Sepia Saturday 523: 6 June 2020 - Margaret Jones research

This post is in honour of Sepia Saturday and the theme this week is windows.  I have chosen a photo of a woman called Margaret Jones from Wales who seems to be cheerfully working in her dairy. Everything looks clean, spotless and very bright.  You can’t really see the window but you know it’s there from the light, and you can glimpse a bit of the frame.  This is how I am feeling about my family history research at the moment.  I know there is a window there somewhere…I’m getting chinks of light but I’m still trying to fill in all the picture…through a glass darkly to quote someone.

Margaret Jones, Hafod Owen, Llanfachreth, and her homemade butter Ffotograffydd/Photographer: Geoff Charles (1909-2002) Dyddiad/Date: June 19, 1953 Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales

No known copyright restrictions

145 years ago my g-g-g-grandmother, Margaret TAYLOR (nee JONES) died on 6th June 1875.  Like Margaret Jones in the photo above, she was a dairy (and house) maid from Wales.  Only I don’t think she would have been as cheerful as the Margaret from Hafod Owen, Llanfachreth.  My Margaret was a convict transported to Australia, so she must have had a pretty tough life from the get-go.  I have written about her early life here and here.  

My Margaret Jones died of chronic brain affection and paralysis.  She was 68 years old, although we can’t really be sure as we have no record of her birth in Caernarvonshire.  She died in Yass, New South Wales, Australia.  Dr Campbell said she had been ill for 4 or 5 years.  She was buried at the Church of England Cemetery Yass next to her husband who had died four years earlier.  

The informant on the death certificate was her second eldest son Henry.  He would have been about 36 years old.  He could not write, nor, I assume, could he read.  That’s very sad because according to Margaret’s convict indent she could read and write, so things went backwards down the line rather than forwards.  

While I am on leave from work I have become slightly obsessed about trying to find where Margaret came from in Caernarvonshire or at least arrive at some sensible theories.  

At first glance, this may seem impossible with a name like Jones, but I like to think I look on the positive side of life and, if nothing else, persevere.  Bear with me while I voice some thoughts and if you have any suggestions to make, for goodness sake, chime in. 

I have enrolled in a short course offered by Pharos Tutors and already in my first week I have learned heaps.  I knew nothing about Caernarvonshire now Gwynned I think; let’s be honest about Wales full stop.  I still feel vastly ignorant but at least now I know there were no less than 70 parishes at the time my Margaret lived there.  Now that I look at the geography a bit closer, I realise that living at Yass may not have been so strange for Margaret because it is close to the Brindabellas.  They are about the same height as the mountains in Snowdonia.  But then again, I don’t know if Margaret lived close to the sea or the mountains in her home country.  I did get a bit tearful thinking about Margaret perhaps not knowing anyone else who could speak Welsh.  It hadn’t occurred to me that one of my ancestors might have English as a second language. Yes, I have ordered a Welsh dictionary, reference tragic that I am.  Here is a photo of the Brindabellas I found on Flickr.  My father used to work at the NCDC at this time.  Wouldn't it be funny if he took this photo?  Or asked for it to be taken.

Aerial photo of the Murrumbidgee River and Brindabella Ranges taken on c1972 from the National Capital Development Commission series NDC1732. 
Copyright details here.

 

I am trying to organise all the information I have about Margaret e.g. constructing a timeline – so that I can make more sense of her life and gather some clues.

Margaret had eight live children, six boys and two girls.  There was another little girl but she died as an infant.

Margaret and Samuel’s children were as follows:

Samuel born 1833 baptised in Goulburn

Susanna born 1835 baptised St Philips, Sydney and died in 1836

Margaret born 1837 and baptised at St Philips, Sydney

Henry born 1839 in Bong Bong, Berrima and baptised at Yass 

William born 1841 at Gundaroo and baptised at Yass

Susannah born 1843 at Gundaroo and baptised at Yass

John Thomas born 1845

Rowland Owen born 1849

And

George Robert born 1851 – the last three also were born at Gundaroo

So basically Margaret was bearing children from the age of about 24 to about 42.  When her eldest daughter Margaret married there would have been eight children living at home.  Can you just imagine it?  I have to say that I am enormously impressed that the Taylors made the effort of taking the children to Sydney to get christened.  My mother chose to have her funeral service at St Philips.  I suspect it was the church they might have used if they ever went to church at Fort Street.  She was also very aware of the ancestral links.  She also liked the diction of the Minister at the time.  Those sort of things were very important to her.

Courtesy of the Royal Australian Historical photostream on Flickr
St Philips Church Located at 3 York Street near Clarence and Jamison, St Philips is the oldest Anglican church in Sydney. No known copyright restrictions

At least three of Margaret’s six sons never married and we are not too sure about George Robert or Samuel Jnr.  I am descended from John Thomas.  I wonder about the other sons not being married.  Were they put off marriage for life from witnessing their parent’s marriage or was there a shortage of women?  Probably the latter.

So what have I achieved this week?  

One of the things I have done is look at all the instances of a Margaret Jones from Caernarvonshire being charged with larceny to see if they might be my Margaret Jones.  It’s impossible to tell as they don’t give ages in the criminal register or accounts of the trials.  

Interestingly there was one Margaret Jones and a Henry Jones who in the spring of 1823 stole from the dwelling house of Jane Owen of Roe in Llanbedr-y-Cennin.  Margaret Jones was acquitted because she was considered to be under the influence of her husband. (The Cambrian, 12th April 1823 p. 3)  As I say..no ages are given.  My Margaret Jones would have been about 15 at the time.  Did she marry very young?  Henry Jones was hung for his crime and apparently up til that point had been of good character.  On my Margaret’s convict indent she is described as being single but who knows maybe with her husband hung, she was single again.  Or perhaps these were my Margaret’s parents.  

Llanbedr-y-Cennin in the Conwy Valley The view of the Conwy Valley from the terraced garden of the lovely pub "Ye Olde Bull Inn " Llanbedr-y-Cennin Conwy Valley Photographer Terry Kearney Link to licence.

In the spring of 1824 there is a whole bunch of people 9 men and 1 woman to be precise who were charged with larceny from a wreck.  The wreck of the Hornby off Great Ormshead which washed up at Lalndudno.  Most received a sentence of some sort but Margaret Jones was found not guilty.  (North Wales Gazette, 22nd April 1824, p.3) Why?  Was this Margaret Jones considered under the influence as well?

Llandudno Prom in the James Gardiner collection on Flickr - In the Public Domain

 

My Margaret Jones was found guilty of larceny however in 1828 and transported for her crime.  Maybe if the others were my Margaret Jones the upholders of the law decided she’d pushed her luck too far.

Trawling through the newspapers again courtesy of the National Library of Australia's eResources (what would we do without them?), I found a more informative account of her crime as follows:

 “Late on Thursday se’nnight (I interpret this to mean seven o’clock at night, what do you think?) a young man of respectable station was found in Dale-street, in a state of intoxication, by two women, who took him into Lace-street, where they were joined by two men, their companions; the party then knocked the young man down, bruised him very much on the face, and robbed him of his watch, ring, breast-pin, and £12 in money.  William Wakefield, William Rainford, Ann Tierney and Margaret Jones have been arrested on suspicion of having committed the robbery.” (Liverpool Mercury, Friday, September 26, 1828, p.6 Issue 905)

I have been creating lists of possible associates or friends/neighbours so that when I research particular parishes I can keep an eye out for those names as well.

I also found a new convict record for Margaret which I hadn’t found before which showed her working for a Mrs Scott of Richmond.  I knew she had been assigned to a Mrs Cox but there seems to have been a change.

I have ordered the death certificate of the first daughter called Susanna in the fond hope of finding some extra information on that. I have also ordered Margaret’s probate file in case there is anything extra in that.

What am I looking for exactly?  Some kind of distinguishing features about Margaret that will help identify her apart from all the other Margaret Jones.  On the BMD index for NSW, for Susannah’s death in 1918 it shows her parents as Margaret A and Samuel.  In some other correspondence from other descendants I have been made aware that Margaret her daughter may also have had the second name of Agnes.  I was not aware of Margaret Snr having a middle name so I am now trying to find evidence of her having a middle name on records created while she was still alive.  Death certificates are notoriously unreliable.

One other thing I did this morning was map Wales onto Queensland so I could get a sense of the size of it, particularly Caernarvonshire (now Gwynned).  And then I thought I should map it to where Margaret lived after she came to Australia to get some ideas of the distances etc. 

It’s been enormously useful to see different places and their relation to each other.  Places where her children or associates ended up e.g. Wee Jasper, Tumut and Gundagai.  My ancestor John Thomas ended up in Bourke which would have seemed as far as the Outer Hebrides in Scotland to Margaret.

I'm very pleased to have found this site.  You can play around it with it too here.

I will reach out to other descendants to see if I can get hold of other certificates which may give more clues. 

I have to go through my filing and consolidate all that I have on the Taylors.  I need to read Samuel’s will one more time with fresh eyes. 

 

Have you got any great ideas of how to narrow down the Jones in Caernarvonshire?

Thank you for reading if you have got this far.  I have probably opened a window on to just how tortured my research process is.  Please forgive me.  For far briefer and more succinct stories go here.

PS I must apologise for the formatting in this post.  As I think I've said before Blogger is driving me nuts with what it does to my text.  I put everything into notepad before I enter stuff into here and still it mucks around with it.  And it's very difficult to get the captioning on the photos right now.  I don't want to move over to WordPress if I can help it.  Is anyone else suffering the same issues and have you found a solution? 

PPS I looked up that glass darkly quote - take your pick, The Corinthians from the Bible or General S Patton's poem - I like the last lines of the poem and think it could be applied to family history :

So forever in the future

Shall I battle as of yore,

Dying to be born a fighter

But to die again once more.