Tag Archives: Penrith

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – Family Lore

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Over the last few years, my blog has been dormant because sometimes life just happens. But this year, I am going to get back into my blogging and have decided to join this years 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. The prompt for Week 1 is “Family Lore”.

Mary Ann during her time as a Salvation Army member

Many of us family historians start out journey with family stories that have been passed on by family members. In my own family, I had a Great Uncle who had traced his family tree (which is my maternal line) during the 1980s and handed me a lot of his research when I became interested in doing family history. One ancestor which intrigued me was a woman called Mary Ann Green who was  my 3x great grandmother. She was also one of the few ancestors that I had seen a picture of when I first started family history.

The family lore was that she had been born on the Hawkesbury River in 1830 to unknown parents who had ‘come free’ from England. The story was that her parents were unknown as when Mary Ann was 3 years old, both her parents had drowned in the Hawkesbury River Floods of 1833. Perhaps the thought of Mary Ann losing her parents at such a young age also piqued my interest, so I did some digging to find out more about Mary Ann.

Firstly, I searched for information about the 1833 flood of the Hawkesbury River. If people had drowned, surely there would have been a mention somewhere? Lo and behold, after many hours of internet searching and consulting with the Hawkesbury Library Service I found that there was no flood of the Hawkesbury recorded that year. I puzzled over this, but thought perhaps the date had been remembered wrong. However, when looking at Mary Ann’s marriage and death records I found no clues as to who her parents were.

Looking on NSW births, deaths and marriages I found a number of Mary Ann Green’s born either in 1830 or the few years before and after. I diligently ordered transcripts of likely looking records, only to find none of the Mary Ann’s were born anywhere near the right area. I was confident that she had indeed been born in the Hawkesbury area as every other certificate I had that related to Mary Ann confirmed that she had been born in the Hawkesbury area.

After many years of on and off research, I connected with a distant family member on Ancestry who was related to Mary Ann via her second marriage. I had noticed that this person had a birth date and parents for Mary Ann, so I reached out to them to see where they had got their information from. Well, that proved to be an excellent decision as it turned out she had got this information from a mix of family lore and a very well researched family history book.

Mary Ann’s Baptism Record

It turns out the elusive father of Mary Ann that I had been searching for any evidence of was not in fact her father and her surname was not Green. Rather, Mary Ann had been born to Dorothy Pickett and William Parsons. Not much is know about William Parson but Dorothy was the daughter of two convicts, with her father arriving on the First Fleet and her mother on the Second Fleet. After that, finding a record of her Baptism was a piece of cake. So, in that case the family lore was proved incorrect. Perhaps it started as a way of covering up the ‘convict stain’ as I have found in other areas of my family.

However, all was not lost with Mary Ann. Another piece of lore passed on about Mary Ann’s funeral was proved correct. Mary Ann died in 1914, and my Great Uncle wrote that Mary Ann’s funeral cortege proceeded down the main street of Penrith, NSW (where she had been living with her daughter) and was accompanied by the local Salvation Army band on its journey to the cemetery. This was proved to be accurate through Mary Ann’s obituary, which was published in the local  newspaper. A notice about the funeral was also published in the Salvation Army publication The War Cry, which described how her funeral cortege was accompanied up the main street of Penrith by the band and a contingent of the local Corps Soldiers (church members).

 

Account of Mary Ann’s funeral in The War Cry

O is for Oscar

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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

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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

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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