Sydney in New South Wales

On 2 March 1834, the Parmelia sailed through the sandstone heads of Port Jackson in New South Wales. Author Thomas Keneally describes the Parmelia's voyage and arrival in his book, The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New. Hugh Larkin, one of Keneally's wife's ancestors, was one of the 200 or so Irish prisoners on board. John Mason, my great great great grandfather, was another.

They had been cooped up in the crowded, creaking ship since they left Cork the previous October, so everyone was eager to catch a glimpse of land and the penal colony which was to be their home and prison for the next 7 years, 14 years or even a lifetime. From the decks they could see the coastal hills, with their strange (to their eyes) drab vegetation, the sandy beaches and the lighthouse, signal station and shacks around South Head. Sydney Town itself was hidden from view.

But the ship didn't immediately head for the docks in Sydney. According to Keneally, the soldiers of the 50th regiment, who had been the guards aboard the Parmelia, were landed four days after they reached Port Jackson. The convicts were given health checks and assessed for their fitness for work. It was not until 18 March that they were disembarked upstream at Sydney Cove.

Map from Museums Victoria

Sydney's history

People had been living in the area that would become Sydney for 30,000, perhaps even 50,000 years. It's estimated that the Aboriginal population was between 4000 and 8000 before the First Fleet arrived in 1788. Their descendants remain to this day, but initially their numbers declined as their traditional food-gathering areas were taken over by settlers, and they succumbed to previously-unknown diseases such as smallpox and measles. Violent confrontations also occurred.

John Mason had come from Limerick, a port city of elegant buildings but dire poverty. Food riots had broken out among the destitute there in 1830. In some ways, Sydney, with its bustling port, might have seemed familiar to him, though it was much smaller than Limerick. In the 1820s, Governor Lachlan Macquarie had set about constructing many grand public buildings and laid out the future city with a botanic garden and public open spaces.

Vue de George's Street a Sydney 1833
By Alexis Nicolas Noel 
Contributed By National Library of Australia  [nla.pic-an8148364]

Macquarie had also insisted that those who had served their term ('emancipists') should be treated as free citizens and be allowed to buy land, establish businesses, and be appointed to government posts. Many had done well for themselves. The port had become a busy trading centre. Those with money or power kept up a social life as similar to their English counterparts as they could, in the heat and dust.

Advertisement in the Sydney Gazette, 9 March 1833

But Sydney was still a town built by, and for, convicts. Although many women had arrived, either as convicts or free settlers, men still heavily outnumbered them. Crime, drunkenness and prostitution were rife. Convicts were provided with food, clothing and shelter, but their lives could be very harsh, depending on where they were allocated to work. Public floggings and hangings took place regularly. In 1833, there were 1,149 floggings in NSW, with 247 convicts receiving 9,909 lashes between them.

John Mason, convict labourer

Nineteen-year-old John Mason was initially assigned to work for Alexander Fotheringham, a prominent local business man and shipwright. By 1837 he had been re-assigned to Wright and Long, a shipping company with a wharf at Millers Point on Darling Harbour. He may have helped to build the store building on the wharf at the Point, eventually sold to Captain Joseph Moore, using sandstone quarried on-site. Working alongside John was another convict, William Doody, who would later migrate with John to South Australia.

By the time twenty-year old Catherine Murphy arrived in Sydney aboard the Mary Ann, in August 1840, the town had a population of 35,000, and had its own City Council. New South Wales was in an economic depression, and transportation of convicts to NSW had been suspended, but settlers continued to arrive. Decent accommodation was in short supply. Perhaps Catherine was met on the wharf by Mrs Caroline Chisholm, who endeavoured to make sure that newly-arrived single women had accommodation and found employment, rather than drifting into prostitution.

Caroline Chisholm

John and Catherine's marriage

Catherine came from a farming family in Monaghan, Ireland, and was hoping to find work as a farm servant. It seems, though, that she probably stayed in Sydney. On 2 February 1841, her twenty-first birthday, she married John Mason in St Mary's Roman Catholic church. John had received his Certificate of Freedom on 18 July 1840.

Hyde Park and St Mary's Cathedral, c1842
by John Rae. Image from State Library NSW

John and Catherine made their home in Elizabeth St, near the harbour, and their first child, Rosanna, was born there 10 months later in December 1841. Andrew and Mary Goodwin, an Irish couple who had been the witnesses at their wedding, became Rosanna’s baptism sponsors (similar to god-parents). One of John’s former mates from his days at Wright and Long’s shipping company, Timothy Rourke, along with his wife Mary, were the sponsors at the baptism of the Mason’s second child, Mary Ann, in October 1842. John’s friend William Doody and his wife Bridget (nee Murnane) were sponsors at the baptism of the Mason’s third daughter Catherine in 1844.

In 1843 John and Catherine were rocked by the death of little Rosanna. Such deaths were tragic but common in the colony as childhood diseases such as measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever arrived with the children of free settlers and spread in the overcrowded conditions in the city. Infants made up thirty percent of deaths in the colony in the 1840s.

Millers Point Sydney c1845 by Joseph Fowles.
Image from State Library NSW

Leaving for Adelaide

The Mason family remained in Sydney until December 1844. Then they sailed for Adelaide aboard the Dorset, along with several other Irish Catholic families. Did they feel any sadness at leaving the former penal colony? Somehow I doubt that they did. It wasn't a place of happy memories. Today, much of what they left behind has disappeared and the city would be unrecognisable to them.


General sources:
Wikipedia, History of Sydney
Webster World Encyclopedia of Australia
Convicts and the Colonisation of Australia
NSW State Records and Archives

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For more details about John Mason and his family, see my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool. It's available on Amazon and other online books stores. To read a preview of the first chapters, click on the cover image.

Adelaide in South Australia

We now leave the villages and towns of Essex so familiar to my great grandfather William Beales, and travel to Adelaide, the birthplace of his wife, Eliza Whybrew.

Rundle Street, Adelaide in 1845, by S. T. Gill.
 (Image from the State Library of Victoria.)

Eliza's grandparents, John and Catherine Mason, arrived in South Australia in December 1844, when the colony was less than a decade old. The main streets of Adelaide already contained some impressive civic buildings, churches, shops and hotels, along with a smattering of houses built of brick or the local stone. But most of the settlement's European population of around 10,000 people lived in single-story structures built of wood, tin or pise (a form of wattle and daub).

Adelaide and its surrounding farmland was the brain-child of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. While in prison in Newgate (for abducting a young heiress) he put forward the idea of populating a new Australian colony by selling land to the wealthy, then using the proceeds to pay the fares of labourers and artisans, who would provide a labour force for the land owners. The labourers' incentive to work hard would be that they could eventually save enough money to buy their own land. This would, he believed, avoid the social problems experienced in most of the other colonies, where land was granted freely to settlers while transported convicts provided the labour force. The "taint" of convict life would be absent.

The British Government passed the South Australia Colonisation Act in 1834, and in  February 1836 a convoy of ships full of eager settlers left England for the new colony. The first task of the Surveyor General, Colonel Light, was to work out where to actually put the new settlement. Light favoured one site on the Torrens River, while the Governor, Hindmarsh, favoured another, closer to the coast. It took a public meeting and a show of hands by the frustrated settlers, on 10 February 1837, to agree on the site favoured by Colonel Light.

William Light's map of Adelaide, 1837.
Image from Adelaidia website

By March 1837, the future city, with its grid of streets, open squares and surrounding parklands had been surveyed. It didn't take long for land prices to soar as new settlers continued to arrive. The Kaurna people, who had lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, and whose fire-stick farming practices were responsible for the park-like landscape so admired by the settlers, were gradually displaced.

What brought the Masons to Adelaide?

As an Irish ex-convict, John Mason (my great great great grandfather) was not exactly the sort of settler that Edward Gibbon Wakefield had envisaged for his new colony. In 1834 the 19-year-old John had been transported from Limerick in Ireland to New South Wales for stealing several yards of cotton material from a shop. 

After serving his seven-year sentence in Sydney, John married a newly-arrived Irish girl, Catherine Murphy. In December 1844 they and their two surviving daughters, Mary Ann and Catherine, left Sydney on the brig Dorset. They seem to have been travelling as part of a group with John's friend and fellow ex-convict William Doody, William's wife, Bridget (nee Murnane) and her sister and brother-in-law, the McCormacks. 

Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Dec 1844

For John Mason and William Doody, Adelaide offered the opportunity to leave behind the taint of being a convict, although they would have to keep that motivation to themselves. Bridget Doody's parents had settled in South Australia a few years earlier. William Doody, a country man, may have been attracted by the chance to buy land. News about the riches to be made at the recently-opened copper mines in South Australia might have been an attraction. Or, as good Irish Catholics, the group may have been following the Sydney priest, Father Francis Murphy, who had just been appointed the Bishop of Adelaide.

The Bedford Hotel, Currie St, c1891
Formerly named the Ship Inn, and now demolished,
it stood almost opposite the Mason's house.

John and Catherine rented an assortment of small cottages around Adelaide as their family grew to include eight daughters. They eventually settled in Currie Street, to the west of the city centre. Their sixth daughter, Eliza's mother Susan, was born in May 1848. It's clear from the girls' baptism records that the family were part of the community of Irish Catholics in Adelaide, a small and sometimes unpopular minority in the largely English and Scottish protestant colony.

John found work as a labourer. As immigrants continued to arrive, there was plenty of work for builders' labourers and the like. So much so, that land owners often had difficulty attracting labourers for their farms. In time John established himself as a member of the wider community, becoming a member of the Ancient Order of Forresters, a mutual aid organisation.

But in 1856 he became bed-bound and was unable to work. In January 1857 he died, leaving Catherine and her daughters destitute. She was able to get some support from the Destitute Board, a body which, like the police force and the prison, had not been envisaged by Wakefield in his original plans for Adelaide. The older girls also brought in a small amount of money.

Currie Street, looking west, 1872.
Image from the State Library of South Australia

By the time Susan Mason was in her teens, Adelaide had grown to a sizeable place. In 1866 the non-Aboriginal population numbered 163,452. This included over 5,000 Germans who had established a wine growing industry in the hills around Adelaide. It also included thousand of single women from Ireland who arrived during and after the great famine. Many of these found work as servants or farm labourers, but some joined the growing number of prostitutes around the city. Susan included several of them among her friends.

The Whybrews leave South Australia

By the mid 1850s, South Australia had been granted its own parliament, though initially only land-owning men could vote. By 1861 property-owning women had been given the right to vote in municipal elections. Despite some ups and downs, the colony was faring well. Much of its wealth came from exports of wheat and wool, and from copper mining.

Yet it was also very isolated, leading to a sense of vulnerability among the population. Most residents were happy that the British government continued to station troops in Adelaide to protect them from real or imagined threats.

Members of the 50th regiment in 1850
Image from the National Army Museum

In 1868 it was the turn of the 50th (Queen's Own) regiment to be stationed in the barracks near the Torrens River. The red-coated soldiers of the 50th would provide husbands for both Susan and her sister Eliza. Ironically, the same regiment had acted as guards on board the ship that had transported their father to Sydney. Susan Mason and David Whybrew were married in Adelaide in May 1869, after some interesting escapades and the birth of their first daughter, Harriet, in 1868. Their daughter Eliza was born in December 1869.

When David's regiment was called back to England in 1870, Susan went too, taking baby Eliza with her, but leaving Harriet behind in the care of another family. As far as I know Eliza never went back to Australia, so had no memory of her birth place. Harriet, on the other hand, remained in Adelaide until her teens, when she suddenly reconnected with her family in England.

Several of Susan's sisters married in Adelaide and some of their descendants no doubt still live there. I've yet to discover where John and Catherine Mason are buried, although it is probably somewhere in West Terrace cemetery.

St Luke's church, Adelaide, where Susan
and her sister Eliza both married 

My own family arrived in Western Australia from the UK in 1969 and I visited Adelaide several times over the following decades. One of my daughters studied at university there. I always liked its leafy, old-but-trendy atmosphere. But until I began researching my family history I had no idea that three generations of my father's family had lived there. Now, when I have chance to visit, I see it in a different way, with various landmarks around the city having associations with "my" Adelaide family.

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You can find out more about the Mason and Whybrew families in Adelaide in my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool.
It's available on Amazon and other online books stores

Inside St Luke's, Adelaide

This post is a bit of a break from my "unsolved mysteries" series. We've just returned from a holiday visiting family in Alice Springs, which included taking a 'detour' via Adelaide. The detour was deliberate - we wanted to avoid having to get to the airport in Perth before dawn for the direct flight to Alice. And besides, we both like Adelaide.

While we were enjoying a walk we decided (or should I say, I persuaded my husband) to see if we could have a look inside St Luke's church on Whitmore Square. Susan Mason and David Whybrew were married there by the Reverend James Pollitt on 28 May 1869. Susan's sister Eliza and her sweetheart Jeremiah Murphy were also married at Luke's in March the same year. Last time I visited Adelaide I found the building but wasn't able to take a look inside.

Rev. James Pollitt, c 1869
Photo courtesy of SLSA.

A mid-week service was taking place when we arrived, so we sat in the park opposite until people started leaving, then went to have a peek while the doors were still open.

The minister noticed us and invited us in. When I told him why we were there, he introduced us to a couple of parishioners who, he said, knew a lot about the history of the place. They were very generous in showing us around and telling us what they knew.

St Luke's, Whitmore Square, in about 1870
Photo courtesy of SLSA.

St Luke's was the second Anglican church built in Adelaide, after Holy Trinity in the city centre. The land for the building was donated by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Apparently the bishop of the day, Augustus Short, arranged for a prefabricated iron building to be brought in pieces by ship from Britain, but the parishioners thought it too expensive and started building with local bluestone instead. Some of the ironwork was incorporated into the stone building and the rest sold off. The church was consecrated in 1856.

A pipe organ was installed in 1868 - just in time for the two Mason sister's weddings! The Mason family were Catholic, so it was probably their spouses' connection with the British Army that led to the weddings being held in the Anglican church.

Painting of the burned out ruins of St Luke's,
by Adelaide artist Arthur Phillips.
The painting is behind glass, so my photo
includes some unwanted reflections.

Unfortunately, the original church was burned out in 1992, possibly as a result of arson, leaving only the stone walls. So what we could see of the interior was mostly the result of rebuilding, and not what David and Susan would have seen. (We  heard a similar story when we went to look at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, where John Mason and Catherine Murphy were married.)

Only one small window, located near the altar, remains of the original stained glass windows. The window at the back of the church is a reproduction of what was there before the fire, but all the other windows are new, and part of a commissioned series. As one of the parishioners said, it makes the church quite unique in having a matching set of windows rather than a random collection donated over time.

The church has a long-standing reputation for it's work in the community, so we were pleased to hear that this is continuing, and the congregation is growing. Thank you to those who received us so kindly.

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You can find out more about Susan and David Whybrew and their family, in my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool, available on Amazon and other online books stores

And it's done!

View the book

The book I've been writing about Susan Mason and her family is finally complete and published on Amazon worldwide. It's available as an e-book which can be read on any Kindle device or Kindle app. A paperback version is also available (although sadly not through the Australian Amazon site, which doesn't stock printed books yet). I'm still looking into other e-book options such as epub and ibooks.

I hope if you've enjoyed reading my articles about the Mason and Whybrew families here on Clogs and Clippers you will find this much expanded and chronological version of their stories interesting and enjoyable. The book has extensive endnotes and a bibliography.

I've had great fun writing it. My sincere thanks to all who have helped with the research, editing, and revising of the book. Thanks especially to Katie for the cover and Amy for her editing.

For UK readers, the Kindle edition is available here.
For customers of the Australian Amazon site, it can be found here.

Visit my new "author page" on Amazon for more information.

The missing link - William Doody

Millers Point in 1870
(Image from State Library of NSW collection)

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while will be familiar with my theory that John Mason, who married Catherine Murphy in Sydney in 1841, was an Irish convict born in Limerick.  He arrived in Sydney on the Parmelia in 1834.

The problem has been that my conclusion was based on excluding all the other possible John Masons around at the time, and some circumstantial evidence. And that meant I could never be sure that I wouldn't one day come across another John Mason that I'd overlooked, who would ruin my theory. (I've mentioned before how my heart sank when I read in the Destitute Board records in Adelaide that John Mason was said to be English.)

That uncertainty has always nagged me. It meant I was constantly having to say that John Mason was "probably Irish" and "probably a convict". It's hard to build a good story on the word "probably".

So this week I started to think about what sort of evidence would I need to show that "Convict John" was the same person as "Catherine's  John". Convict John disappears from the records in 1840 after getting his certificate of freedom. What could tie him to the John who appeared on the scene to marry Catherine in 1841?

After asking that question on a genealogy forum, and tossing it around, it occurred to me that William Doody (or Dowdy or Doudey) might be a link. William was a former convict who sailed to Adelaide with the Masons in 1845. He and his wife Bridget (nee Murnane) were also the sponsors at one of the Mason's daughter's baptisms. He was obviously a friend of John and Catherine.

I found William's record on the 1837 General Muster of Convicts. It showed that he arrived on the Dunvegan Castle in 1832 and was employed by Wright and Sons in Sydney. That didn't seem very promising. I knew John Mason fom Limerick was assigned to an Alexander Fotheringham when he arrived in 1834.

Then I realised that I'd never found John Mason's name on the 1837 muster. My information about him came from his convict indent and his certificate of freedom. After some searching I found him listed as "John Wason". All the other details such as his age and his ship, the Parmelia, matched. And he was assigned to.... Wright and Sons. So he would have known William Doody in 1837, before he met Catherine. They would have worked together and probably lived in the same quarters.

I did a little dance - this was just the sort of link I needed. It's not quite proof that the two John Masons were the same man, but it makes it a lot more likely.

Since then I've done more research and found that "Wright and Son"s is probably a mis-transcription of Wright and Long, who owned a wharf and shipping business at Millers Point on Darling Harbour. Another convict assigned to them, Timothy Rourke, was a sponsor at the baptism of one of the Mason's other daughters. Two for the price of one!

More about John Mason:

John and Catherine Mason - pioneers
John Mason - where did he come from?
Two more small clues about John Mason
An interesting snippet of news about John and Catherine Mason
Discoveries in Adelaide part 1
Discoveries in Adelaide part 2
A sad tale of two Roses
The missing link - William Doody
A song of the sea

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You can read more about John Mason and William Doody in my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool. It's available on Amazon and other online books stores. To read a preview of the first chapters, click on the cover image.

A sad tale of two Roses

The name Rose and its variants - Rosina, Rosanna, Roseanna - pops up quite often among the Beales and Mason families in the Ward family history. Recently I've discovered two more Roses that I didn't know about before. Unfortunately their lives were both rather brief.

The first was Rosanna Mason, born in Sydney on December 1, 1841. She was the first child of John Mason and Catherine Murphy, and she was baptised at St Mary’s Church on December 8. Her sponsors (the Catholic equivalent of god parents) were Andrew and Mary Goodwin, the same couple who had been the witnesses at John and Catherine’s wedding in February that year.

Their second child, Mary Ann, was born on October 19 the following year. Catherine may already have been pregnant again with her next child, Catherine, when little Rosanna died. Perhaps she succumbed to one of the epidemics of childhood diseases such as whooping cough and scarlet fever that swept through Sydney in the 1840’s, as families began arriving in the colony as migrants. Nearly 30% of deaths in the 1840’s were among infants*. Prior to this, when the population had been made up chiefly of adult convicts and soldiers, such illnesses had been almost unknown. Rosanna was buried in Sydney.

As was common in those days, John and Catherine used the name Rosanna again, for their fifth daughter, who was born in Adelaide in 1847. Several of the Mason’s daughters named one of their children Rose, Rosanna or Rosina. I knew already about Rose Atkin (daughter of Mary Ann), and Roseanna Murphy (daughter of Eliza Mason).

Recently I discovered another child named Rose who I think is a daughter of Susan Mason and David Whybrew. (I don't yet have certificates to prove it, but it seems likely.) If so, she would be one of the 'missing' children who doesn't appear on any census.

She was registered in Colchester in the April-June quarter of 1874 under the name “Rosina Whybruew”. The spelling suggests that it was Susan who registered her, and unlike the other children born while David was in the army, she wasn’t recorded on the British Nationals Armed Forces births register.

That may be because the family were in a state of upheaval. A two year old child named David, who was almost certainly their son, died in Colchester  in July. David’s regiment was moved to Ireland in August, arriving in Dublin on August 8. Susan and the children went with him, though they may not have sailed at the same time.

Sometime in 1874 a child less than a year old named “Rose Whybren”  died in Dublin and her death was registered there. It seems very likely that this was Susan and David’s young daughter. It must have been a terrible blow to lose a baby like that in a strange country, especially so soon after the death of another child.

Like her parents, Susan and David used the name Rose again for a later child, a daughter born in Kent in 1877. Their daughter Eliza kept the tradition going by marrying into a family with many ‘Roses’, the Beales, and naming one of her daughters Rosina.

Postscript: I now have confirmation that the child Rosina Whybrew, who died in Dublin in October 1874 was the daughter of David Whybrew, soldier in the 50th regiment. She was 4 and a half months old and cause of death was 'diarrhea'.

*Lewis, Milton James. The People’s Health: Public Health in Australia, 1788-1950. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Print. Page 30-31

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to read more about the Mason and Whybrew families, see my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool. It's available on Amazon and other online books stores. To read a preview of the first chapters, click on the cover image.

Discoveries in Adelaide (part 1)

Who would have thought that the word "English", written in faded ink on yellowing paper could make my heart sink. But it did.

South Australia's magnificent State Library.
The Spence Wing is in a modern building behind this one.

Last week I spent a few days in Adelaide, looking for information about the Mason family, while my husband attended a conference. Although I'd been to Adelaide before, this was the first time I'd been there since I discovered that my father's forebears had once lived there. I had a wonderful time exploring the city on foot, and using the Spence wing of the State Library to check out some original documents and records that aren't available on-line.

One of the first things I wanted to see was the minutes book of the Destitute Board. As I've mentioned previously, the local newspapers reported that Catherine Mason applied to the Board for relief several times, both before and after her husband John died in 1857. The Board minutes seemed the most likely place to find more information about the family and their circumstances.

Unfortunately there is a gap in the records between 1857 and 1869. But I found the entry for Friday November 21, 1856, a couple of months before John died, in the big tattered ledger. The record was in John's name rather than Catherine's.

Cottages in North St, off Currie St.
Most of Currie St is now taken up by
businesses and warehouses.

It stated, in a neat copperplate hand, that "Jno. Mason" lived in Currie St (no number given), had 4 children under the age of 7 and 4 over 7, that he arrived in Adelaide on the Dorset 12 years prior, and that he was a labourer. His application was recommended by Dr Shole.

Under "Circumstances" it said "Has been ill, unable to work since last Christmas." Type of relief provided was "outdoors", that is, provision of rations rather than "indoors", admission to the Destitute Asylum. All this confirmed what the newspaper report had said. In fact, one of the things I discovered on this trip was that the newspaper reports at the time were remarkably detailed and accurate.

The only new information, apart from Dr Shole's name, was the comment in the last column . Whoever wrote the minutes felt that it was important to record the nationality of the applicants, even though it wasn't required. In most cases they also recorded the religious denomination, though it was omitted in John Mason's case. But there was that word:  "English". Drat!

The Edinburgh Castle Hotel, Currie St,
one of the oldest pubs in Adelaide.
The Ship Inn, frequented by the Masons,
no longer exists.

For some reason, the entry for John in the Destitute Board minutes was duplicated a few lines down, on the same date, but with a minor correction to the ages of the children. Perhaps this entry was made after the information had been checked by the Relieving Officer, as the newspaper reporter indicated was going to happen. But that word English was 'dittoed'. No correction there.

After all the research I'd done trying to discover where John Mason came from, before he married Catherine Murphy in Sydney in 1841, that word "English" was depressing. By a long process of eliminating every other John Mason I could find, I'd come to the conclusion that he was probably the young convict of that name who arrived in New South Wales on the Parmelia in 1834. And that John Mason was an Irishman from Limerick.

The most obvious explanation is that I've got the wrong John Mason. After all, I have no proof that the convict on the Parmelia was the one who married Catherine Murphy. But so much that I know about John and Catherine suggests they were Irish. Almost everyone associated with them - the witnesses at their wedding, the sponsors at their children's baptisms, the person who registered John's death - was Irish. So I've been trying to think of some other possible explanations.

We know from the newspaper report that it was Catherine, not John, who fronted up to the Board to ask for relief, so the recorder didn't actually meet John on that occasion. Did he know the family? Where did the information come from?

If John had arrived in Australia as a teenager in 1834 and he had lived in Australia for 22 years, perhaps he had lost his accent. Or perhaps he lived and worked in Ireland but originally came from England, though convicts' records usually recorded where they were born. Maybe Catherine sounded, looked, or claimed to be English.

Or perhaps, just maybe, the recorder made a clerical error. My faith in official records was rattled when I found a couple of entries in 1882 for Harriet Whybrew, when she was admitted to the Industrial School at the age of 15 for stealing a watch. One entry mentioned that her parents were in England, but both entries said that her uncle, David Whybrew, a turner, lived in Adelaide.

Part of one of the records for Harriet Whybrew.
(Taken with a phone camera from a microfilm,
so not great quality. Click to enlarge.)

In fact, David Whybrew was her father, a soldier who was living in England with his wife Susan Mason and their other children at the time. Harriet's uncle Henry Atkin, husband of Mary Ann Mason, was a wood turner living in Adelaide. (More on this later.)

Since I've been home I've been going back over my previous research, looking for an English John Mason that I might have overlooked before. So far I haven't found one that wasn't dead or married by 1841 or still in Sydney after 1845. I'll keep looking.

As a footnote, I still don't know why John was bed-bound for twelve months before he died. While I was at the library I checked the Adelaide Hospital admissions records for 1855-1857, but didn't find any of the Mason family mentioned. Never mind - it was great fun and fascinating looking at original records from 160 years ago. The library and State Records people were all very helpful. I just wish Adelaide wasn't quite so far away.

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To read more about the Mason family in Adelaide, see my book Susan: convict's daughter, soldier's wife, nobody's fool. It's available on Amazon and other online books stores. To read a preview of the first chapters, click on the cover image.

An interesting snippet of news about John and Catherine Mason

DESTITUTE BOARD. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17.

Adelaide Observer, 22 November, 1856, p. 3

This snippet of news from the Adelaide Observer may be only 16 words long, but it's actually quite informative. It's taken from the Observer's report of the meeting of the South Australian Destitute Board on Monday November 17, 1856, so we're looking at a date about two months before John Mason's death on January 22, 1857, at the age of 42. 

First of all, its mention of "12 years in the colony" confirms that the Mason family arrived in South Australia about 1844. That ties in with their assumed arrival in Adelaide from Sydney on the Dorset in January 1845. It also confirms that they had 8 children.

What is new is the information that John Mason was bedridden for nearly a year before his death. What would cause a man in his early forties to be incapacitated for such a long time before his eventual death? Did he have an accident, or a work-related injury? He worked as a labourer, which in those days meant a lot of heavy work with little safety equipment, so it's quite possible, though I haven't found any reported accidents in the newspapers. His death certificate says he died of heart disease, so some sort of heart condition or a stroke is another possibility. 

Whatever the case, poor Catherine must have been in a desperate state. It seems unlikely that the family could afford any sort of medical care. With eight children to look after, and a husband not only unable to work but also in need of care, it's not surprising that she was applying to the Destitute Board. 

Previously I'd only come across reports of her appearance before the Board some months after John's death. Whether or not the 'enquiries' of the Relieving Officer resulted in some relief before his death isn't clear. At it's peak in 1855, the SA Destitute Board was providing relief to over 3,000 men, women and children. This was a time when lots of women found themselves abandoned by their husbands who had gone off to the goldfields. Perhaps out of necessity, the Board was not known for its liberality, and many cases were refused. 

By the time the Board discussed her case again in June 1857, the three oldest girls (aged 14, 13 and 11) were working and receiving board, but the widowed Catherine still had five daughters at home to feed. On that occasion Catherine was granted two rations.

Comings and goings

Australia's first boat people

Yesterday was Australia Day, the day when Australians remember the arrival in Port Jackson (in 1788) of a fleet of British convict ships. From these ships staggered several hundred disgruntled prisoners and their guards, while the local Aboriginal people looked on in disbelief.

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?

Sydney past and present

Last weekend we went to Sydney to meet up with some of my husband's extended family. Since we had a free day on the Monday we strolled around the city looking at some of the sights.

I'd hoped to get some sense of what Sydney might have been like in the time when John Mason and Catherine Murphy were living there in the early 1840's, long before the iconic Harbour Bridge and Opera House were built. However very little of the early settlement remains.

Lower George Street and Sydney Cove c.1851
 watercolour attributed to Jacob Janssen

The oldest area of Sydney, known as The Rocks because of the sandstone with which it was built, has been demolished extensively over the years to make way for more modern buildings. Even in its heyday it was something of a slum with a dark reputation. In the early 20th century plague broke out and much of it was bulldozed. It was only in the 1970's that people began to feel that some of Sydney's heritage needed to be retained.

Views of Sydney, from St. Leonards, 1842
Conrad Martens

Similarly the harbour itself is no longer what John Mason would have seen when he arrived in Sydney (probably in 1833). A marker placed to show the original shoreline near Cadman's cottage is a hundred metres from the present day wharf at Circular Quay.

An early photo of George St, the Rocks
These buildings still stand

We stopped for a coffee in a row of shops in George Street which would have existed in John and Catherine's day. Most were now boutiques and bars, and across the road was a very modern art gallery. It was hard to imagine what the area might have looked like back in 1840.

Hyde Park, St Mary's Cathedral and Belfry, 1842
John Rae

Old St Mary's Cathedral
date and artist unknown

Up the hill from the Rocks, near the Domain, we found St Mary's Cathedral, where John and Catherine were married in 1841. Unfortunately the original building burned down in 1865. The current building, although magnificent, was built long after the Masons moved to Adelaide. 

But never mind. After strolling through the beautiful botanic gardens with the glass and steel towers of the business district as backdrop, then sitting in the winter sunshine watching a lunch-hour game of soccer being played, I had to think that John and Catherine would have been both amazed and approving of what Sydney has become.

The spires and tower of St Mary's Cathedral today 

(All images except the last one are courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales)

Two more small clues about John Mason

In a previous post (John Mason - where did he come from?) I explained my reasons for thinking that the John Mason who married Catherine Murphy in Sydney in 1841 was probably the convict named John Mason who was tried and sentenced to transportation for stealing cotton in Limerick, Ireland, in 1833. He arrived in Sydney on the Parmelia in 1834.

However, there were still several other convicts who could potentially have fitted the bill. The next most likely after 'John from Limerick' was a John Mason, born in 1813, who was tried in York in 1835 and transported on the Royal Sovereign. I've now discovered from the New South Wales Convict Indents 1788-1842 (on Ancestry.com.au) that this John Mason was Protestant, and could read and write. Which means that he is very unlikely to have been the John Mason who married Catherine in a Catholic church, and who signed his name with an X.

Another small piece of information I gleaned from the New South Wales Settler and Convicts list, 1787-1834, was that the John Mason who arrived on the Parmelia was assigned to an Alexander Fotheringham in Sydney. As yet I haven't been able to find out much about Alexander Fotheringham except that he seems to have been a shipwright who owned several properties around Sydney.

If you would like a copy of a spreadsheet listing all the details I could find about 19 of the convicts named John Mason who arrived in NSW before 1841, please contact me and I'll email it to you.