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| Australia's first boat people |
The day got me thinking about the people in our own family history who left the land of their birth to migrate, willingly or otherwise, to another country.
Irish migrants to Manchester
On the maternal (Orton and Bentley) side, most of the migration seems to have been from Ireland to Manchester in England. I've mentioned previously that it seems likely that Samuel St Ledger and Alice Dodd both had Irish parents.
One of my grandmother's great grandmothers, Elizabeth Hardman, the child of Patrick and Margaret Hardman, was also born in Ireland, in Galway. Her family migrated to Manchester around 1840 when she was a young child. She married John Holt in 1853.
The most notorious 'migrant' on the Bentley side of the family was Alfred Pearson Bentley, who in 1879 left his wife and 4 children in Salford and sailed to Massachusetts. There he married (bigamously) and had another son. He and his new family eventually returned to England and lived not many miles away from his first family. More of him in a later post.
One of Samuel and Alice St Ledger's grandsons, Frederick Helliwell, migrated to New South Wales in Australia some time after his marriage to Frances Beatrice Farmer in 1903. Frederick died in Redfern in NSW in 1933 and Frances in 1968. As far as I'm aware they had no children.
To Australia and back
On the Beales side of my father's family, we have John Mason, who was probably an Irishman, and quite possibly a convict. He arrived in Sydney quite early on, sometime before 1841, and married Catherine Murphy, another immigrant. They moved to Adelaide in 1845, and remained there for the rest of their lives.
One of their 8 daughters, Susan (born 1849) married an English soldier, David Whybrew, who was stationed in South Australia for a while. Susan returned to England with David after the birth of their second child, Eliza, (who became my paternal great grandmother). Their first daughter, Harriet, born in South Australia, was left behind and didn't join them in England until her late teens.
Susan's younger sister, Eliza (born 1850), also married a British soldier, Jeremiah Murphy. They moved with the army to England and then to Scotland. The rest of the Mason's daughter seem to have stayed in Australia.
David Whybrew's older half-brother, Jeremiah, migrated to Canada with his employers in 1850. He married and had a family and died there in 1878.
Two of David and Susan Whybrew's daughters, Alice and Rose, migrated via Canada to Cook County in Illinois in the early 1900's. Unfortunately neither of them seem to have had happy experiences there. Alice died not long after she arrived, leaving a husband and young daughter, while Rose lost her only son when he was six.
The Ward side of my paternal family all seem to have remained staunchly in Lancashire, except for an occasional foray into the wilds of Yorkshire. The only migrant I've discovered is Henry Heaps (born 1832), a nephew of Matthew Cragg, who migrated to Utah, USA in 1869.
And then, of course, there are the members of my own childhood family, who came to Australia unaware that we had forbears and distant relatives here.
Does anyone know of any other migrants in the family?
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