On 25 November 1896 a baby was born in Beaconsfield and named Laura Ivy Annear.
Laura spent her childhood and youth in Beaconsfield, before marrying Harry Robertson in 1918. In 1970 Laura died, and according to records from her death, her parents were John Annear (brother of my gg grandmother Emma Maria Annear) and his wife Christina nee Maumill.
With John and Christina as parents, Laura would have been the youngest of 7 children, all of whom were girls except for one. Between her and her next eldest sibling there were 5 years, while the others were all between 2 and 3 years apart. In total there was a 20 year age gap between Laura and her eldest sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.
Mary was 20 when Laura was born, but she didn’t marry for another nine years, so may have been at home for much of Laura’s childhood and despite the age gap, the two could have been close.
Perhaps to Laura, Mary was just a much older sister, however, going back the record of Laura’s birth, it is Mary who is listed as the mother of Laura, not Christina. No father was recorded.
Laura was using the Annear the name at her own marriage, and obviously at her death she had led those around her to believe that John and Christina were her parents. Did she know the truth? Did other people?
There are no records of a Laura Edmunds, so even if she ever lived with Mary and Mary’s husband, she didn’t use her step-father’s name enough to it make it onto any records – however, the only records I can find for Laura Annear are in relation to her wedding and death; she had lived life with very little interaction with authorities or the newspaper.
Often at people’s death the newspaper notice would list who their children were, which would show who considered themselves to be in who’s family, but none of Christina, John and Mary’s notices did.
When Laura was born, Mary was unmarried, living in Beaconsfield, and likely living at home. Laura’s birth wasn’t registered until 6 weeks later, when Mary “notified” the registrar in Beaconsfield. Mary either wasn’t able to sign her own name, or for some reason didn’t want to.
Did Mary’s parents, John and Christina, know she was pregnant? Whose plan was it to pass the child off as John and Christina’s?
Was there something about Christina and Mary’s own experiences that might have made them think that this arrangement was for the best for both teenage, unmarried Mary and baby Laura?
Back in 1876 when Mary was born, Christina herself was an unmarried child – she’d been 17 for just 6 months when she gave birth to Mary.
Unlike the next generation, Christina was unable to keep her relationship with Mary secret in any way. Mary’s biological father was a young man named Stephen Culmer Hurst Skelly. Christina was a child, living with her invalid mother. Her father had died just after she turned 17. There are various stories on Ancestry about how Skelly knew Christina.
Skelly was five years older than Christina. On Mary’s birth record he was listed as an “Independent Gentleman.” Until about 1871 his parents had run a draper’s shop in Launceston on the corner of Elizabeth and Charles Sts. I can’t find out whether they retired to the West Tamar and Stephen went with them, or if perhaps Stephan, in his twenties, took himself off to the country – or if, as per another version of the story, he was simply a frequent visitor to the area.
I think that in order to have had his name on the birth record, Skelly must have “owned up” to being Mary’s father in some capacity, however he and Christina don’t seem to have ever been a “couple.” When Mary was 6 months old, Christina went to court to seek maintenance. Stephen Skelly lost the case and was ordered to pay Christina a weekly maintenance, plus costs for the case.
According to the newspaper the case “appeared to create a considerable amount of local interest.” If Christina had felt shame about being an unmarried mother, and perhaps trauma from her experiences, once she got to court and the story got into the newspapers, everyone would have known and been talking about it. Similarly, it’s unlikely that Mary, who was raised in Sidmouth, would have been unaware that she was born out of wedlock, and was she also likely to have come across those who judged both her and her mother harshly for that.
When Mary was two and a half, Christina married John Annear (whose sister was Emma Maria, my g g grandmother), and John took Mary into his life and she took on the Annear surname.
Nine years after Laura was born and taken into John and Christina’s family, Christina and John’s third daughter, Ada, gave birth out of wedlock when she was 18 in 1906. According to Ancestry trees, baby Oswald Keith Annear was born in the Salvation Army home in Launceston (RockLynn House in Connaught Ave). He died a few weeks later in Beaconsfield. There’s no way to know what Christina’s attitude to her daughter’s pregnancy was. It’s interesting that Ada went into Launceston rather than stay in her family home, but that young Oswald died in Beaconsfield suggests at least that he wasn’t secretly adopted out, and that he was being raised among family – although by now Christina was 48 and it would have been getting harder to pass off this new baby as her own.
Six years later, Christina had a third grandchild born out of wedlock when her youngest daughter, 21 year old, Alice Maude Christina, gave birth to a son, Lancelot Thomas, in the Salvation Home in Launceston. By this time Christina had been ill for some time, and ten days after Lancelot Thomas was born, she died. Alice was unable to be with her mother for her death, presumably as she was still in the Home. However, she and the baby returned to Beaconsfield, and when she married Thomas Francis McIntosh the following year, the baby became a McIntosh, and was recognised by Thomas Francis as his own son (which he may well have been – biologically – as the baby and he did share a name).
Christina was the youngest of her parents children, and not born out of wedlock, however her own parents Mary Ann Campbell and William Maumill, had childhoods that would have very much influenced how they thought about family and childhood, and how Christina was raised.
Mary Ann was born in about 1818-21 in the UK (possibly Ireland or Scotland, however her mother, Adelaide, came from a Dutch family!). Looking at Mary Ann’s life prior to coming to Australia, it looks like she was born the same year her parents married, but I can’t tell which way around the two events were.
Her family were likely poor farm labourers who saw very little future for themselves in the UK. When she was about 12 years old and the eldest of four siblings, on 27 November 1832, her family set sail to Australia aboard the Hibernia. Just a few days out of port, a storm damaged the ship to the point that it returned to Liverpool. Hibernia left port again on 8 December 1832. This second attempt to reach Australia ended in tragedy. At 11am, on 5 February 1833, just near the equator, the ship caught fire. Like the Titanic many years later, there were not enough boats aboard to save all the passengers. Mary Ann, her parents and 3 siblings managed to be amongst the 17 people who boarded the ship’s pinnace (tender) (They perhaps began by finding a place aboard the larger Long Boat, but then moved to the pinnace as supplies and passengers were configured for the long journey to safety). Of the 253 people aboard the Hibernia, just 74 or 78 made it onto another boat. Mary Ann and her family would have sat in their little boat, watching the ship burn and sink and their fellow passengers die. The Campbell children were four of just 10 or so children who survived. There had been 50 children aboard.
A passenger aboard one of the other boats of survivors wrote of his experiences, as the small boats attempted to make it to Brazil, their nearest land.
On the long boat, but likely similar on the pinnace (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=f04pxiFXsY8C&pg=PA557&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false )
The Campbells were picked up by the ship Isabella and made it to Rio on 21-22 Feb 1833. The survivors camped on the beach, and were provided with clothing by locals. The government hired a ship for them to continue their journey, and the locals took up a collection to try to provide replacements for what had been lost.
The Campbells boarded the ship Adelaide on 13 March 1833. Mary Ann’s mother, Adelaide, gave birth on 27 March.
The Campbell family, now consisting of seven, made it to Hobart on 19 May 1833, likely deeply traumatised and having lost what little they had, and likely in debt for the ill-fated voyage.
Despite any dreams they would have had about life in Tasmania, life there did not go as planned. James and Adelaide were ill and unable to work or to care for their eldest children. When they did find work, it was out in the country and so they put their children into the Orphan School. This may have been the original plan – a short stint in an orphanage being better than whatever they’d left behind in the UK – or it may have been born out of desperation.
The eldest four children were admitted to the Orphan School. Mary Ann entered on 23 May, along with 8 year old Eliza. James aged 9 joined them on 12 July, and five year old Thomas on 20 November.
(On Ancestry people have recorded birth dates for Mary Ann varying from 1818 to 1821. The first comes from her death when she was recorded as being 75 years of age. I’m tempted to think that this was just “rounding,” and that as all other records give her at ages with 1821 as a more likely birth date. There is of course the chance that she as 15 on arrival to the colony, but for some reason, rather than have her home with them helping out, her parents preferred to pass her off as younger and have her enter the Orphan School – perhaps they saw that as a “safer” place for a young woman than perhaps going into service?)
Mary Ann’s parents had suffered so much to bring their children to a better life and the family on arrival was split up.
The Campbell children entered the Orphan School just as it was moving to New Town. It was a place that was run at the time by a committee, and lived up to every cliché we’ve heard about 18thC orphanages.
Despite its name, the children wouldn’t have gained any sort of formal education in the school, instead spending long periods of time locked in the dormitories, attending church, working as servants for the staff and perhaps sewing their own clothes for the girls and working on the government farm for the boys. (In fact, Mary Ann learnt so little despite her years in the school, that it was commented on in the newspaper in 1838).
A biography on line says that James and Adelaide fought hard to get their children back from the government. James was appointed a constable in Launceston at the end of 1833, so was presumably able to support his family on that wage, but the powers that be must have still seen him and Adelaide as unfit parents.
All children finally re-joined their parents, in Launceston, between the 8 and 13 of December 1837.
While working, Mary Ann was assaulted. I can’t find the outcome of the trial, but James and Mary Ann’s descriptions of of the orphan school resulted in a flurry of hand wringing about the treatment of orphans in the colony.
At just 14 (or, more likely, 18) years of age Mary Ann applied for permission to marry convict Ephraim Fowler. The two were married in Launceston, but lived in the West Tamar, where they had a daughter, Lucy, in 1842. However Ephraim died just twelve months later. Mary Ann married again, to another former convict, William Maumill, only three months later – perhaps illustrating the necessity to have some sort of support for her and her child.
Like so many of his descendants, William Maumill was born out of wedlock. Maumill was his mother’s maiden name. On his birth record his father is name as Dickison Gentle. Gentle! I expect the Tasmanians to have a few loops in the tree, but is this Gentle as in Christina’s husband’s brother’s grandson married a Gentle in 1950?? The absolute lack of mention of other Gentles in the area, or Dickison anywhere else at all, actually lead me to believe that it was a made up name, and that someone had a sense of humour… however more recently, more documents have been digitised, and it seems that Tabatha/Tabathy Maumill and Dickison Gentle did marry, the same year that William was born.
I haven’t looked into all this in order to drag out family skeletons, but because it’s clear that babies born not-to-plan, has always happened, and how those children have been raised has varied over that time, based on experience, options and attitudes.
Experiences in the Hibernia make the Campbells another family set of family members who have made it to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernia_(1828_ship)
Mary Ann’s Friends of the Orphan School page: http://www.orphanschool.org.au/showorphan.php?orphan_ID=757
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