http:// olneyfamilyarchives.blogspot.com.au
Doris Olney's heritage has been one of fascination and exploration.
She was born Doris Gwendolyne Moss in New Zealand in 1896 to Matilda Louisa (nee Smith) and Clement George Moss. Matilda died when Doris was two years old and she was brought up by the Glasson Family, the family of Matilda's first husband Arthur Evelyn Glasson.
You can read in previous Posts about the Moss family and it's connection to Napoleon and St Helena.
Then I discovered the Smith family and it's connection to Norfolk Island and the First Fleet in 1788.
More recently I have had a connection with Ian Bowie, a descendant of Henry and Henrietta Smith.
His story reflects on Henry Laporte Smith, our Convict, his daughter Henrietta Smith's life in Van Diemen's Land, marrying Henry Smith, and bringing up 9 children in New Zealand.
I invite you to read Ian Bowie's fascinating story about the Smith family.
The Smith story in outline (Ian Bowie, December 2019)
I have mixed feelings about today’s preoccupations
with family history in ‘western’ countries. I suspect that a lot of
genealogical research reflects widespread desires to find identity and
importance, or at least meaning, for our lives and a significant industry has
grown up to exploit these desires, something made possible by official passions
in the last couple of centuries for
recording things and by the recent rise of the internet.
That industry must benefit from the fact that people
are often not good at sharing information or corroborating findings about
‘their’ families and, so, different parts of an extended family may often be working
at odds over the same material. One of my reasons for writing about my origins
at some length below is so that ‘my’ information can be shared. When I talk here
of ‘my’ family it will be in the sense of ‘pertaining to’ rather than in any
sense of ownership. Not a lot of my information has come from my own
discoveries.
I suppose that we’re all a bit like the small child
who asks ‘where did I come from?’ Although I was curious, I was not at all
rigorous in searching for more about my family history until the last decade of
the twentieth century. Neither my father nor my mother seemed seriously
interested in their antecedents, though they kept records of their paternal (but
not maternal) lineages and family trees compiled by my father. Both from time
to time mentioned various cousins, aunts and uncles, none of which made much
sense to me until I got more seriously into my family’s history.
Both my father and Grandpa Bowie included other information
on their origins in memoirs that they wrote, respectively in the 1960s and the
1940s (now held in the Archives of Canterbury Museum in Christchurch), but that
information came mainly from family stories which have turned out to be neither
complete nor completely accurate.
It came as a surprise to me, for example, to learn
from Trevor Langford-Smith in 1995 that he and I shared common NSW First Fleet and Second Fleet convict ancestors who
had lived on Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land (and a marine who was on the
first fleet to Hobart and in the first, failed, British settlement on Port
Philip). My father appears to have known nothing about this when he’d written
his memoir some thirty years earlier.
As I started to look closer at my family history after
2000 it came as a further surprise to learn of the work that was being done
around the world by various cousins and others more distantly related to my ‘Bowie’,
‘Smith’, ‘Caesar’ and ‘Gardner’ relatives on their respective family trees, and
about letters and other records (including of enquiries made by Grandma Bowie
and her siblings into matters relating particularly to the disappearance of my
great-great grandfather, Henry Laporte Smith) held by cousins in Christchurch.
I didn’t want to become more involved but those
letters drew me in because they included not only letters between several of [great
grandmother] Henrietta Letitia Smith’s children but also letters to her from
Mrs (later Lady) Herbert (wife an important British politician) and Clara
Yeates Cummins (Henrietta’s stepmother) since donated to the Canterbury Museum.
These talk about Henrietta’s life and offer insights into things such as
education, migration and family life that might be of use to social historians
and historical novelists.
After I’d learned about the Smith letters my cousins
and I hired a photocopier for an afternoon in 2003 to ensure that we at least
all had a copy of what seemed to be the more significant of the genealogical
material held by the first two. Now, with a lot more material to work on, I began
transcribing information gleaned from family and public sources (and, more
recently, from my own and others’ research) into electronic records respectively
on my Bowie, Smith, Caesar and Gardner families.
Mostly, these records contain little more than details
of births, marriages and deaths in many cases and work is needed to fill out
sources and references. However the files do include several what I would
describe as ‘family histories’, and extended family trees, which helped me
better to understand something of where I came from and which have encouraged
me to tell this story and a fuller story about ‘My Generations’ which is held
in the Archives of Canterbury Museum, albeit in need of some revision.
The 2003 project set a precedent for an even more
ambitious project between 2013 and 2016 in which I digitised and copied onto CD-ROMs
just about every document that I had or had copied relating to my family
history. If this seems a little obsessive, let me say in my defence that every
good researcher should work to ensure the preservation of records. Moreover, I
want our daughters to have copies because I know how families can lose access
to hard copy records.
I have continued adding to these electronic files and hope
to put them onto updated CD-ROMs in due course. In the meantime I spent some
months through 2019 checking particularly the birth, marriage and death
information in them against public records and indices, so that I now have
information in which I have sufficient confidence to post some of it onto
Ancestry.com, Family Search.org and Geni.com websites where this might be
available to a wider audience.
The stories that follow here seek to put flesh onto
the bones of these birth, death and marriage details. I’ve not indicated
sources or given references here but most of that can be found in my electronic
records. While new information may become available down the track I’m confident
that my stories are substantially accurate.
Surprisingly, for only a few of my more recent ancestors
seem to have been distinguished (or notorious for other reasons), I now have
some information (mostly corroborated, and displayed in the chart on the next
page) about all sixteen of my great-great grandparents, who were born in the
decades before and after the beginning of the nineteenth century. I also have
photographs of all in the last three generations before me.
The roots of
some of those great-great grandparents have been traced back further, possibly
more than two dozen generations further in the case of one of my Caesar/Fry line,
and it is interesting to observe how
kind the great events of history such as wars, famines and depressions seem to
have been to most of my known ancestors. Even their relocations, across and
from Europe, caused by the spread of empires and by the industrial revolution
seem to have done little harm to them.
However, although I know whence these people came, I
know little about them as people or about their genetic make-up. From what is
known about their place origins, these people were of mixed race and I cannot
discern racially ‘stereotypical’ features in any of them. From what is known of
their lives culturally also they were mixed, a mixing that has continued to the
point where I cannot see in myself many traits that that have been ascribed to particular
parents or grandparents. Genealogy has its limitations as a practical study.
Genealogy
The Langford/Smith line
My Smiths have roots which are uncertain and have been
a source of endless fascination for their descendants, not least because of the
stories that have been passed down to descendants of my great-grandmother
Henrietta Letitia Smith who is reported by her sons to have talked of her
mother being a niece or ward of an Irish Lord Langford and heiress to money in
Chancery, who had eloped with a ‘Scottish’ ship’s surgeon. Her sons also told
stories about a paternal grandfather having been a lieutenant in ‘the Life
Guards’ of George III and having served at the Battle of the Nile.
Variants of these stories have passed down through six
generations of Henry and Henrietta Smith’s descendants but we know now that
some of what was passed on, particularly to their eldest son Henry Herbert
Smith (H H Smith, Herbert), was confused as to the facts. Some has been
confirmed, some has been corroborated but much remains to be uncovered.
For example, it has turned out that it was the
maternal grandfather of Henrietta’s husband (James Morrisby) – who was known in
Van Diemen's Land as a ‘guardsman’ and ‘early settler’ who had been in the 3rd
Regiment of Foot Guards (the Scots Guards), though his rank is unknown; he and
Ann Brooks his wife were two of three ancestors who as convicts were
transported to Australia! It was said that their son-in-law George Smith was at
the Battle of the Nile (1798), though that would have been before he became a
marine so perhaps as a seaman.
The third of the three convicts, Henry Laporte (or
delaporte) Smith (who seems to have gone under the name Laporte, which he may
have adopted in adulthood), as well as his first wife Maria Louisa Langford (or Longford), remain enigmas today as they seem to have been for their own daughters
and grandchildren.
Maria Langford
Maria, who died in Guernsey in 1841 aged 36, is stated
on her headstone (photographed in 1913, fortunately as it is now almost
illegible) and in Irish newspaper advertisements in 1898 by her daughter
Henrietta Letitia Smith (who perhaps ‘knew’ this from the headstone) to have
come from ‘Langfords Lodge, County of
Limerick, Ireland’ (technically it is just within Cork).
On the strength of this, research done for Trevor Jury
(descended from one of Maria’s grandchildren) linked her to ten generations of
an Anglo-Irish family of Rowleys (which included the not always so-distinguished
Lords Langford) planted in Ulster by James I. No connection between Maria and the
Rowley family has been found and as this family had its seat at Langford Lodge
in County Antrim this now seems unlikely.
A more likely Maria Langford was baptised in the South
Cathedral (Roman Catholic) parish in Cork in 1804, as a daughter of a James
Edward Langford who is given in the 1806 baptismal record of one of Maria’s
sisters as 'Prvt' which suggests an army rank. This James Langford could be the
Irish-born soldier who enlisted in England in 1793 and. may have been the J E
Langford who was a corn merchant in Cork in 1810. He appears to have had two sons,
including James junior, baptised as Langford or Longford in Cork’s North
Cathedral (near the Collins barracks).
Our Maria did have a brother, James Edward Langford who
was an executor of Laporte’s 1841 deed of settlement onto his second wife. Army
records and gazette notices record that this Langford was born in Cork in 1802,
promoted from Gentleman to Quartermaster in 1834 but ended his army career as a
Paymaster in India in 1845 when he was cashiered for being ‘drunk, deficient in
his accounts’. He unsuccessfully claimed insolvency relief in Poona
in 1849 and may have been the James Langford who returned to England
He may also have been the Cork-born James Langford who
had an earlier army career as a foot soldier between 1819 and about 1830.
Henry Laporte Smith
Laporte Smith claimed on his wife’s headstone to be
from ‘Ballinatrea’ County Cork [Ballinatray is in Waterford on its boundary
with Cork, near Youghal] and Stephens Green Dublin’ but I wonder, from the fact
that nothing ‘known’ about him or his family before 1841 has been corroborated and
from the detail on this headstone, whether Laporte was using the headstone to
give himself a back story in Guernsey (where burials in the [Candie] town
cemetery were then mainly limited to locals, suggesting a more local connection).
From the ‘Laporte’ in his name [the Ottoman court at Constantinople
was often referred to as ‘La Porte’], Blair Smith speculated that Laporte was a
son of John Spencer Smith, an envoy in Constantinople from 1795. This would
have Laporte a nephew of Admiral William Sidney Smith and related to other
notable (and sometimes shady) Smiths and Smyths (including the Lords
Strangford) who did have associations with Ballinatray. As with the back-story
researched for Maria, no links with these families have been confirmed.
No documentation of Laporte’s birth or his first
marriage (in 1821 according to the 1841 settlement) has been found. Nor has anything
been found to support the ideas that Laporte had been a surgeon and maybe
eloped with the Maria born in 1804 who would have been 15 in 1821. Did the two
meet shipboard somewhere? Might Laporte have had some military connection
(though by the 1820s England was no longer the military camp it had been a
decade earlier). All of this is the stuff of speculations at present!
Nor have traces been found of any of Laporte’s siblings
listed in his convict indent, even of Lt Charles Augustus Smith who also was another
executor of Laporte’s 1841 settlement, though he might have been the merchant’s
clerk of that name bankrupted in London in 1844. Indeed, the only ‘official’ record
found of the years or places of the births of Laporte’s and Maria’s children is
an adult baptismal one in 1850 for our Henrietta (which discounts any links to
a similar family that lived in London).
Family stories suggest that the Smiths (or Langfords) had
money and connections with Dublin’s Roman Catholic establishment through
banker, merchant and nationalist Nicholas Mahon and family solicitor Thomas
Richmond Evans. They have connected them also to Sidney Herbert, an important
political associate of Peel and Disraeli (he became Baron Herbert of Lea) and it
has been suggested that Laporte was related to Florence Nightingale whose grandfather
was a William Smith and who was a protégé of Sidney Herbert and his wife.
None of these connections have been proven and relevant
Irish records may have been destroyed in 1922. If the Smiths were connected
with powerful and distinguished military, diplomatic and political Anglo-Irish families
they would have been linked to the heart of the English and Anglo-Irish Establishments.
But Laporte possibly disgraced himself if he did marry Maria as a Catholic girl
who was under-age in 1821. And he certainly disgraced himself in 1841. Perhaps
people including Maria’s children covered these up.
Indeed, all that was known to Maria’s grandchildren
with any degree of certainty about Laporte, Maria and their children came out
of four sets of events in 1841: Maria’s death (which is proven); Guernsey’s
census of that year (which has her family at Vauvert Cottage; and may be reliable as to the birth order of the
siblings if not as to birth years); Laporte’s known second marriage; and the ‘disappearance’
of Laporte after that. Even now, no firm evidence from before 1841 has yet been
found. But there were stories….
In 1841, Laporte and Maria had come (perhaps recently
from Ireland and/or London) to Guernsey with their seven surviving children all
of whom except Eliza (Ireland) were reported in the census of 1841 as born in
England (some later claimed Ireland, and Guernsey), including our Henrietta who
was born in 1831. In February 1841 Maria died, in June Laporte remarried and in
August he ‘disappeared’ leaving both his pregnant new wife and his born
children apparently without any knowledge of what had happened to him. For the
next 165 years nothing more seems to have been known about Laporte.
It had been thought (including by my father) that Laporte’s
disappearance was somehow related to the 1841 deed that settled £3000 (say $370,000
in today’s dollars) onto his second wife, half of the money apparently
previously settled on Maria. It was thought also that Laporte might have
carried out plans which he had shared with his second wife, Clara Cummins, and
migrated to America or Australia perhaps under the name of Courtney (which,
curiously, is the family name of a possible Rowley ancestor of Maria).
However, in 2006 Anne Mason discovered that in fact Laporte
had been arrested and on 4 December 1841 convicted in the Royal Court of
Guernsey of forging three bills on the Bank of Ireland totalling £530 (say $65,000)
in July 1841 (after his second marriage!). He was sentenced to be exiled from
Guernsey (a sentence with meaning only for a Guernseyaise) but also to be transported
for seven years. After the rejection of a petition to the Privy Council, he was
transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Candahar
in March 1842.
All of this seems to have been unknown to his descendants
or, in the case of Sydney Edgar Langford Smith (S E L Smith, Edgar, who may
have found something about the Langfords in 1913 and who surely knew when he
buried his aunt Louisa (as Mrs Gee) in 1920), it may have been covered up (Edgar,
who knew that Laporte was a ‘forger’, did worry about the possibility of a ‘convict
stain’). Strangely, also, my father noted Laporte’s father as John when he
penned a family tree in the late 1940s. The secrecy is curious for a number of
reasons.
Firstly, Laporte’s trial was widely reported across
the British Isles and elsewhere including
in The Times of London (why, I
wonder?), though not as extensively as the trial about the same time of Edward
Beaumont Smith for forging a much larger sum of Exchequer bills. Beaumont
Smith, who was a son of Admiral Sidney Smith and so would have been a cousin of
‘our’ Smith if Blair was correct in his suppositions, was convicted of the
‘Exchequer Fraud’ in 1841 and also transported in 1842 to Van Diemen's Land
where he died as a schoolmaster in 1877.
Secondly, notwithstanding any scandal,
great-grandmother Henrietta seems to have known Mrs Elizabeth Herbert, wife of Sidney
(who was a brother of the 12th Earl of Pembroke), describing her as her
‘guardian and friend’. Also, Henrietta claimed to have been fare-welled when
she left England in 1854 by another Elizabeth Herbert, Sidney’s sister who was married
to the Anglo-Irish Earl of Clanwilliam (and/or by Florence Nightingale); her
ship – the Constance –did indeed
anchor in 1854 off Deal where the Earl of Clanwilliam was Captain of Deal
Castle.
Thirdly, while it true that no traces of Laporte after
the 1850s have yet been found, records and newspaper entries have now been
found online which roughly confirm many of the family stories through Henrietta
about the movements of Laporte’s children (including Henrietta and, separately,
three of her younger siblings to Australia) and which suggest that rather more may
have been known to his children than was passed on to his grandchildren about Laporte’s
movements after 1841.
In particular, after the three younger siblings
arrived in Sydney in late 1854, they placed advertisements in the Empire newspaper that indicate that they
understood that their father – as ‘Mr Laport Smith’ – had been in Sydney but
were unable to contact him. Another newspaper advertisement placed from
Christchurch in the Sydney Morning Herald
in 1880, suggests that he was known to have been in Victoria and this is
more-or-less confirmed in lists of unclaimed letters awaiting him – generally
as ‘Laporte Smith’– in Melbourne in 1854/5.
At his trial, Laporte claimed to be a native of Cork in Ireland
and was reported to be the son of John, a ‘highly respectable person’ in Cork London ,
Cork , Jamaica ,
Lisbon and Gibraltar
but declined to reveal the name of the firm other than that his name was not in
it. One of the bills was drawn on the firm Kinahan Son & Smythe, and it may
be that Laporte was in the sugar or spirits trade (he was described in his
convict records as a ‘provision merchant’, though other sources have described variously
as ‘yeoman’, ‘esquire’, ‘accountant’ and even ‘physician’).
Since the rediscovery of Laporte in 2006, it has
emerged that after serving time in a road gang based at the Bridgewater
probation station (at Granton) he became a petty constable in the Richmond
police force in 1844 and was watch-house keeper at the Richmond convict depot until
1847 (‘neglectful of duty’ on one occasion). Towards the end of 1847 his pardon
– though it had been recommended a year before had been that he should remain
in the Australasian colonies – was
gazetted, curiously conditional only on his 'not to return or be found within the
limits of the Island of Guernsey'.
Laporte resigned from the police force at the end of
1847, presumably left Van Diemens Land shortly thereafter and had been in
Melbourne by 1848/9 (when unclaimed letters awaited ‘Smith, Laport’ and ‘Smith,
H de L’ at the Post Office). He was residing in Sydney as ‘Laporte Smith’ by
1851 and was still there in 1854. The 1880 Sydney
Morning Herald advert suggests that he was ‘in Sydney in 1855 but last
heard of in Avoca, Victoria’ which perhaps was information that came through
James, his son who is thought to have gone to the goldfields.
Further unclaimed letters awaiting ‘Smith, Laport’ and
‘Smith, Laporte’ at the Melbourne GPO in 1854/5 suggest that he returned to
Victoria, while other unclaimed letters, to Henry L Smith (1854) and H L Smith (1855)
in Sydney might have been letters to him, perhaps telling of his children’s
movements. The letters and advertisements do suggest that, contrary to what is
said in letters between Laporte’s children (copies of which still exist), some
people had clearer ideas about his movements in Australia than has been
suggested to Henrietta’s descendants.
It seems that James lost contact with his sisters
because in 1877 he advertised in Tasmanian newspapers (coincidentally in the
issue of the Hobart Mercury that
advertised Beaumont Smith’s intestate estate) seeking his sisters. We don’t
know whether he made contact but the timing is curious in that it could have
been related to the death from senility in that year in Launceston, of an ex-convict
invalid Henry Smith born about 1795. And, perhaps, it was this that gave basis
to the vague idea that James was or had been in Queensland.
However, other deaths were registered in Australia of
Henry Smiths born at the end of the eighteenth century. Other deaths were
registered in Britain and Ireland (including an 1864 death in Limerick informed
by a Rowland Smith of a Henry Smith born 1792, that I cannot confirm) and, given
Laporte’s possible occupation as a providore and the fact that in Sydney he had
lived near Darling Harbour, it is possible that he returned ‘home’; there are
ship-related records that could be related to such a return. We may never know.
The children
Although Laporte’s second wife understood him to have been
a man of property in Ireland, she made no claim to this property (which was subsequently
embezzled, according to family mythology, though it might have been called on
by Laporte). She returned to her parents, living in London and France for some
years and losing touch with children of Laporte’s first marriage until after
her return to Guernsey by 1851. Yet, rather than being sent to a poor-house,
six of Laporte’s children were boarded during 1842-3 at the expense of the Parish
of St Peter Port, during which time Henrietta reported a visit from Uncle James
(Home on leave from India).
It is not known why or for how long the Parish
Douzaine took on this expense. However, in 1849 three of Henrietta’s siblings left
Guernsey while she, having finished private schooling on Jersey, was enrolled (after
her Anglican baptism in Jersey) in a one-year course at an Anglican teachers’
training college in the Close of Salisbury Cathedral (1850-51) with her home
address given as at Pierre Percée,
the estate of James and Elizabeth MacCulloch, members of an influential
Guernsey family known for their Methodist charity but linked by marriage to
other important families such as the (Anglican again) reverend Brocks.
Although there is online speculation that there was an
orphanage or boarding school at Pierre
Percée, Henrietta claimed Mrs MacCulloch also to have been a ‘guardian’.
So, with MacCulloch’s father a wine merchant in Brittany
In reviewing both what Henrietta is reported to have
told her children and the fragments that exist in a number of documentary
records that I have located over the last decades I wonder whether Henrietta
had been singled out for special treatment compared with her siblings
(and, if so, why) but we can only
speculate about that.
Henrietta’s younger siblings may have also had lived at
le Manoir du Pierre Percée but James
MacCulloch died in 1850 and Elizabeth may have moved out then as she isn’t
recorded in the Channel Islands (or English) 1851 censuses. The 1851 census has
Henrietta’s sisters boarding with teachers more-or-less next door to le Manoir , while James was boarding
near the school attached to St Pierre du Bois (the church of the Rev Thomas
Brock until the latter died in 1850) and Rowland was working (for a family of
the same name) on a farm in St Pierre du Bois.
Despite the scandal of 1841, Henrietta went to a church
teachers’ college and (from letters written to her by Elizabeth (later Lady)
Herbert) interacted socially with Mrs Herbert in London, during 1850-53.
Certainly, Wilton House home of the
Herberts (which Henrietta claimed to have known, pointing to the room where she
had stayed) is close to Salisbury where Henrietta studied but the nature of her
connection with the Herberts remains a mystery (apart from suggestions that
Laporte was connected with Sidney Herbert or his wife).
What is known more certainly is that after completing her
course, Henrietta taught in ‘Martin Wiltshire’ (now in Hampshire) in 1851-2 from
where she left ‘in peculiar circumstances’ and near ‘Sudbury Norfolk’ (Maria
Ericksen has established that it was more than likely the new school at
Foxearth in adjacent Essex) in 1853. She was in Winchester in 1852, which may
have been to be near Elizabeth MacCulloch who was in Droxford (nearby in
Hampshire) and died there in 1853, or to support her married sister in Soberton
(also nearby in Hampshire).
Sailing for Australia
In 1854 Henrietta sailed on the Constance, ‘for her health’ (according to family legend and
whatever that might mean), to a female-deficient Van Diemen’s Land where she
was to meet and marry an unrelated Henry Smith, a son of Grace Morrisby. Her
parents were the other two of ‘my’ transported convicts.
James Morrisby, for whom five generations of Yorkshire
ancestors have been traced (including a father who was killed in the Cape
Breton Island battle of Louisbourg, in 1758), had enlisted in the Scots Guards in 1776 but after his regiment had returned
from America in 1783 he was convicted in 1784 for breaking-in. He arrived in
Port Jackson on the Scarborough in
1788 and was moved to Norfolk Island in 1790 (where he was disembarked from the
Sirius four days before it was wrecked.
In July 1791, at the expiry of his seven years’ sentence, he was living with
Ann Brooks in ‘Sydney’ (now Kingston) and cropping 12 acres there.
Ann (whose family name might have been either Brooks
or Lavender) was apparently a Londoner who was convicted in 1787 for stealing
two linen sheets. She arrived in Port Jackson with her first son William generally
known as Brooks on the Lady Juliana,
subject of Sian Rees’ book The Floating
Brothel’, in June 1790, and was sent to Norfolk Island on the Surprize two months later (by which time
she had become pregnant with her second son, who became known as Richard Larsom
though his father is not known).
It is said, but there is no archival record, that
James and Ann were married by the Revered Richard Johnson during the latter’s
three weeks on Norfolk Island in November 1791 (if so, with more concern for
good order amongst the convicts than for any previously married states or
children from them). Ann’s sons and the five further children she was to have
with James were recorded variously as ‘Lavender’ or ‘Morrisby’ in the several
Norfolk Island Victualling Books and Musters.
By 1796 Ann and James were living on one of their
leases along Watermill Creek below Mount Pitt (James farmed 74 acres of
leasehold including that of his eldest son). The Morrisbys prospered there and
when the Norfolk Island settlement was to be closed, James and Ann went with
their five shared children on the Porpoise
in 1807 to Van Diemen’s Land where
James was granted 80 acres in the Clarence Plains near Rokeby in exchange for
his earlier leases on Norfolk Island.
James was to farm Belmont
Lawn successfully there and was granted 300 further acres in Muddy Plains, Clarence
Plains, in 1828. Grace, the older of his and Ann’s daughters and second of
their five children together), married George Smith from here, in Hobart in 1810.
George Smith was a Warwickshire man
who attested as a private in the Marines in 1800, though he may have been
previously at the Battle of the Nile (1798).He came, firstly to the failed
Sorrento (Victoria) settlement on the transport ship Ocean in 1803 (accompanying HMS
Calcutta) and then on to Hobart in 1804. Later in 1804 George was charged
with insubordination and was sent to Port Jackson in 1805 where he stayed till
1807, awaiting a court martial which didn’t eventuate for lack of judicial
officers.
George was eventually returned to
Van Diemen’s Land where he was discharged in 1812, to be granted 120 acres of land
at Broadmarsh (near Herdsmans Cove) in 1813. He sold this land to his
father-in-law in 1817 when he and Grace appear to have been living in Clarence
Plains (a little further south), possibly on the Kimberley Farm at Ralphs Bay, Clarence Plains (south of Rokeby), of
which George sold fifty acres to his oldest son in 1841. A clearing sale notice
gazetted in 1816 and Grace’s death as a ‘poor woman’ suggest that George (like
other marines it has been observed) may not have been successful as a farmer.
This Henry Smith was the second youngest of seven
children born in Clarence Plains to Grace Morrisby and her Marine, George
Smith. Grace who was married at 13 (so young) was dead at 30 (dying in Hobart
as a ‘poor woman’: childbirth?) and her youngest children (including ‘our’
Henry) were brought up at Summerfield,
Broadmarsh, by her daughter Grace who (at 16, reflecting a still-enormous
gender imbalance in Van Diemen's Land) married William Stanfield and (later)
James Staples. No more is known of George Smith apart from his sale of land at Ralphs
Bay (Rokeby) to his oldest son.
Henrietta Letitia Smith, accompanied by a Mrs
Frederick, sailed on the barque Constance
(not to be confused with a larger clipper of the same name) from Gravesend
on 6 February 1854. It anchored off Deal on the 8th, apparently called into in
Hobsons Bay to drop mail and embark passengers from Melbourne and eventually
made its way up the Tamar to Launceston on 27 May 1854. As Henrietta was not
government-assisted it has been speculated that her fare may have been paid by
Sydney Herbert’s Tasmanian Female Emigration Association or Caroline Chisholm’s
Family Colonisation Loan Society.
However, the funding might have been linked in some
way to the MacCullochs. It also might have come from an Irish connection of the
Smiths or Langfords. It has even been suggested that Henrietta might have been
a beneficiary of the will of Nicholas Mahon who died in Dublin in 1841.
Certainly, Henrietta seems to have been under the impression (though she would
not have understood it as a child) that she was to inherit money that her
brother John claimed later was being embezzled.
Another possibility is that Smith siblings had been
supported in Guernsey by the money that had been settled on Clara in 1841 but
which she did not call on. If so, whether or not uncle James (Langford), the
family solicitor (Evans) or even Laporte himself had been drawing on it, that
money might have been nearly exhausted as to both interest and principal by
1854, giving us reasons for sending four younger siblings to Van Diemen’s Land
and Sydney and suggesting the possibility that Laporte might have contributed
toward the passages of his children.
Henrietta’s three younger siblings sailed shortly
after Henrietta, on the Hanover which
arrived in Sydney in September 1854, as domestics and in James’ case as a
servant possibly with the Westbrook family (who also had ties to Droxford) with
whom they had sailed. James’ fare was paid by person(s) unknown but half of
each of the girls’ fares (£25 each) was paid by the Family Colonisation Loan
Society, which suggests that they may have been intended to meet Laporte in NSW
to recoup these payments (which may not have happened).
Henrietta (and Henry) in Van Diemens Land
Henrietta was ‘sent’ to Dr William Valentine at The Grange in Campbelltown in what was
still Van Diemen's Land, perhaps as a governess to Valentine’s three children.
She was lonely there and soon moved south to James and Grace Staples’ Summerfield. If we are to believe letters
from both Lady Herbert and Clara Cummins Henrietta was unaware that her father
had been a probationary convict in nearby Bridgewater and then a petty
constable in Richmond not so many years earlier. Seven months after arriving in
Van Diemen's Land, Henrietta married her Henry Smith (no relative) at the end of 1854.
Henry Smith started out as a sheep farmer in 1846,
three years after George’s death, but in 1852 he and his brother Richard spent
seven months on the Bendigo goldfields. In 1853 he leased the 3800 acre Rathmore run (he added to it the 2662
acre Pelham run and in 1861 another 8000
acres at St Patrick Plains near Shannon) at Hollow Tree near Hamilton, sixty
kilometres north of Hobart in Van Diemen’s Land, to which he took his new
bride. Over the next ten years Henry and Henrietta had five (or, possibly, six)
children in what became Tasmania
Henrietta probably found Rathmore even bleaker and more isolated than either Campbelltown or
Broadmarsh and was very ill during the first year of her marriage (pregnancy?
endometriosis?). She was joined there for a while by her younger sisters from
Sydney and in 1859 Henrietta was advertising the services of a ‘young lady’ as
a teacher – Louisa perhaps, because Susan was about to marry?) but not by James
who is believed to have gone ‘to the goldfields’.
The times were hard, Henry was unsuccessful as a
grazier and is said to have been ‘generous with his money’ (certainly including
loans to a nephew who became insolvent), while Henrietta may not have been
coping with her rapidly growing family. In 1861, after failing to get financial
help from Henrietta’s childhood ‘guardian’ Lady Herbert, the Smiths put Rathmore up for sale, anticipating
leaving Tasmania Milford estate at Cambridge
Henry and Henrietta in New Zealand
Two years later, with a fifth addition to the family,
the Smiths sailed on a mid-winter’s voyage on the tiny Chrishna (259 tons), from Hobart to Lyttelton in 1864. This begs
the question ‘why did they go to New Zealand?’ and the best answer I can come
up with is that this was somehow connected with the fact that Henrietta’s
sister Louisa – with whom Henrietta may have maintained ties (as she did with
Susan) – had gone to Otago with her (already married) lover (George Leopold
Morton) in 1863 and was still in New Zealand when Henrietta sailed.
Baptisms, family stories and letters from England have
the family initially in Rangiora in 1864. Henry is said to have farmed then on
Kaiapoi Island and Flaxton but his farming troubles were to continue there and
Henrietta returned to school teaching in between having four more babies Henrietta
may have been the Mrs Smith who taught in Rangiora and is reported to have obtained
a teacher’s certificate in 1866.
Henrietta may have taught then at Flaxton and either there
or Burnham in 1868 (a letter from England suggests she was living in Burnham in
1869) despite indifferent health and in St Albans in 1872 (she would have been
pregnant with my grandmother Amy) but none of this has been confirmed; Henry
and Henrietta and Smith are common names, unfortunately. Family memories too
may be uncertain and, while Edgar Smith wrote of the Smiths moving to Leeston
in Easter 1878, he may have confused Doyleston with Leeston (they are close one
to another).
From 1879, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives), show
that Henrietta was teaching at the (Doyleston) side school of Leeston school for
three years 1878-1880 and then, after breaks (perhaps due to illness and
probably spent in Christchurch), at Silverstream (now Kimbell, near Fairlie)
where she was sole teacher for four years from when it opened in 1884 until 1888
and at Burnham school as sole teacher during the three years 1890-1892
(notwithstanding poor inspectors’ reports which perhaps encouraged her to
retire).
A letter to Henrietta suggests that
the Smiths were actually at ‘Allan Vale’ Doyleston in 1876 and marriage notices
indicate that they were still there in 1880. However, in 1879, Henry who was
there as a market gardener declared insolvency. Henrietta sought a retirement
allowance on the grounds of ill health (she’d been teaching for 14 years; it is
not known whether the allowance was granted but she was given a small
promotion). After that, nothing is certain about Henry until 1893 but
advertisements suggest that he was with Henrietta (and Amy) at Silverstream,
market gardening and as sub-postmaster.
Henry’s name doesn’t appear on electoral rolls before
he was resident at Doyleston in 1880/1, which suggests that he did not own or
lease any of the land he farmed in New Zealand. After then (property
qualifications were abolished in 1879) his further absence suggests that he may
have remained an undischarged bankrupt until after the introduction of
universal adult suffrage. (1893), perhaps a consequence of the long depression
(and perhaps the 1879/80 marriages of four daughters!).
It appears that Henry and Henrietta were back in
suburban Christchurch in 1893, probably renting. A readdressed envelope in
Blair Smith’s hands suggests that Henrietta may have visited Victoria in 1893/4
(after Edgar Smith followed his optician-employer to Melbourne in 1892 and by
which time three of her daughters also had moved to Victoria) but by 1896
electoral rolls show the parents, with children Herbert and Amy in Christchurch
living with daughter Eveleen (Bradbury) in Salisbury Street where Henrietta
died in 1898.
It has been said that Henrietta became involved in the
women’s movement then. A ‘Mrs H Smith’ was identified in an 1896 photo from a
meeting of the National Women’s Council and two of her daughters are said to have been in other photos. However, I cannot find Henrietta or
any of her daughters in the 1892 and 1893 petitions for women’s suffrage. Only
Henrietta and her two youngest daughters, Eveleen (Bradbury) and Amy (my
grandmother) appear to have been enrolled to vote in New Zealand in 1896.
My Grandma Bowie was born Amelia (Amy) Smith in 1873,
the last of nine children born to Henry and Henrietta Smith in Tasmania and New
Zealand. Little is known about her life except in the roles of wife and mother
though she was in South Canterbury with her mother as a girl. She may have
shared her mother’s and older sisters’ reported interests in women’s suffrage
and an interest in spiritualism with sister Elizabeth, and (like others in her
family) she sang in public – perhaps this is how she met Grandpa Bowie.
As the only unmarried child in New Zealand after Edgar
Smith went to Melbourne (where three of her sisters had married) and Herbert
Smith (who’d returned from Sydney) married in 1896 Amy helped care for
Henrietta during her last years when she and her parents lived with Eveleen or
another of her married sisters in Christchurch. After Henrietta died, Amy went
to Tasmania with a Colonel F A and Mrs Buckley, reportedly to stay for two
years from 1898 (possibly with her aunt Susan).
Amy returned to Christchurch where she married Grandpa
(James Stirling) Bowie (whom she’d known before) in 1902. They were to have
four children: Enid, Colin, Edgar and Neil.
After Henrietta’s death Henry moved with Eveleen and
her husband to Nayland Street and later Alexander Street (Clifton Hill), in
Sumner (where Mr Bradbury was Mayor, briefly) where Henry died in 1910.
Published with permission of Ian Bowie.
Published with permission of Ian Bowie.
If you have any additions or comments to make, please email the author of this Blog Joy Olney on joyolney@gmail.com
