Anyway, after William Rawlings died his wife, Maria, married again. One of her sons from that marriage was Frank Barrier Gentle.
Back in the UK, William’s baby sister married, move to another town and had a daughter, Julia Henrietta Grain.
During WW1 Frank travelled to the UK, where he met and married Julia.
Did Frankknow of their family connection? Perhaps he went seeking out his UK family (his mother and her first husband were cousins, so seeking his mother’s family would have put him in touch with William’s) and perhaps in all this family reunion, he met young Julia.
On the other hand, census records show that she was waitressing away from home, so perhaps he simply bumped into her and it was all coincidence!
Ancestry.com attempts to show the non-marriage relationship between Frank Gentle and Henrietta Grain
William Rawling[s], the first husband of my great great grandmother, Maria Elizabeth Langford, was found dead in Brown’s Hotel, Port Pirie in May 1881.
In order to be dead we know he must have been born, but when and where are mysteries. All the ancestry trees say September 1848 in Peterborough in Northampton in the UK. But there’s no sources of this, so are we all just copying off one another? Also, 1848 is the birth date of Maria’s second husband – coincidence?
According to his death record he was born about 1844, and the marriage index gives his father’s name as William Rawlings (as does his marriage record). An old family tree no longer on the internet gives his mother’s name as Elizabeth (and may also be the source of the 1848 information).
Searching for William Rawlings born 1844 with a father called William, and born in Peterborough, Northamptonshire gets a William R Rawlings right year and born in Peterborough! Hooray! But that William was married and in the UK in 1881. So scratch him.
I zeroed in on the 1851 census, when he would have most likely been living at home, aged 7 or so. There are none that fit. The best fit is a William, born Werrington, Northamptonshire, father William, mother Mary, but age 2, ie born c1848. His father is an agricultural labourer. All the other child William Rawlings’ are either not born anywhere near Northamptonshire, or their father isn’t called William.
Some general googling showed that back in the day, Peterborough was a district in Northamptonshire, with a number of towns/villages included – including Werrington – so anything in Northampton might have been also in Peterborough. Add to that, census takers often rounded ages so they could be up to five years wrong!
I began again, forgetting about Peterborough and just assume that anywhere in Northampton might be in Peterborough. I took his father’s name and the year (ish) as the truth, and I get a few more options – including the abovementioned one from Werrington.
However, I can’t be sure that William was living with his parents as a child, or that his family was correctly recorded (to say nothing of the accuracy of the digitisation) – so I looked at future census’ to see if any more likely suspects appeared.
As teenagers in the 1861 census the William Rawlings are all over the place and hard to track and none live with their parents. The one from Werrington is working away from home as a servant (‘boy’) in the household of a farmer in Newborough, Peterborough.
By the 1871 census I found 3 William Rawlings born in Peterborough-ish-area in the right sort of year. Looking at their birth information and matching it to the 1851 census one (as he hadn’t appeared earlier) possibly had a non-William father, and going forwards one of them was the William R Rawlings ancestry had tried to tell me was the right guy right back at the start, but who turned out to have been quite married in the UK rather than dead in Australia in 1881.
The Werrington born William was a 22 year old labourer in 1871, and living as a lodger, along with two other young labourers, in the house of an elderly woman in Marlhom (a village in Peterborough, where his father was born).
An undated photo of Werrington, Peterborough, Northamptonshire, from here
Further exploration of the William Rawlings from Werrington shows that there’s a chance that his mother was Mary Langford, making William’s future wife his cousin which makes sense in a nineteenth century way.
All in all, I’m prepared to accept that there’s a very high likelihood that it’s the right guy. Perhaps he lied to his wife about his age which is why it was reported wrong at his death, or perhaps – as I’ve never seen the original certificate – the 1844, 1848 discrepancy is a digitisation/transcription error. (To throw another spanner in the works, at his marriage on 27 December 1877 he was recorded as being 29, which only works if he was born 28, 29, 30 or 31 of December 1848, as he was baptised in May that year, it’s more likely – if he’s given his age correctly – that he was born in 1849!)
Trying to sort out all the William Rawlings’ in Peterborough
Update: after putting all this data into ancestry.com, that site found found me some baptism information adding extra weight to the this being the correct William:
Yes, Paston is yet another location, but taking a closer look, these places are all pretty close and in fact there is some suggestion that Werrington church is within Paston by some reckoning.
Okay, so how did he get to South Australia where he died?
His uncle Samuel was already here in 1859 when William was only a toddler, so they didn’t travel together.
William left the UK sometime between 1871 and 1877, and he came without his parents. (A death index suggests that his father died in Peterborough in 1859 when William was 12-13, leaving his mother alone with the younger children in 1861. I couldn’t find his mother in any further census or death records, so she may have had a second marriage and changed her name – no guarantee she didn’t emigrate, but none of her children other than William appear to have died outside the UK.)
Immigration to SA was big at the time. The colony had just begun to organise ships of migrants for itself (previously the UK gov had organised them). There are indexes of immigrants on-line, and a William Rawlings shows up as arriving in the 1865, but then I can’t find him on other documents related to that ship that give more detail on the passengers. Anyway, the date doesn’t work.
An ancestry tree gives him an arrival in Victoria in 1877. Which is possible. For some reason soon after arrival he moved on to SA – I guess because his uncle and cousins were there. It would have been a quick engagement. (Unfortunately for this theory, the public records office of Victoria has no evidence of it).
Somehow, he ended up in Kangarilla, where he married his cousin, Maria (Moriah) Elizabeth Langford in 1877, when he was about 28(ish) and she was 19.
Why did he end up in Port Pirie?
After their marriage, the young couple moved north to Jamestown, where William had been living.
Jamestown was, in the scheme of things in the colony, a large and established settlement. The town had been surveyed in 1871, and by the time the Rawlings were there for the birth of their first child, Samuel, on 5 November 1878, there was a church, a school, and a hotel.
They didn’t stay long though, and were soon even further north.
Between March 1880 and May 1881 William and Maria were recorded as being in the adjoining towns/districts of Morchard (1881), Pekina (1881) and Orroroo (1880).
In order to understand their story it’s necessary to know about the Closer Settlement Scheme and the Goyder Line.
The Closer Settlement Scheme of the 1860-70s was about breaking up larger properties and offering smaller farms to a wider proportion of the population – switching the land from mainly grazing, to more intensive agriculture. In South Australia, the land towards the Flinders Ranges was mapped and the maps covered in grids and blocks. These farms and towns were soon sold and communities were being built.
It was a rough existence. The oldest existing house in Orroroo dates form the time that the Rawlings’ were there, and it’s barely more than a tent with a chimney. In Morchard a pub was built to double as a meeting place, and all the surveyed towns soon had impressive stone churches. In the land beyond the town boundaries wheat as planted, and thrived. The railways were soon on their way in order to get all that wheat to market.
The oldest extant house in Orroroo, built c 1879-80
Goyders Line is an imaginary line surveyed in the 1865 by George Goyder. Based on soil and rainfall it’s the line above which crops aren’t viable – and Closer Settlement wasn’t offered.
After a series of “good” years (above average rainfall) in the 1870s, and a belief that “rain follows the plough,” meaning that cultivating land brought rain to those districts, there was public pressure to open up land north of Goyder’s line for settlement. A number of towns were laid out and sold or leased. These towns included Pekina, Morchard and Orroroo.
William was a mason by trade, so perhaps he was there to build to the beautiful brick houses that are now the ruins that’s all that’s left of some of these towns, or perhaps he and Maria were for hoping for a farming future with a piece of land of their own – William had been an agricultural labourer in the UK and Maria had grown up on a farm.
A ruined, photogenic farmhouse near Pekina, from Flickr
If William and Maria had taken up land, even if they were struggling to hold onto it, then I imagine that the records relating to them would more clearly place them in one town/area, so I think it’s more likely that they came north happening to find work working for those who had land. However, two different builders soon went bankrupt or were in court for failing to pay wages.
On the other hand, they may have been in Orroroo for the birth of their second child (18 months after Samuel, on 2 March 1880), but then moved to a place of their own in Morchard but, as the largest town was Pekina, it could have been that family events of 1881 were officially recorded as occurring there. Pekina was largely settled by Irish and German Catholics, whereas the Rawlings were celebrating family events at protestant churches – which perhaps Pekina didn’t have.
When the Rawlings’ arrived in Morchard it had a brand new hotel, and boasted a cricket club. The 1878 weather had been dry, but harvests improved, and the town continued to grown rapidly with a church in 1879 and a school the following year.
Morchard Bible Christian Church built 1879 – perhaps William helped?
The good times didn’t last long.
In 1880 the harvests were alright but the prices were low. Then the summer of 1880-81 had no rain, and the crops failed – it produced just 3 bushels per acre compared with 12 for 1878 and 79, and 6 in 1880.
Whether William and Maria were land holders or not, we can assume that by 1881 things were not going well for the young family and William had headed off to look for work.
In April he was in Port Germain asking for work.
A month later, in May 1881, he was in Port Pirie.
At home, his son Samuel was 2 and a half and daughter Florence (Flora), just fourteen months. Maria was pregnant again. She gave birth to Henry in Morchard, on Friday May 20.
What happened in Port Pirie?
On Friday May 20th William arrived at Brown’s Hotel in Port Pirie. He ate a “hearty meal” with the publican that evening.
Port Pirie was the port for all the wheat that had been grown out in the new closer settlements. It was a boom town, growing quickly, it was the sort of place where a strong, keen man (William had “never complained of ill-health”) would have thought that he could get work.
On Sunday the new baby back home died. I don’t know how quickly news could have got to Port Pirie, but with railway it would have been possible that William heard about it.
On the afternoon of the Sunday William was in the stockyard of the hotel.
A few hours later, at 6pm, he was still in the stockyard, and was said to moaning.
At 7pm he was in the bar and a doctor was called “to a man who was supposed to be dying.”
Thee doctor found him sitting on a box, slumped, with a strap from a saddlebag round his neck – dead.
The next day an inquest was held in another hotel. People told of their last sighting of William but it was clear that they needed some medical advice on what had killed him, so the inquest was adjourned while a post mortem was held. The doctor reported back that the killer had been an issue with William’s heart.
Newspaper reports of the inquest stress that it was not suicide – to an extent that leads me to wonder if it’s a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ Was it important for William and his family that it not be a suicide, and that that be publicly stated in the newspaper? Or were suicides common in men like William who were struggling to find work and support families, and so it struck the reporters as being unusual and worthy of mention that this wasn’t the case here?
Whatever killed William Rawlings it must have been something awful – alone and in pain and thinking of his wife and living children and dead baby so far away from him.
It’s a long bow to say that I’m related, but one of my great grandfather’s sisters married a guy who played cricket with Don Bradman – and got him out!
On Wednesday December 14th 1927 the NSW cricket team played the Broken Hill team. It was the first match with the state team for a young Don Bradman.
Bert Chandler was the vice captain of the Broken Hill side. While Bert himself was run out for a duck, he was the wicket keeper when Bradman was bowled for 46.
The heat and the condition of the ground were both a shock to Bradman, who seemed content in his memoirs to blame the heat, the night spent not-sleeping on a train and then the unusual dust and concrete surface of the oval, for his poor performance, but I’m sure that really it was the skill of the vice captain and wicket keeper that made it such a hard game for him.
The State Library of South Australia owns the ball used in the game.
The First Ball I Took Your Mother To 