Murder Most Horrid - A Follow Up

I blogged recently about the very tragic death of my ancestor's cousin, Ellen "Nellie" Cunningham, found dead in the Bridgewater Creek in 1890. I still have to fully develop my response, but here's the basic follow up:

Despite Dr. Henderson's later assertions about possible heart disease, I believe Ellen was murdered. Her body was found in a place which had already been searched. There were no initial claims about illnesses from either Dr. Henderson or Jane Sr. Too many people were obviously lying about what they knew. That begs many questions:

- Why was the knife deemed so significant, and what was Ellen doing with it?

- Were the wild flowers just growing along the river, or had they been placed there?

- Whose was the carpet bag, and what was in it? Where was it in relation to Ellen's body?

- What happened to Ellen's clothes? Were they ever found?

- Was Evan Jenkins the same Evan Jenkins who killed himself in 1923, and if so was there a connection between the events? There are two Evan Jenkinses with brothers named William in SA, one of whom has Hills connections (his father died in Crafers and he married in Glen Osmond). That would be the one who shot himself on Glenelg beach 33 years later. His wife had died shortly before, which no doubt was the primary cause, but you have to wonder all the same.

- Why was the coroner so focused on when Hart threatened Jane, and the colour of the dress having been reported incorrectly, rather than issues like the inconsistencies in the 'last sightings' and Jane Sr's weirdness about Evan lodging at the Cunningham residence (face it, the family had precious little reputation to ruin)?

- Why were Hart and Jane fighting? Was it really about the cows, and if so, why did she do that to begin with?

Some of these could have been answered by more thorough reporting. While the existing reports are often verbatim, they lack the contextual details needed to make sense of the lines of questioning. My theory is that either there was some manner of love triangle operating between Ellen, Jane Jr and Evan, or Jane Jr and Evan were involved and Ellen found out. Either way, it sounds like the news reporters felt there was something fishy going on and it lead to her violent and untimely death, and without having any further facts I am inclined to agree.

So, what happened next?

Jane Sr. died age 66 in 1912. The newspapers indicate she is buried at Stirling, but she has no gravestone and there aren't any other records of her burial.

After the trial, two of the sisters moved to Western Australia - Agnes (Mrs. Bartsch) and Margaret, who married in Boulder in 1898. Possibly they were trying to avoid further scandal, or it may just have been job opportunities coming up with the mining industry's development. I believe my great-grandmother Margaret was sent to stay with them at one point (why, I'm not sure) and met my great-grandfather there.

Jane Jr. sadly did not live much longer, dying age 17 in 1892. I am curious to order her death certificate to see how she died, although I'm sure it will be a common, garden variety illness. I hope.

Annie, the sister after Margaret, does not appear to have been mentioned at her sister's trial, nor does she appear in any other records I can find aside from her birth. I assume she died young and her death was not registered, as the family often skipped registrations.

Marion remained unmarried and died in 1957. Elizabeth, the youngest, married William Dalton and remained living in the Aldgate area. Of all the family, she was the only one still there when Jane Sr. died.

Ellen has no known memorial. I assume she was probably buried with her grandfather, Archibald, who died during the course of the inquest. I've never been able to find either Archibald or his wife, Euphemia, in any local cemetery and neither has a local researcher who holds all the burial registers for the Mount Barker district. Ellen is entirely forgotten, apart from here on this blog, and by me, especially whenever I read Tracey Chevalier's "Falling Angels". The novel contains a fatal (and probably sexual) attack on Ivy May, the introverted younger sister of one of the main characters. Ivy May's only line in the novel (which is told from a variety of perspectives) is this:

Over his shoulder I saw a star fall. It was me.

Rest in peace, Ellen.





Update: June 2015 - According to her death certificate, Jane jr died of enteric fever.

5 things doing Genealogy has shown me are bullshit

As a regular newspaper reader (both print and online), I find there are distinct perceptions some people seem to have of the past, which get trotted out every so often in public debate. However, after just under 20 years of genealogy research, I call SHENANIGANS on the following notions:

#1 People never used to be fat.

Yes, we all get it. There's an obesity epidemic. Electronic devices, small yards, fears of predators stealing our kiddies, processed foods etc. etc. And yes, it's certainly not how it used to be. However, one of the hilarious lines which gets paraded almost every freaking time someone writes an article about obesity is that "You fatties are just making excuses. Nobody ever used to be fat, therefore there are no fat genes/thyroid problems/whatever else and you would all look like Michelle Bridges if you weren't so damn lazy and addicted to hamburgers". Essentially, there are a pile of people who seem to think inside of every single big person is a skinny person who has been stifled, suppressed and Cadbury family-blocked to death, quite deliberately in some kind of act of self-sabotage.

HA!

I present a small selection from my extensive collection of exhibits for the defence.

My great-great grandma, Elizabeth Jane Duffield (1838-1911). In a corset. Squeezing her in to her teensiest tiniest possible size. No wonder she looks a bit tense.

3x Great-Grandma Elizabeth Jane Williams (1851-1909).

My grandmother (front) and her some of her family show why they aren't being used as promotions for Ashy Bines' Bikini Body.

And there they are again, this time fully dressed and with a  few more cousins along.

Now, I intend no disrespect to any of these lovely ladies. They are/were all beautiful people, and great-great grandma Duffield is a particular source of inspiration to me in my daily life. I don't hold with fat-shaming and don't mean to imply any one of these women should have felt bad about how they looked. In fact, I positively love that women the size of my grandma's family were so confident and secure they were ok with being photographed rocking their bathers, and keeping those photos for decades afterwards.

However, I think we can all agree that they are plus-size. "People never used to be fat", hey? Myth busted!

#2 People never used to live very long.

Every time there's talk of raising the pension eligibility age or something similar, some ill-informed twat writes in to the paper saying that the average age of people in generation b was 13 and therefore nobody lived long enough to pro-create, let alone retire.  (Ok, so I exaggerate just a little there.) I'm fairly notoriously not mathematically minded, but even I know an average is not the right figure to look at when considering the economic problem of retirement funding. Every genealogist with more than 30 seconds experience knows that, very sadly, a large number of our relatives were taken from us before they started school or, in so many cases, could even walk. Infant mortality was terrible (especially if you're like me and have a lot of family from Moonta). However, if you got through that, there were plenty of people who went on to quite a ripe old age.

My genealogy program of choice doesn't seem to be able to generate a report on Age at Death (wouldn't that be an interesting feature!), but here's a random sampling one some of its contents:

Samuel Skermer, died age 88 in 1806.

Eli Roebuck, died age 81 in 1860.

William Dawson, died age 80 in 1891.

Mary Robinson, died age 82 in 1892.

Charlotte Langdown, died age 82 in 1898.

Honora Curren/Curreen, died age 87 in 1908.

Edward Fudge, died age 92 in 1911.

Elizabeth Harvey, died age 83 in 1916.

Hannah Sykes, died age 82 in 1927 (after having 13 children in 26 years during her life-time!)

Jean Cargill, died age 102 in 1925

And that was just the fruits of a quick 5 minute skim! Apart from the last one, none of them were especially remarked upon as having reached an uncommonly old age in their obituaries, and if my grandma's recent birthday was anything to go by, 100 is still a big deal. Only William Dawson was even described as 'old'.*

Yes, average life expectancy was tragically short in Ireland, the UK and Australia. However, if you made it to adulthood, you weren't automatically going to die in a work-place accident, catch something dreadful or pass on trying to give birth. You were a fighting chance to make it through all of those dangers and spend quite some time sitting by the fire, watching your great (or great-great) grandchildren play.

*Updated to add: Since joining PASA, I've discovered this description of him as an 'old colonist' was probably intended more to convey the fact he settled in the first decade of the colony rather than his age.

#3 There's such a thing as a traditional family.

Maybe it's just that I live in Tony Abbott's Australia, but I get the regular impression that a certain segment of our society firmly believes that, until those dreadful and decadent 60s (or 70s in Australia... we always are that bit behind) every family had mum, dad, and 2.3 kids with a  puppy and a parrot. Or something like that. Yes, the myth of the nuclear family. Er... I mean the nuclear family.

Well, if that was ever true, it certainly wasn't in my family!! Again, just a random and small sampling of the many non-nuclear families in my tree:

Great grandma Margaret Dorey. Married 3 times. Raised two step-children (neither of whom had the same father) plus five of her own.

Great great uncle Hubert McPherson. Married before World War 1. Ran off with a Vaudeville dancer and went to live in Papua New Guinea. Remained with her for the rest of his life but never married her, even after his wife's death. Childless.

Thomas Skermer Evans: Married his first wife because she was 6 months pregnant, with what turned out to be someone else's baby. Enlisted in ww1 and discovered on his return the affair had continued. Divorced and remarried but remained childless. Did better than his younger brother Reginald who discovered in the divorce courts that his wife had frequented hotels and regularly 'misconducted herself'. Had two older sisters who had children prior to their marriages. In one instance the child was adopted out and the woman went on to marry a widower with children, while in the other the woman went on to marry the baby's father.

And that's before I even get started on William Drage, who had 11 children with his first wife before she left him and the state, then went on to have 17 children with another woman who he never married. The last one was born in 1894 when he was 68. Or before I get started on someone like Matilda Dawson, who was fostered out as a child because her widowed father couldn't look after all the children. Or Violet Tieste whose mother was widowed in the war and ran a boarding house (of questionable repute), lost most of her family to TB, had a brother made a ward of the state and became a Communist who we believe was 'barren by choice'.

Yep, reckon the whole mum, dad and two kids thing is pretty busted!



#4 Nobody ever used to commit adultery, or steal stuff, or get drunk, or...

Do I even need to go there on this one? There are so many stories I wouldn't know where to start! It's probably been partially addressed above anyway!

#5 There will always be a Redden.

In every country town across Australia there will always be at least one member of the Redden family buried in the local cemetery.

Actually, this last one is true.

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Y'know, some time I must get around to writing about what doing genealogy has shown me is the case on nature vs nurture.

Samuel McPherson... a storm in a glass of good Scotch?

It's been a big, big weekend for me, genealogically speaking (and my son started school, but back to the dead-people stuff). Jill Ball's recommendation has brought many of you over to read my blog, and there's also been some events connected to an ongoing family saga, so it's probably a good time to share this one. It's a big mess, but it's a great story, a ripping yarn even. I'd say apologies in advance to offended family members were it not for the fact I'm not sorry at all. Well, I'm sorry a few people were upset by it, but I'm not sorry it happened.

Ok... so, to begin at the beginning.

My grandmother is:

1. A McPherson
2. Very fond of all of her family
3. Full of stories about their past.

My great-uncle Ron and my grandma, who is rocking a 'Black Watch' pin her dad bought her while on leave from the Western Front. Because the family is Scottish. Apparently.



One of her stories about the past was about her grandfather, Samuel James McPherson. He was a teacher at Scotch College. He dedicated many years of his life to education, and was later memorialised at the school in the naming of their History Prize (Why? He taught accounting and book-keeping!) As in the best of stories, he died of a heart-attack just outside the school property when on his way home one evening, just a few days before he was about to retire. He was at least 73 at the time.



Samuel James McPherson, as seen hanging on the wall of my grandmother's childhood home



He was very stern, and would think nothing of thumping one of the kids with his slipper at dinner-time then going back to talk as though nothing had every happened. Someone in his family was African and that's why we all tan so easily and have birth-marks. And he was Scottish. Apparently. Or, as Grandma describes it, Scotch, which I always found somewhat disconcerting. What can I say? She is virtually a teetotaller and probably doesn't realise how it sounds.

Great-great grandpa, is that you?



The official records told me somewhat more than that. He married a German woman while working in Melbourne. He worked at a number of elite Adelaide private schools. He was highly regarded and raised his children to succeed in professional or personal endeavours (never both: a story for another time). His mother could not write. Nobody seemed to know what year he was born in exactly, or whether he was born in South Africa or Ayrshire. But he was the son of John Henry McPherson, a Scotsman sailing from the ports of South Africa, and Betsey Geyer. And he was Scottish. Apparently.



I met cousins of my Grandmother's (who are just wonderful, wonderful people, and I wish I could have found something better for them in the research process). They told me about Samuel's career, complete with his references, showed me photographs of him, told me about his incredible children. They WERE incredible. I'll be blogging about each and every one of them at some point. There was the sailing and shipwreck stories about his arrival here from South Africa, and the stories about his mother, a great cook and boarding-house keeper, and his father, who died in a horrible accident in the St. Vincent Gulf. He was a sailor, but like most, he couldn't swim, so the one time he got knocked into the water that was it. And Samuel was Scottish. Apparently.



Report of the Death of John Henry McPherson



I don't know why, but I kept digging. Maybe it was to get facts. Maybe it was because every newspaper article which mentioned Samuel said he was John Henry McPherson's son, even the ones which were nothing to do with his father at all, and the lady doth protest too much. Either way, I ended up discovering a South African record indicating that Samuel's mother had been married before, not long before either, to a man named George Bagshaw. He was NOT SCOTTISH. Apparently.

One thing led to another, as they say, and next thing I was collaborating with a Bagshaw researcher and another McPherson cousin who was keen to discover the truth. We found out that:

1. Samuel was the name of George's father, and James was the name of his step-father, meaning Samuel was either George's son or John, Betsy's second husband, was unusually accepting of his wife's first marriage to the extent that he would name his first-born son after people of significance to his wife's first husband. Yeah, I'm not buying it either.
2. There was a baptismal entry for a Samuel James George Bagshaw, son of George Bagshaw, which matched Samuel's headstone's implied age of birth.



I have a clearer picture of the headstone, but this one is from my grandma's album and dates from the 1930s, so it's the oldest one



The McPherson cousin and I are pretty convinced that Samuel was the son of the first husband. We still really value the second husband. He was the man who raised Samuel; Samuel was obviously very fond of him and he had huge input into the cultural identity of our family and no doubt lots of other aspects we will never know or understand. Naturally there are a few in the family who are/would be deeply upset by this revelation that they are not genetically McPhersons and not genetically Scottish, and that's been a real downside to the whole process. I can understand their concerns: if anyone were to suggest I was not a McDermott, I know I'd really struggle to accept their theory. However, I choose to take a bigger picture view in the nature vs nurture debate and look at the fact that John McPherson still stamped his own distinctive flavour on our branch of the family, genetic input or not. He is my great-great-grandfather (adoptive) and George Bagshaw is my great-great grandfather (genetic). John Henry is one of only two people I've ever bothered to enter using the 'custom relationship' features in Family Tree Maker 2012, because as far as I'm concerned, he still rates.

To help shed some light on things my grandmother took the very avant-garde step of taking a DNA test, and we also bought one for a Bagshaw relative to try and settle matters. (Grandma is not hip with the 90-something kids!) Unfortunately it wasn't conclusive in that there was no match to Bagshaws, well, yet. However, the company (ftdna) did provide a genetic profile of my grandmother which showed that some of her DNA originated in Africa and that a further percentage was from South Asia. In case anyone is wondering, my mother's test with them shows 100% western European, so they don't just throw African in the mix for everyone to support a pre-existing human-origin hypothesis. There had always been a family story about Africa, both from Grandma and her cousin, and this proved it. At this point I supposed that given the Bagshaws originated from London, Betsy/Betsey Geyer must be the origin of this 'exotic' DNA, despite her Germanic surname.



As you've surmised, a few members of the family have been less than delighted about this discovery. Not because they have any issue with being, as my husband so charmingly put it, "part eggplant", but because they were used to thinking of themselves as having origins in the Scottish highlands.

"From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas —
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides"

That sort of thing. I've been quite troubled about having robbed them of their dreams of tartan and bagpipes, although in fairness the family were raised with those by John, so they are still part of who we are.

That's been the state of play for a little while now. Fast forward to the weekend, when my Bagshaw relative forwarded me some new information he'd been working on. He still has contact with family in South Africa, and as many of you would know, you pretty much can't research South African ancestry without a local contact. He has been doing further research on the Bagshaws, and has discovered a few items of huge interest which have left me really floored, to say the least!

My Bagshaw ancestor, George, was the child of Samuel Bagshaw and Margaret Connolly. It turns out that Margaret was born a slave. By the time of her marriage to Samuel she was listed as "free slave" (still in the slave marriage register). She was the daughter of a slave and 'woman of colour', in St Helena. Her father J Connolly was a British (well, probably Irish but serving in the British army for profit) soldier in St Helena (as was Samuel Bagshaw) during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte!!!! Only just over 5000 population, and there were my ancestors and Napoleon!  There are so many potential stories there that I just can't even begin to get my head around it. The slavery, Napoleon, Samuel's grandmother's triumph against the odds and her experiences when the family lived in England for a while, Samuel Bagshaw's family's reaction to his marriage to a former slave, how a man whose grandmother was a freed slave became a school-teacher to Adelaide's establishment, how his first cousin was president of the SA Stock Exchange... I just can't even.

Now if it had turned out we were connected to this guy, THAT would have been even weirder!

Edited to add: Elizabeth, if you read this again, your message had an incorrect email address and bounced back. Please do get back in touch.