Edith Jane Hartley was my great grandmother and is the subject of my letter ‘e’ post. I never had the pleasure of meeting her, but as my mother spent a lot of time with her growing up I’ve heard a lot about her over the years.
Edith was born in 1898 at Jamisonton near Penrith, NSW to parents James Edmund Hartley and Elizabeth Brownlow. She was the first child born to the couple, but had four older half-siblings and a younger brother was to follow her two years later in 1900. Nowadays, Penrith is a busy metropolitan area but in the late 19th Century it was still very much a rural area.
Edith’s father worked as a Railway Guard on the NSW Railways with her mother having the usual occupation of ‘home duties’. We don’t know many details about Edith’s early life, but it would probably have followed the usual form for a girl in those days: learning how to run a house and becoming accomplished in all those domestic science tasks such as cooking and sewing. It seems likely that Edith would also have attended the Anglican Sunday School at Jamisontown, which was established in 1889. Additionally, there would have been the social round that existed in country Australia, with weekly church services and country dances.
Edith as a young woman
But the usual gentle round of country life was interrupted when WWI broke out in 1914. Edith was 16 years old, and over the next four years she would watch many of the local young men leave to go fight overseas. Reading the local Penrith newspaper from the time, there is a plethora of articles relating stories of local men heading off to the front and the going away parties that were held fro them. One such article, from the Nepean Times on 20 November 1915, details how Edith was involved in one such gathering and with another young lady handed each young man heading to the from a going away present of a safety razor.
Edith’s future husband Oscar Norman Thompson was one of these local men to head off to war. Whilst there is no record of a relationship between them prior to him going away to war, the two families did live very close to each other and the couple were well known to each other. More newspaper articles from the time detail the home front effort of knitting socks and mufflers for men at the front, which Edith as a young women would have undoubtedly been involved in.
Edith and Oscar on their wedding day
The war ended in 1918 and by 1919, Edith’s future husband had returned to live with his family in Jamisontown. On 28 February 1920, Edith and Oscar were married at Holy Trinity Church Jamisontown. A beautifully descriptive article appeared in the Windsor and Richmond Gazette in April of that year, with the bride’s dress described as being of “white organdi (sic) trimmed with lace and insertion, finished with a white folded satin belt” complemented by the traditional veil and rope of pearls around her neck and a bouquet of white and pink asters. The article goes on to describe the bridesmaids and flower girls outfits as well as naming all individuals involved in the wedding party, before stating that the reception was held at the residence of the board parents’ and that the wedding gifts “were numerous and costly”!! As a family historian, it is so rare to receive an insight into an ancestor’s life like this and I still remember how excited I was to find this article.
Edith with her three eldest children
The couple’s first child was born in 1921 with a total of five children to be born in the period 1921 to 1939. The couple settled in Jamisontown, on a small parcel of land that was gifted to them by Edith’s father as a wedding present. In recent years, I had some photos shared with me by the couple’s eldest child of their life in Jamisontown and later Penrith itself. However, as the Great Depression began to bite in the 1930s, the family was forced to move to a cheaper location. In those days, cheaper meat closer to the ocean and their new home was in Brighton-le-Sands. Today, this is a bustling seaside suburb but in the 1930s a lot of Australians moved to similar suburbs as they were the cheapest places to live.
It was while they living here that Edith’s eldest son was struck down with Polio and she spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards between home and the hospital. Eventually, he recovered and moved back with the family. By this time, they had moved to the inner western Sydney suburb of Ashfield. The family lived at Ashfield until at least 1945, which was when Edith suffered the loss of her husband. Out of the five children, two were still dependants when Oscar died and Edith relied on the War Widow’s pension to raise them along with any income made by her elder children.
In her later years, Edith lived in the Sydney suburbs of Croydon and Fairfield. When living at
Edith (centre) with her two sisters Amy (left) and Ethel (right)
Fairfield, her eldest daughter (my grandmother) separated form her husband and brought her family to live with Edith. This included my Mum and they lived with Edith for many years until they were allocated a house by Government Housing. During the years my Mum lived with Edith, she heard many family history stories (some of which weren’t entirely true!) and those stories were passed on to me and helped birth my love of family history.
Edith lived at Fairfield until her death in 1980, at the age of 85. In those 85 years, she loved through an immense amount of change in her family and the world around her.
Edith’s memorial plaque at Northern Suburbs cemetery, Sydney