey.
The Old Bailey records state that Mary was tried on September 9, 1789 by Mr. Justice Grose and a Middlesex jury. Mary stood accused of stealing three muslin half shawls and one muslin shawl, amounting to the value of 5 shillings, from Samuel Francis who had a Hosier and Haberdasher shop on Tottenham Court Road. Samuel’s wife gave evidence at the trial, stating that she had been alone in the shop with her baby when Mary and two other women entered the shop asking to see shawls. The women started pulling around the shawls in the shop but left without buying anything. Mrs. Francis states that she immediately missed a buff coloured shawl and ran into the street after the three women. Apparently, another woman then took up the chase crying “Stop Thief!”. The trial transcript goes on to account how Mary ran down a side street to evade her pursuer. She encountered a man and spoke to him, saying “I have robbed nobody” before dashing off again. The man gave chase and caught up with her, seeing her drop a buff coloured shawl. In her defence, Mary asserted that the other two women should have been taken up instead of her and that she was only 16 with her only friends being in the country.
As far as I have been able to find, the other two unnamed women were not apprehended at this time. Mary, however, was convicted of stealing and received a sentence of seven years transportation. On 17 January 1790, Mary set sail for Australia aboard the Neptune which was part of the Second Fleet to depart England. Mary was one of 78 women onboard, with an additional 421 male convicts. The female convicts on board the Neptune fared much better than the male convicts, as they were kept unchained and housed in a section of the upper deck.
After months on board ship, Mary and the other convicts aboard the Neptune arrived in Sydney on 26 June 1790. Mary was lucky to have survived the voyage, as the conditions on board the ships of the Second Fleet were so bad that it earned the nickname the Death Fleet and the Neptune was the worst of the three convict transports in the fleet. Overall, 150 men and 11 women died on board the Neptune. This was the highest death toll out of the three convict transports in the Second Fleet and those who did not die were either seriously ill or malnourished.
By 1792, Mary had married for the first time to fellow convict Thomas Smith. With Smith being such a common name there has been much debate as to exactly which Thomas Smith Mary was married to, as there were seven Thomas Smiths in the colony of New South Wales. Mary had two children with Thomas but it’s not known what happened to Thomas Smith as by 1802 at the latest, Mary was living on the property of James Wilbow at Mulgrave Place with her two children according to the Settlers Book form 1800-02. Mary appears again in 1806 as housekeeper to James Wilbow, and simultaneously appears on a list compiled by the Reverend John Marsden as a concubine.
By 1807, Thomas Smith was presumably out of the picture permanently as Mary married James Wilbow. Mary and James appear as a couple on the 1811, 1814, 1816, 1822 and 1828 musters. In the time that they were married, Mary had a further three children and her two elder children by Thomas Smith adopted the Wilbow surname and continued to use it through the generations. Amazingly, only one of her five children died in infancy with the remaining four living to adulthood and starting their own families.
At the time of her death in 1847, Mary was a resident of the Pitt Town area in the Hawkesbury region of New South Wales. Mary was 74 years old when she died, and undoubtedly had a better quality of life in the new colony of New South Wales than she would have if she had remained in London. Mary is buried somewhere in the St. Matthew’s Anglican churchyard in Windosr, NSW in an unknown grave.