Unearthed Treasure

 1. The Thornbers

Before we moved to Wagga Wagga eight years ago I knew little about the city. I was vaguely aware from my time at the (now defunct) professional craft artists’ organisation, Craft Australia, that Wagga was home to a significant collection of Australian art glass. A reconnoitre mission prior to committing to the move yielded more positive findings.  As well as the Glass Gallery, Wagga has an impressive regional art gallery; Wagga has a pool complex that runs aqua aerobics every day of the week almost all year round, and Wagga’s Civic Theatre is on the circuit for enough of the performers and productions we want to see to keep our diaries happily full.  On arrival we also quickly discovered the charms of Pomilgalarna, the Wollundry Lagoon and the Victory Memorial and Botanic Gardens and the delight of seeing ‘womboynes’ (Wiradjuri word for kangaroos) bounding about behind our house.

Still to come though was the surprise of two family connections. I’ve been doing genealogy for a few years, filling the void created because my mother was an only child, we left England when I was eleven and my father maintained very few links with his Australian family. I’ve experienced the peculiarly modern day Australian delight of uncovering convict ancestors and then the disappointment of discovering that one of them, the famously spirited Tasmanian inn keeper, Rachel Hoddy who arrived on the Lady Juliana in 1789, was mis-identified as a relation.  

A felon of a later era does however retain his place in our tree. Henri Garnay (aka Henri Chapins /Adolphe Mathey) married my great grand aunt Pauline Emilie Pittard in 1885. For the marriage certificate he represented himself as ‘a photographer in private life’, not revealing his former incarceration in New Caledonia  for forgery or his  conviction for carrying housebreaking implements in Sydney some four years earlier.  It is one of his daughters (he and Pauline had time to conceive two before he was deported in 1887), Armandine Garnay, whose link to Wagga I first discovered. Despite her humble origins,  Armie married well. Her groom in 1911 was South Australian born Lawrence (Laurie) Rowland Thornber, from a successful family of bankers and teachers. His career with the Union Bank spanned 43 years and 22 of those were spent first in Wagga and then in nearby Henty.

Armandine & Laurie

When we sit outside at our favourite café in Johnston Street, the former Union Bank, where Laurie was accountant from 1923 to 1926, is directly in our line of vision. The building now houses Boyce Chartered Accountants, but its exterior remains little changed since Laurie’s day and it isn’t hard to imagine him at work behind his desk inside. Nor is it hard to picture the Thornbers out and about in 1920s Wagga pursuing their interests.   Both Laurie and my first cousin twice removed, Armie were keen golfers and their wins at the Wagga Golf Club, then situated on the site of the Murrumbidgee Turf Club, were frequently reported. Laurie was the club’s auditor in 1924 while Armie was a founding member and Treasurer of the Wagga Wagga Shakespeare Club.  

Henty Man

Their stay in Wagga was brief as in 1926 Laurie was promoted to manager of the Union Bank’s Henty branch some 60 kilometers away.  Far from diluting the sense of propinquity, learning this fact intrigued me further. I first heard of Henty and its annual Field Day from a colleague raised in Albury who regularly sang the Henty Field Day song to us at work. With that auspicious introduction, I was excited to visit the town. Initially unaware of the family connection I contented myself with admiring the famous (locally at least) Henty Man. When I returned it was to see the old Union Bank building in Sladen Street where Laurie, Armie and their daughter Norma had resided. The elegant two storey corner building combined banking premises and spacious accommodation but is now a private residence.

Former Union Bank, 33 Sladen Street, Henty

It was a balmy day and to my delight the current owner had the door open while renovating the hallway. When he saw me excitedly staring at the building and photographing the exterior he was kind enough to invite me in. I saw the banking chamber, the old safe door, Laurie’s office, the kitchen, living room and bedrooms. My spine tingled as I imagined Armie hosting CWA meetings to raise funds for the hospital or giving her celebrated needlework demonstrations there and Norma meeting with the local youth group, nattily named ‘The Younger Set’, up until her marriage in 1940 disqualified her from membership and she was presented with a parting gift of a 'Cutex' leather encased manicure set. It is hard to explain the frisson I experienced despite never having known or, until recently, known of, these relatives. I found treading where they had trod an emotional and rewarding experience.

Laurie and Armie remained in Henty for some 13 years after his retirement in 1945 eventually joining their daughter and her family in Quirindi, northern NSW where they died within a few months of one another in 1973.

2.  Semple Misfortune

The other coincidence is less jolly. It relates to my husband’s family and this time the DNA has not left the district!

My husband is descended from Welsh miners via Newcastle NSW on his mother’s side and London tradespeople via Melbourne on his father’s. While it is a popular belief that migrants from the UK generally benefited from relocating to Australia both sides of our families contain examples of misfortune hampering attempts to build a life in a new land.  A qualified engineer died a pauper in my family and my husband’s great great grandfather John Semple (1815-1860) perished under sad circumstances after trying for a decade to make a success of his timber business. John, his wife of 5 years, Mary, and daughters Susannah and Mary jnr arrived in Victoria aboard the Alice Maude in 1849. They had 4 more children in the following decade. Plotting his course via newspaper archives, I traced his involvement with the dissolution of the Golden Cross Timber Yard business in 1855, his fine for sourcing wood on Crown Land in 1857 and the establishment then lapse into bankruptcy of his own timber import and merchandising business at Melbourne’s Batman’s Hill during 1858-60.

The Hope Inn, Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga

I can remember my surprise on obtaining a copy of John’s death certificate to discover that he had met his end just down the road (about 48 km away) from Wagga and about 464 km from his family home in St Kilda. Searching the newspaper archives revealed little until I tried the variations on the spelling of his surname: ‘Simple’ and ‘Semphill’. Then I found the full story of the tragic last weeks of his life. It seems that after he was discharged from bankruptcy John  must have sought work felling timber for the telegraph service which was being established between Deniliquin and Wagga. On or about 23 November  1860 he was leading a team when the tree the men were attempting to chop down fell unexpectedly; it hit John and fractured his spine. He was transported by cart to The Hope Inn in Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga where he languished under the care of Dr Allen Morgan and the unnamed publican and his wife until 3 December when he succumbed to his injuries. John’s wife Mary was informed by letter but he was not reunited with his family posthumously. It was summer and burial was urgent. According to his death certificate John Semple was interred in the new Wagga Wagga Monumental Cemetery the following day. While he is commemorated on a grave stone in St Kilda Cemetery, his burial site in Wagga’s extensive cemetery would have had only a wooden marker if it was indicated at all. 

St Kilda Cemetery, John's not there despite indications to the contrary

Thanks to the St John’s Church of England’s archivist, Leanne Diessel, we have recently discovered that John was only the 26th burial in the Anglican section of the cemetery and have been given a map that has allowed us to estimate his location. I like the fact that his great great grandson has been in his company so often over these past 8 years and that we are now  able to share information with other descendants about his unexpected final resting place.

Robert Erwin (John Semple's great great grandson) standing on the likely spot of John's interment

*it turns out that when checking out Wagga pre move we dined in the very building where John breathed his last, the old stone portion of what is now the Riverina Hotel! 

Women In The Shadows

I posted a while ago about how I have become hooked on family history.  I continue to make discoveries both great and small: finding  an envelope in an old box of photographs containing three pages of reminiscences written in a shaky hand by my grandmother recalling her early life in Newtown, tracking down through birth announcements, school records and newspaper stories that my second cousin once removed was a champion footballer who won three ‘best and fairest’ player medals and had a Prussian  army captain for a grandfather, learning that one of my great grand aunts became the  single mother of two young girls quite unceremoniously when her husband was arrested for producing and passing forged £1.00 notes and deported to Noumea.

It seems possible that my paternal line is traceable back to Switzerland in 1200 AD, but investigating that is just too mind boggling given that I am challenged enough fleshing out the past four generations in Australia! With the help of a first and a second cousin and various databases, I have been able to piece together quite a lot of my family members’ lives and stories.  Now that I have ‘gone bush’ I can’t easily visit the record repositories, museums and cemeteries that are the haunt of ‘genies’ but it is amazing how much is available online and it is heart-warming how generous other family history buffs  and volunteers at local historical societies can be.  I am as excited now at the arrival of a package of photocopies of documents and pictures as I used to be at the arrival of bric-a-brac I had bought on eBay!

But I have to remark on one complication that hampers my research.  I kept my so-called maiden name i.e. the surname I was born with, both for ideological and practical reasons, when I married back in the 80s.  I had not been bitten by the genealogy bug back then and it never occurred to me that continuity of identity had implications beyond feminist principles and avoiding the mess of changing bank accounts, electoral roll listings etc.  It wasn’t until I saw Armandine Garnay disappear to be replaced by Mrs R. L. Thornber and Regina Louise Pittard morph first into Mrs Charles Norett, re-emerge temporarily as Mrs Regina Norett (widow), only to be subsumed by the moniker Mrs J. B. Wallis (one of three succeeding women to be known by that name) and then to surface briefly as Mrs R.L. Wallis (widow) in the last few years of her life, that I realised how difficult the custom of assuming one’s husband’s name makes family research.  Add to this non-standardised spelling, 'Noirette' for 'Norett' and 'Wallace' for 'Wallis', and it can take a lot of detective work and guesswork to track down female relatives.

Another challenge is what the papers considered newsworthy in past eras. Business ventures and sporting achievements often got a mention so I stumbled upon (male) entrepreneurs, cricketers and footballers in the family quite quickly.  Female golfers and bowls players occasionally made it into the papers’ columns but a single initial and surname are hard to verify as the particular ancestor you’re seeking.  Marriages, births and deaths, assuming the family had the price and presence of mind to post a notice, can be depended upon to an extent. The first two usually reveal the bride’s/mother’s former identity. I remember the first time I heard the term ‘nee’ referring to a woman’s surname prior to marriage. It was on the saucy sit com ‘George and Mildred’ when Mildred was referred to as Mildred Roper (nee Trembler). Boom tish!  Incidentally, the Newcastle region leads the pack in their enthusiasm for printing wedding photographs, their local papers, in my experience,  had by far the richest source of blurry black and white pictures of newly hitched couples back in the 1940s and 50s.

Unless they moved in exalted social circles (none of my forebears really did) or were conspicuously active in the Country Women’s Association (Armandine Thornber nee Garnay was forever demonstrating her spinning or judging at rural shows) not many women featured in the newspapers. Of course women who held  important positions as matrons or headmistresses got some coverage, but shopkeepers, seamstresses, laundresses and those discharging ‘home duties’ (the term the census  used)  like my lot, only featured in the paper if they took out a classified ad selling a pony or a sewing machine.  Nowadays the likes of the Trading Post online and Gumtree and the explosion of social media have made both ‘For Sale’ notices and wedding coverage in newspapers redundant, but they helped to bulk up copy until about the 1980s.

My great grandmother was selling a pony and sulky in 1912.

So large chunks of women’s lives were not revealed in the media and, to my frustration, my female antecedents go ‘off the radar’ for years at a time especially if they weren’t reproducing during that period. Like the veiled mothers in Victorian photographs you may sense their outlines behind their more prominent offspring. Later their attire at their progenies' weddings might attract a few words in a newspaper but not for them election as aldermen, retirement send offs or visits to court to recoup debts or declare bankruptcy.  Even the ratio of industrial accidents and driving offences is firmly weighted along gender lines. While male relatives have had trees fall on them at work, lost fingers on the production line, been pulled over for faulty headlights or charged with indecent language, I have only been able to trace one female in our tree being fined for driving under the influence and she is only a relative by marriage!

 

 

A Victorian 'hidden mother' photograph  - she's there to keep the children from wriggling  but why disguise her?

Thank goodness for Trove (the National Library’s collection database) I have discovered so much trawling through it.  Some of my ancestors got more than their 15 minutes of fame – if they served their country, opened a successful emporium or played a pretty classy game of football – but the women got disproportionate obscurity, some not even accorded their own ‘real’ names in their death notices.   My greatest satisfaction and ongoing quest is to talk to those family members still around today who can throw a light on the shadows they inhabit.