O is for Oscar

Oscar Norman Thompson was my great grandfather and is the subject of today’s A to Z post. Oscar was born 25 May 1895 at Regentville, near Penrith NSW to parents Charles John Thompson and Alice Skeen. Oscar’s mother had a mammoth 13 pregnancies, with a total of 15 children born including two sets of twins. Out of these 15 children, 9 lived into adulthood. Oscar was the seventh child born, so petty much smack dab in the middle of his family. Oscar grew up in various suburbs of Penrith, but by 1915 the family were settled in the suburb of Jamisontown.

The year 1915 was a significant one in Oscar’s life as well as in the wider community. The ANZACS landed at Gallipoli and there was a huge drive in recruiting for World War I. Like so many other young Australians, Oscar enlisted. His attestation papers show his date of enlistment as 24 July 1915 and he was assigned to 5th reinforcements of the 20th Infantry Battalion. Oscar was aged 21 years and 2 months at the time of his enlistment.

Oscar in army uniform

All individuals enlisting underwent a physical examination and Oscar was not exception. Oscar’spapers record his height as 5 feet 7.5 inches (or 171.45cm) which is quite tall even for men today and his weight as 126 lbs (0r 57.15 kgs). At this weight, he certainly wasn’t carrying around any extra weight!! This was a physique he carried for the rest of his life, as later photos show how lean he is. What is interesting to me is that nothing is mentioned about his feet, and rumour has it that he had flat feet. Whether he did or not, he passed all the requirements to enlist in the army. From Australia, Oscar was shipped out to Egypt where he arrived on 30 September 1915. Oscar undertook training with his battalion before being transferred across to the Western Front in France.

 

Oscar was wounded multiple times whilst on the Western Front, including being shot in the head and the neck and also suffered from illness causing him to be admitted to hospital. This may have been a blessing in disguise, as Oscar’s frequent illnesses caused him to be in and out of hospitals both on the Western Front and in England. This may well have helped with his survival, enabling him to return home to Australia in mid 1919. At the time, the Spanish Flu pandemic was still continuing in waves across Australia. However, Oscar returned to a rural area full of wide open spaces which would perhaps have helped with containing the disease. All of Oscar’s immediate family survived the pandemic and life went on as normal.

Oscar on his wedding day

In February 1920, Oscar was married to Edith Jane Hartley and the settled down and started a family. Oscar and Edith had five children together, with the first four being born in the Penrith area. However, as the Great Depression hit Australia the family was forced to move from the Penrith area to a cheaper area. As a result, they settled in Brighton-le-Sands before ending up in the inner city suburb of Ashfield.

Oscar’s health was obviously stable enough after the war for him to continue to work in his job at Sydney’s Schweppes factory, where he had been employed since the age of 15, and raise a family however as he aged his health deteriorated. As a result, Oscar died at the relatively young age of 49 years old in 1945. This may have been due to him being heavily gassed during his war service, which has since been proven to cause serious and ongoing health problems. At the time of his death, Oscar’s two youngest children were aged just 11 and 6 years old respectively.

 

L is for Lorna

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.

 

E is for Edith

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

 

 

 

 

E is for . . .

E is for Edmund. Edmund Albert Hartley was my 2nd great uncle, the younger brother of my great grandmother. And his story his interesting to me because if it hadn’t been for world events at the time, his story could have ended so differently.

Edmund was born 28 October 1900 in Penrith, New South Wales. He spent his growing up years on the family property at Jamisontown near Penrith, which in those days was still ‘in the bush’. Presumably, he had a childhood similar to that of other children his age but the year he turned fourteen his relatively quiet life was to be shaken up with the start of World War I.

Having heard many stories about boys aged fourteen or even younger being caught up with the fever of ‘defending the empire’ and changing their ages so they were old enough to go away to war I can imagine that Edmund would have ben infected with the same fervour. Perhaps he nagged and nagged his parents to be allowed to go to war or perhaps he even tried to lie about his age. Whether he did either of these things or not, he didn’t succeed in enlisting until he reached the age of 18.

At 18, he was still under age as the age of majority was 21 in those days so he would have needed permission from a parent and his father’s permission is recorded on his enlistment form. How he must have been excited to finally have his chance to go and ‘fight the Hun’ but before being deployed he had to undergo basic training in Australia. I can imagine that Edmund chafed at not being deployed overseas immediately now that he had finally been able to enlist.

However, before he could complete his training and be deployed overseas World War I ended. This resulted in Edmund being discharged from the army without making it overseas let alone seeing any action. Whilst I can imagine that as a young man, he would have been frustrated that it was all over before he could be involved. On the other side of the coin, I can imagine that his mother must have felt enormous relief that her son would be safe.

Edmund was fortunate in that he never made it overseas to fight, as he avoided suffering the physical and mental scarring that so many young men suffered during World War I. Interestingly, he never enlisted for World War II even though he would have still been young enough. Whether he realised what he had been cared by not being deployed overseas or he didn’t enlist for other reasons, I don’t know. But what I do know is that his life would have turned out so differently if he had enlisted earlier in the war instead of right before it ended.

     Edmund Hartley with his daughter Lorna.

#52ancestors Week 7 – Love

So, the theme for week 7 of #52ancestors is Love. It was suggested on the weekly post that this doesn’t have to mean romantic love it could mean an ancestor you love to research or someone with a ‘love’ name. So, for me I’ve chosen to focus on two ancestors this week (who were a couple) that I love researching.

My fourth great grandfather David Hartley (aka Harknett) is one of my favourite ancestors and I love researching his life. David was one of the very first ancestors I ever researched, and I had heard a lot about him for most of my life. My mum’s uncle had done a great deal of research on his family which started in Australia with David. After the death of my grandmother, my mum decided she would like to find out some more about David and his origins. So, we scraped together the information that we had, which wasn’t all that much.

We knew from my great-uncle’s research the general time that he came to Australia and it was suggested that he may have been a convict but my mum had always been told by her grandmother that he was a ship’s captain. Well, with this scant information we actually found something after hours of searching: David was in fact a convict who was sentenced to 14 years transportation. So then, where did the story of the ship’s captain come in?

Obviously, David’s convict past was meant to be covered up. At the time, we kind of shrugged it off as some story that had been made up by the story as a way of hiding the fact that David arrived here as a convict. However, after a bit more digging we found where the story actually came from. To understand where this story came from and how we found out where it came from, I first need to discuss a bit about David’s life in Australia.

So, after being in the colony of New South Wales for a few years David was married. He was still serving his 14 year sentence at the time of his marriage, which in itself isn’t unusual as many serving convicts were married and it was encouraged as a way of creating a civilised society. However, what was unusual was the woman he married. His wife was one Elizabeth Grono who was a free woman, who had been born in England and came to Australia as a free person. Many individuals came to the colony free, either associated with the army/navy or to be with convict parents or relatives.

Elizabeth’s father was a Captain John Grono, who was a reasonably prominent man in the colony. He was an early settler of the Hawkesbury region and was a founding member of Ebenezer Church in the Pitt Town area (this was the first Presbyterian Church outside of Sydney and is currently the oldest surviving church in Australia). On his property, which fronted the Hawkesbury Rover, John Grono ran his shipbuilding business. this bought him into close contact with important members of the early colony such as Governor Bligh.

So, this is where I and the rest of my family believe the story of David Hartley being a ship’s captain came from. David has always fascinated me and continues to do so which makes him an ancestor I love to research. I also like to believe that David and Elizabeth were a true love match, as it would have been a big step down from visiting the Governor’s residence as a guest to marrying a convict who worked on the governor’s property. At the same time, there is a sadness to the story as it appears that Elizabeth was completely cut off by her family. Her sisters all married free men who were bought into their father’s business and made wealthy men. They are all also buried in the family vault at Ebenezer Church.

In sharp contrast, Elizabeth is buried in an unmarked grave at Pitt Town along with her husband David. David was also obviously not brought into the shipbuilding business as the copious amount of writing on John Grono and his shipbuilding business don’t mention him at all. In fact, in the majority of the writings on John Grono Elizabeth and her convict husband are not mentioned.

 

#52ancestors – Week 43 Cause of Death

So, I’ve been absent for months as life took over but have decided to make an effort to get back into it.

The prompt of ’cause of death’ was a easy one for me as one particular ancestor’s cause of death has given me  a lot of thought recently as to my own lifestyle and health. I was recently looking back over some certificates, looking for any missed clues as I did some more research on my mother’s family. I was looking at the death certificate of my great, great grandmother Elizabeth Hartley nee Brownlow,  not really expecting to see anything different, when the cause of death jumped out at me from the paper. She had died from a coma as a result of Diabetes Mellitus. As she was 72 years of age at her death, I think it’s safe to say that she suffered from Type 2 diabetes, which is a mature onset form of the disease usually caused by diet and lifestyle choices.

Elizabeth Brownlow-Hartley (Death)-1xnb78w

This really shocked me, as Type 2 diabetes is something that is discussed quite a bit in my family. My mother has Type 2 diabetes as did her mother (my maternal grandmother). As a result, I know quite a bit about the disease and know that I fall into a high risk category as both my mother and grandmother ended up with the disease. However, no one in the family realised that the disease went so far back in our family history. My mother never knew this ancestor of ours as she died long before my mother was even thought of, but as a result of finding out that this woman likely had type 2 diabetes as did my grandmother prompted my mother to hypothesise that perhaps her grandmother (my great grandmother) had the disease as well.

With some further digging into my great grandmother, looking at photographs and her death certificate, I have found that she was a very large woman and that at the time of her death she was suffering from sleep apnoea which is common in individuals with type 2 diabetes. My mother lived with her grandmother as a child, and remembers the amount of food that they ate and how much of it was fatty food. Poor diet is a number one risk factor in developing type 2 diabetes, as is being overweight or obese as well as genetic factors such as a parent or other close relative having the disease. Therefore, it is likely that my great grandmother suffered from the disease as well.

My great, great grandmother Elizabeth Hartley nee Brownlow. c.1933, the year she died

This is one instance where my family history research has proved to be of practical use, in providing me with information about diseases which are prevalent in my family. It has also proved of interest to others in my family and set off warning bells in my head to change my diet and lifestyle whilst I am still young enough to prevent developing the disease.

 

My great grandmother Edith Thompson nee Hartley. Unknown date.

 

Week 8 – Heirloom

Week 8’s topic is ‘Heirloom’ and I have focused on a collection of heirloom’s that I have in my possession. For as long as I can remember, these beautiful pieces of heirloom furniture have resided at either my grandmother’s house of my parent’s house. This matching wardrobe and dressing table along with a ‘glory box’ belonged to my great grandmother Edith Jane Hartley. As a child, these pieces of furniture fascinated me as they were so different from anything ‘modern’.

The story goes that the ‘glory box’ or ‘hope chest’ was the first item to be acquired by Edith, having been made for her by her father to store the many items she made and collected in preparation for marriage and setting up a household. Apparently, it started its life as a wash stand of some sort but to this day I haven’t figured out how that would have worked. Anyway, Edith took it with her in 1919 when she married Oscar Norman Thompson. At that time, it was used to store clothing for her future children.

On the occasion of her marriage, Edith was also given the matching wardrobe and dressing table. Unfortunately, due to a lot of moving around the wardrobe in particular is in disrepair and the mirror on the dresser has clouded over.My mother has recently shared her thoughts with me on getting rid of the wardrobe and dressing table but I have convinced her to keep them as they are a family treasure (of which we have so few). So for now they remain, and if I have any say in it they will remain forever. One day, I hope to have the money to restore them to their former glory.

Starting

After much deliberating, I have decided to start a blog as a way of recording my family history journey and family stories. The #52ancestors challenge has finally given me the motivation to start the blog rather than still thinking about it. The topic for Week 1 was “Start” so here is my post about how I started my family history journey.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been interested in history and how people lived “in the olden days”. As a child I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother, who was born in 1922. I can vividly remember coming across a black and white photo of a young child playing outside in a rural setting. I can remember asking my grandmother who the child in the photos was and her replying that it was her as a little girl. to me, who was only young at the time (maybe 8 or 9 years old) this was amazing. Over the years, I can remember her telling stories about her growing up years and haring stories from my mother who had heard them from her grandmother. When my grandmother died, my mum and I decided to do some investigating into my grandmothers family and we found something quite quickly on the first ancestor of hers to come to Australia: a convict. And with that, my family history journey was started.