First Marriage in the good old days

(This is the story of my great-grandmother's marriage prior to her marriage to my great-grandfather)

In late 1896 19yo JW married 20yo Janet and they lived with her parents (& several teenage siblings) - and 5 months later Lexy (Jean Alexandra) was born. 

 They moved several times, the majority of which involves living in the homes of relatives, her having the next 2 - James Alexander and George Herbert - in the next 3 years. 

 There is a gap of nearly 3 years between these and the next girl - Mina (#1), during which time she had to take the children to Sydney from  Far North Queensland for medical reasons. 

(The story I got in childhood was that she had left him to get treatment for Mina and one of the brother's polio, and he sued her for desertion but the truth is far more terrible.)

He stayed in FNQ while this was going on, and when she and the 4 children return he sent her first to the home of her mother-in-law's and then to his unmarried brother's pub to help run it. 

 

He sent irregular payments (but she could go to any shop in Cairns he advised) for her to look after 4 children under 7. She eventually contacted him from a completely different town asking him to send money so she could see him.

They haven't seen each other for about 10 months and she has appeared - 7 months pregnant.  

My take? I do not think that this was a love affair but yet another bad mistake for whatever reason that this poor young woman has made - or has had made for her.

She offers to go away and look after the children and him to send enough money and he agrees and indeed does - once or twice - until his lawyers advised him not to.

In the interim she has baby 5 - Jack - whose paternity on paper is JW but in soon to follow court room evidence is revealed to likely be his uncle's son.

When brought to the court - seemingly against her own wishes - all of this is laid out for the world to see. Her desperation, her fertility, her plight - her guilt, and possibly additional guilt in the shape of her body and another son born to adoption. 

She asks for nothing. She just wants this whole nightmare to be exorcised from reality. She is a broken woman.

It is 1906. Less than 10 years have passed.

(#1) I actually met Mina when I was a young child. In 1975 or 76, my mother put her mother, me and my toddler baby brother in a station wagon and we drove for days to the top of Queensland to meet her. She walked with crutches as she had polio as a young girl. She hadn't seen my grandmother - her baby half -sister - for over 60 years.

Powertry

 I did something unusual (for me) (of late) last night.

Well, being out at night was the first bit of unusual - we will check PASSED against the "being able to drive at night" checkbox for our post cataract operation checkbox.

And even though it WAS our anniversary - the traditional gift for sixteen years (I know, that is a BIG number) is apparently NOTHING because its no longer special - V did give me the gift of going out without him last night.

Last night I went to our beautiful little local(ish) bookshop that has some lovely community events.  One is the Book Club that I am part of and meets the last Sunday of the month - and another is the Budding Poets Society.

This image was advertising last night's poetry, not of last night's poetry.  A picture of the organiser and a few enthusiasts in the bookshop.

I used to HAUNT poetry nights.  Back in the day - the day was very, VERY long ago (last century) - I could be found at a poetry afternoon or night or two per week.  In Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane I spent many an hour listening to poets speak their (and occasionally other) words and spoke a few myself. 

Younger me even went to FESTIVALS to listen and speak.

But children - and work and life - came along and the muse took a nap.  I drive a mean spreadsheet and my macros could be called poetry, but my spare time is sparse and bereft of inspirational sparks.  And even were there sparks, the light and energy to capture them is so fleeting that I stopped seeking them out.

So last night, I ventured out.  'Salina is a regular at this event.  She does not write poetry (yet) (she does wield a mean journal though) but has read one of mine there before (The second one in this post - I had forgotten I even went to the workshop!)

The little space was fairly full - probably up to about 20 people - and some beautiful new words being trotted out.

I only have my old work to lean on.  'Salina did "My Addiction" - a poem that used to be one of my standards and a bit of a party piece (oh, my wild days of youth when I knew how to party!!)   

'Salina didn't grow up with her mother dragging her to poetry dives, and so didn't grow up with me reciting this and other things around her, so it was a clean palate that the poem landed on, and she did it justice - and hearing a poem that I know so intimately read with another's interpretation was refreshing.

Everyone got to read up to 2-3 poems, and there was a list for people to put their names down - pre- and post- intermission.  Intermission was nibblies in the room we normally use for the Book Club.

On the list was was a grizzled older poet who had a full life a tales; a (very-nearly) former English teacher; a woman retrospective about life turns; someone who asked for divine guidance in a library to guide her to a book of poems (she found an absolute beauty by a refugee); a man whose health issues have forced symbiosis with poetry; a first-time reader with a lovely snapshot of a relationship end; a lady reading some classic Australian poetry; a woman who interwove some classics with her own.

I read "Drought Breaking" and "The Spinster Song" before intermission, and "Powertry", "Ode to the Dishwasher" and "Fanta Boys" after.

It was fun.

Who knows.  I might even write again.

Thursday in the Key of B Major

 I really think that this wind should blow off to next week.

It's been days since the wind began. It just tuned up Sunday, foxing a pleasant breeze and promises of a paradisical day.

Monday it added raspberries, a soft jazz riff and a hint of cowbell.

Tuesday it turned up the wail and added wah-wah to the mix.

But I didn't mind. I was ensconced in air-conditioned rooms at a workshop for work.

Wednesday the upper layer of the planetary husk started lifting, and a Beethovenic manoeuvre by the local big smoke's Puffing Billy (we are imagining the puff in this electronic era) (and the Billy is really a misnomer too - it is called creative licence) by the local big smoke's Puffing Billy's rail signal network deciding "nah, stuff it, Red it is. We THINK that there might be a train." Right at the crescendo of the peak hour symphony.

The last movement. Today. A westerly came in with Dad to see what all of the fuss was about. It whipped up and down the boulevards of the local big smoke, snaking shortcuts through the coffee shop we dined at. The reverberations rumbled as we manoeuvred bureaucratic bundles and toe curling action.

 Then Dad headed back, his guidance was the ever blackening sky an. 

Lightening and thunder and waves of squalls werr our dinner music and then the rain steadied for a few beats...

Whoops in the Nor-Westerly, swinging the woodwind section in and the house now thrums with piccolo.

Finale.

The Colonisation of Jeanie

 I have always grown up with stories.

There's the ones that Mum and Dad and grandparents and neighbours and classmates and siblings would tell.

And there's the ones that school and radio and books and the telly would give.

Of late I have invested time and money - and a small amount of saliva - into teasing the truth from family  narrative and weaving it with the weft of history.

However history has a way of moving around when you put it under the microscope.

When first I got my results it advised a good dose of Scotland with the rest a brew of basic white girl - the family lore was "English, Scottish, Irish, French, German and whoever else decided to invade ".

But my grandmother always said that her family came from "outside Glasgow".

It was discovered many years later that her family name was on an American college building during a tour my aunt made. She discovered the contribution for the building came from a wealthy local family who had several generations before come from Londonderry. Technically yes, outside Glasgow.

And this many years later, I learned that many Scottish families traversed the sea for generations, following the harvest and being bodies for hire between the geographic boundaries of Scotland and Ireland.

And I learned that my grandmother's mother - a mythical creature even for my grandmother - had a mother born to a Lanarkshire stonemason come publican in Newcastle and an Aberdeenshire lass who had eight children and at least five lived to adulthood.

And my grandmother's grandfather was six years old when he and five siblings and parents travelled from Old Monkland, Lanarkshire   to the brand new world of South Australia, which was apparently in greater need of coal miners than their homeland (and cheaper to send than try to keep alive during famines caused by weather, crop failure and being at the behest of an uncaring class structure - far more common than sanitised history books had me assume).

(LATE EDIT - I had put "possibly on the same ship as two uncles and their TEN children but no wives or mothers" but worked out it was a census when my great-great-grandmother was 18 - her father and uncle had these 10 including her aged down to 4 with no mother and she was the oldest.)

And then I discovered that another forbear may have come indirectly via Ireland during the plantations experiences of the 18th and 19th centuries and have done a deep dive into podcasts about that on a few long drives of late.

Hooboy. 

No convicts. No royalty. Just a lot of callouses in this tree.

And then - Ancestry have had a good hard look at the data collected vs the data assessed and the imaginary lines that used to often move as fealties and armies waxed and waned and have "upgraded" and my brew of basic white girl is now more English than Scot. 

(And Danish, Dutch and Icelandic touches rather than the previous tones of Norway and Wales)

Still callouses. Still white. 

Bloody colonisation happening even to my DNA.

Still. Outside Glasgow!

The land of the long weekend

 We do love a long weekend, and thanks to Bonnie King Charlie we got one.

Mind you, I still give kudos to his Mum. I always do that with birthday greetings since motherhood arrived upon me - it's the anniversary of them being your parent - the birthday person had very limited control over the matter, whereas the giver of birth had time ahead to anticipate the occasion.

We had a lovely one to, with a few unspoken milestones reached, a successful social outing and a wonderful genealogical breakthrough or two.

I awoke this morning and contemplated my paternal great-great-grandmother, who has long been a bit of a brick wall. She was a Jane - I have a few - and her surname is relatively common. I had her father's name - a John - and very little detail regarding the mother apart from her first name.

I did not even know if she were a colonial, a migrant or a convict. Just that she married my great-great-grandfather and they had 3 sons - 1 who died in childhood and the other 2 who were migrating north as she entered old age.

I googled the parent names and the area that she married and a very peculiar and Australian name appeared. VERY peculiar and Australian.

Apparently not that far from where my great-great-grandparents lived. And they had a Facebook page for history.

So I asked the question. "I was wondering" I said, and "would you know".

Not only was a local historical receptacle of information able to answer my query, she was a direct descendant of the sister.

The same 13 year old sister my great-great-grandmother had brought out with her when she was an old maid of 26 from a pretty dire economic situation in Northern Ireland.

And apparently the same sister who had married at not too great a distance from where my Jane had found wedded bliss with her equally geriatric 27yo Cambridgeshire fellow that had swept her off her feet (I mean, isn't that what 19th century marriage was all about?)

And another poster piped up that at least 2 other sisters had migrated there either with Irish husband in tow or finding one pronto on landing.

In the space of less than one hour I had not just found a whole family for her, I had found a story and a tribe of sisters around.

And I love that she was a laundress. I wonder if she was a pegger?

She had a photo of their great-great-grandmother and, although a different age than my photo of ours, there was absolutely no doubt about their genetic link.