Stories of my Family

  John Toohey, Convict. If there is one thing which quickens the heart of an aspiring Australian genealogist, it's the discovery of a convict in the family lineage. The more usual way to this discovery is through detailed and careful research, including at some stage a trip to the NSW State Archives to trawl through their fabulous resources. My own journey was considerably easier, if no less fulfilling. Out of the blue, one an evening in 1983 or 1984, I received a phone call from a fellow called Basil Toohey. At that time our family was living in West Wyalong, in New South Wales, where I was Principal of St. Mary's War Memorial School - a Central School (Kindergarten to Year 10) on the far reaches of the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra - Goulburn. Apparently we were related, distantly. I can't now recall how Basil "found" me in the wider family tree, nor how he had tracked me to West Wyalong. He was himself a farmer in the Eugowra district of New South Wales. B...

  Our Hennessey connection, and the strange case of “Uncle Martin.”   “Uncle Martin” is in fact Martin Hennessey, the brother of my great grandmother Margaret Hennessey, who married John James Cleary at Grenfell. So, technically, this Martin is my great great uncle.   Let’s start this story with another Martin Hennessy, who is the grandfather of “Uncle Martin”. The only way to distinguish between these two Martins, is the spelling of their surnames, as you can see. Same family, but the spelling of this surname can appear either way in all the official records.   Martin Hennessy (the older one), arrived in Australia on 20 May 1850. Together with his wife Mary and children, they had travelled on the “Thetis” and it is more than likely that like thousands of other Irish emigrants, they were leaving their native country to escape the devastation of the “great potato famine”. Martin, aged 36 at the time, is described as a ‘farm labourer’, who can both read and wri...

  Phyl, Madge, Dorothy   Phyl Phyllis Mary, the eldest of   Lucretia’s and Herbert’s three daughters, was working as a ‘cashier’ when she married John Henry Mitten on 2 February 1935. Phyl was 18 years old and John 20, an ‘ironworker’. As each party had not yet reached “marriageable age”, consent for the marriage was given by the bride’s father, Herbert Adams (also an ‘ironworker’), and the bridegroom’s father, James Henry Mitten (‘railway employee’). By 1935, the cracks in Lucretia’s and Herbert’s marriage were becoming apparent, and it was around this time that Herbert deserted his family. These difficulties in Phyl’s family may well help explain some of the problems that would shortly emerge in her own marriage. These were, again, two young people still growing to maturity, even allowing for the earlier age of marriage at that time.   Two years later, on 29 June 1937, their son Warren was born, and it was 4 years later that Phyl was being reported on in the ne...

  My grandmother, Lucretia   There has always been an air of mystery, of incomplete information, around my mum’s family. We knew her parents were divorced, and knew nothing about her father, Herbert Adams. We knew her own mother had been orphaned as a child – or, at least, that’s somehow the story we picked up. We knew there was another cousin of ours somewhere, a child of her older sister Phyl and therefore a half-brother to our Sandford cousins Barry and David, but we had never met him and knew nothing of his life or his own family circumstances. Parts of this particular picture are now a lot clearer, parts are as obscured as ever.   One of the difficulties in researching my Nan’s life   -   as we called our grandmother, our mother’s mother – is the inconsistency in her birth names and surnames on official records. Sometimes she is Lucretia Roberts, other times she is Lucretia Robertson. The full birth names she used, Lucretia Lillian, do not appear on...