Lorna Jessie Hartley was my maternal grandmother’s first cousin, which makes her my first cousin twice removed. Like the name Kezia in my previous post, Lorna isn’t a popular name in my tree but it is a name I am familiar with.
Like many others, I am aware of the novel Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore which was published in 1869. In fact, this is the first usage of the name which was effectively invented by Blackmore in the same vein as the name Wendy and it’s believed that the name comes from the Scottish surname and district name Lorne.
Fast forward, and my Lorna was born in 1924 in the Penrith, NSW area. The name Lorna seems old-fashioned now, and indeed you are unlikely to find many baby girls with this name, but 100 years ago Lorna was a common name. Her middle name of Jessie is comes from her mother, who was called Jessie. Lorna grew up in the Penrith suburb of Werrington, which was still a rural area in those days, as was Penrith itself. One can assume Lorna had a normal childhood for the era, growing up on the family’s property in the area with her parents and siblings.
Lorna with her father ‘Sonny’
On the 18 May 1944, at the age of 20, Lorna married Henry Gales who was also a resident of Werrington although he had been born in England. Electoral roll records tell us that the couple lived in Princess Street, Werrington after their marriage. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the couple had any children due to the fact that everyone who would know has since passed away. If they did have children, then they would most likely still be alive today so for privacy reasons I wouldn’t identify them in any case. For the next ten years, we can trace the couple living at Princess Street, Werrington but the marriage was not to be a happily ever after, as Lorna and Henry were divorced by late 1953.
On 24 December 1953, Lorna married for a second time: her new spouse was Leonard Joseph Brines. Leonard had been living in Werrington since 1949, wiht his then wife Doris. This means Leonard was also a divorced person. to make the whole situation even more tangled, Lorna’s first husband Henry also remarried in early 1954: to Doris Brines, who had previously been married to Leonard Joseph Brines who was now married to Lorna. In 1950s Australia, divorce was still somewhat out of the norm. The divorce rate in 1955 was only 0.7%, compared with 2.6% fifty years later in 2005.
What’s interesting is that both couples continued to live in the Werrington area, just streets away from each other. Knowing small towns, I can just imagine the gossip surrounding both couples at the time. Hopefully, it was an amicable divorce (or as amicable as a divorce can be) for everyone involved as the two couples would have seen each other on quite a regular basis. What is even more interesting is that Lorna continued to live at the same residence in Princess Street, Werrington with her new husband.
Unfortunately, he was not to be her new husband for long as by 1972, Leonard had moved out of the Werrington residence. By 1977, Leonard had a new wife so Lorna had obviously been divorced once again. Despite her second husband leaving, Lorna continued to live in Princess Street, Werrington for the rest of her life.
Lorna died on 10 October 1998 at Werrington and was buried at Penrith General Cemetery.