Thomas Henderson, villain or victim?

We last left Thomas Henderson as a 51-year-old widower with a boy of 7 in tow. 

Thomas was released from his convict sentence in November 1798. There are no details of how he was employed as a convict, but circumstantial evidence suggests that he was probably assigned to work on one of the growing number of farms to the north of the Parramatta River. The area was known as 'Field of Mars, remembered today in the suburb of Marsfield. In the colonial era, the area ran from Parramatta to the Lane Cove River and as far north as Baulkham Hills. Many of the prominent landowners in the colony owned land in the area, including Samuel Marsden, William Wentworth,  William Cox, John Macarthur and Gregory Blaxland.

After his release, Thomas rented land from William Wentworth and became a farmer. He farmed 50 acres in the Field of Mars area. I have found evidence that the farm was probably very close to Parramatta. It was also close to the Parramatta River.  There is evidence the farm was in two separate parts, with one on the river. One of the workers testified in Court that he heard the 8 o'clock drums from Parramatta, so it must have been in hearing of the Parramatta Barracks.

Some time after his wife's death, Thomas was living 'as husband and wife' with Margaret Broughton. Margaret was a convict who arrived in 1804. Perhaps she was assigned to Thomas as a servant to help care for his son Robert. Margaret Broughton was possibly 30 years younger than Thomas!

An item from the newspaper in 1806 mentions a 'Thomas Anderson' who has been taken into custody for possession of a still. He had voluntarily surrendered the still to the magistrate. Six years later in 1812 Thomas is once again embroiled in trouble with the law. With his 16-year-old son Robert and several other defendants, Thomas faced trial on three separate counts of theft from Samuel Marsden's farm. The full transcripts of the trial were prepared by Keith Henderson some years ago and they provide a lot of the details about Thomas's life as a farmer. While Robert was acquitted of all charges, Thomas was found guilty on two counts and was sentenced to a total of 5 years at the Penal Colony at Newcastle.

Thomas Henderson's story is littered with names of men who were prominent on the British colony of New South Wales. Samuel Marsden was the senior clergyman in the colony and officiated at many of the key moments in the Henderson family life. He was also the supposed victim of Thomas' theft in 1812. Thomas rented land from William Wentworth, one of the explorers who crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. At his trial in 1812, Thomas called on William Cox as a character witness. Cox was the man who followed the explorers tracks and built the road over the mountains that opened up the interior. These connection should not come as a great surprise. Sydney probably had a population of about 5,000 people in 1812.

A list of Settlers and Convicts in the Colony in 1816 shows Thomas 'at public labour at Newcastle'. But in August 1816 he is granted remittance of his remaining sentence and is sent back to Sydney aboard the Government vessel Lady Nelson. He was a witness at Robert's marriage to Catherine Geary in 

Joan Taylor reported that Thomas owned 2 acres of land in the Parramatta/Ryde area and this is supported by the Settler and Convict lists for 1817, 1818, 1820 and 1821 which show Thomas as a 'Landholder'. That area remained farming land for many more years.

No records have been discovered of Thomas Henderson's death, but he is not listed in the Settler and Convict list for 1822, so he probably died between 1821 and 1822. He was about 70 years of age and had spent almost 30 years in the colony.

After reading and researching Thomas Henderson's life, my own opinion is that he was neither serious villain or a victim of injustice. He was a man who took any opportunity that presented itself and worried about the consequences later.

Replica of the Lady Nelson in Hobart.

The Margaret mystery?

Before I get into the story of Thomas Henderson after his wife died, I have to go back to last weeks post. When finalising my notes for the draft chapter on Thomas and Margaret Henderson, I could not find the details of the birth of their daughter, Margaret. So I went back to the records and tried to find it again. It was not there! Then I re-checked Joan Taylor's work and I noticed that she quoted the registers at St John's Parramatta. She said that she could not find the death of Thomas Henderson's wife Margaret, but found the birth of a daughter Margaret baptised on 30 October 1803.

Luckily the register is available electronically, and I was able to do a careful check. I looked at every baptism between Robert Henderson in 1796 and the end of 1805 – no baptism for any child of Thomas and Margaret Henderson (or Anderson). But I was able to find 'Margaret Anderson' in the burials section of the register - on the same date that Joan quoted for baby Margaret's baptism. I think Joan would have been using a microfilm reader to search the records and the format for baptism and burial entries are similar, so I assume that Joan (or one of her helpers) mistook the burial for a baptism.

Burial of Margaret Henderson at St John's Parramatta. Rev. Samuel Marsden always recorded the surname as Anderson. [at this time  letter 's' was often written like the letter 'f'.]

I have checked and double-checked my findings, and I am certain that this was the burial of Thomas Henderson's wife Margaret. She is described as 'convict', which rules out the subject of the burial as a baby! It is entirely possible that Margaret died in childbirth, but the baby would not have been baptised if it was stillborn, so would not be mentioned in the burial.

Putting this together with last week's demolition of the case for John, I have come to the conclusion that Robert Henderson was probably an only child!

Thomas and Margaret

I have begun digging into the story of Thomas and Margaret Henderson this week. They were the parents of Robert Henderson, who was baptised in Parramatta in 1796. 

Thomas and Margaret were Irish, so we face the same difficulties in researching their forebears as we did with Patrick and Elizabeth Geary (see my last post). The destruction of many Irish records during the Irish Civil War makes it very difficult to trace ancestries in Ireland. 

There is also the problem of misunderstanding Irish accents and recording different names for the same person. In this case, the name Henderson is often recorded as Anderson and in at least one case, both versions are interchanged in the same document.

The other problem is not restricted to Irish ancestors and that is the quality of earlier research. In the Ward and Henderson families, we were lucky to have so much work done by Joan Taylor, who was thorough in her research and very good at quoting her sources. The same cannot be said for all family historians and some family trees contain information that is just plain wrong. This often means that whole branches of a tree can be completely wrong, based on a simple mistake with a single ancestor.

For this reason I try to check out all sources for myself and for key facts, such as the parents of an individual, I look for an official source such as a birth certificate, (it is mostly not available). In the absence of a high-quality source, I look for at least three secondary sources or key deductions before I accept it as a fact. 

In the case in point, there is amble evidence that Thomas and Margaret Henderson were the parents of Robert Henderson. There are baptism records naming both parents, legal papers naming both Thomas and Robert and Thomas was a witness at Robert's wedding. But there are other aspects of the story that are more difficult to work out.

Thomas and Margaret both arrived as convicts aboard the Sugar Cane in December 1793. Thomas had been convicted in Dublin in November 1791 and Margaret was convicted about 9 months later in July 1992. Both were charged with theft and were sentenced to transportation for 7 years. 

We know nothing of their life before they were convicted. We assume that they were already married before Thomas was convicted, but there is no evidence of a marriage either in Ireland or New South Wales.

Some researchers have named the parents of Thomas Henderson and I can easily find the same baptism records that give those parents. But there is nothing else that I can find that links that baptism to the Thomas who was sent to New South Wales as a convict. The baptism was 150 km away from Dublin where Thomas was tried and there is at least one other baptism recorded in Dublin that could be our Thomas. Added to the fact that the majority of baptismal records have been lost, and I just can't justify including this information in my profile of Thomas.

Some researchers, including Joan Taylor, also suggest that Thomas and Margaret had a son John born on the voyage to Australia. Joan Taylor references an extensive Pioneer Register compiled by Smee and Provis and published  in 1990. I think there may be an updated version and will put it on my list to check when I go to the National Library.  The reference given by Joan gives a few more details - particularly that John Henderson married Ruth Chambers and had a daughter Maria. He died in Maitland in 1844. 

Unfortunately there is a trail of clues that disprove this idea! The John Henderson who died at Maitland was married to Ruth and had a daughter Maria, but his wife's birth name was Ruth Hill (not Chambers) and they were both convicts. This John arrived in New South Wales on the Neptune in 1818, so there was no way he could be the son of Thomas and Margaret. The evidence is in the records of Convicts permission to marry. 

Of course it is still possible that there was a son John, but at this point I have found no evidence that he ever existed. At least one other Henderson researcher has similar doubts about John.

On a more positive note, there is evidence of another child after Robert. Mary Henderson was born at Parramatta in  1803.  She died on the same day as she was born. Margaret also died the same day. The logical conclusion is that Margaret and her baby daughter died during the birth. 

Thomas was left a widower with a 7-year-old son. He was about 51 years old and would have completed his sentence in 1798, so he was a free man.  

In my next post, I will look at the next phase in Thomas Henderson's eventful life and I am pretty sure we can trace him a bit further than Joan Taylor did.

A soldier and his wife

Patrick Geary was a member of the British Army when he volunteered as a reenforcement for the New South Wales Corps. We know very little about Patrick's early life apart from that he was born in Ardmore, Waterford County, in about 1763 and he had joined the 8th Royal Artillery Battalion in 1785, when he was 21. We also assume he married in Ireland, because he was accompanied on his voyage to Australia by his wife, Elizabeth. We know even less about Elizabeth, not even her maiden name. The ancestry of both Patrick and Elizabeth is probably lost to history as many of the Irish parish records were destroyed in an explosion and fire during the Irish Civil War.

Patrick and Elizabeth arrived in Australia aboard the Britannia III. This ship also carried convicts who experienced one of the most brutal and inhumane voyages in the entire history of transportation. But Patrick and his wife would have been spared the trauma and starvation of the Convicts.

They arrived in May 1797 and Patrick was allocated to Major Rowley's Company at Paramatta. In December the following year, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter who was baptised Mary in January 1799. SMajor Rowley's Company was then ordered to Norfolk Island and  Patrick, Elizabeth and Mary were aboard the Reliance when she sailed to Norfolk Island in November 1799.

A second daughter, Catherine, was born on Norfolk Island in March 1800. There is no official records of Catherine's birth, but the date is known from later records. Patrick and Elizabeth returned to Sydney aboard the Porpoise in March 1801. The list of passengers includes Patrick, Elizabeth and Catherine, but Mary is not listed, so we must assume she died and was buried on Norfolk Island.

Elizabeth died in March 1803 and was buried in Sydney. Her name is recorded as ‘Elizabeth Gayre’.

A Military Census carried out in 1808 describes Patrick as 5 ft, 8¾ inches (1.75 m) tall with a dark complexion, grey eyes and dark brown hair. He had a round face and was 44 years of age. He had seen 23 years, 175 days continuous army service at that time. 

The New South Wales Corps was becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Colony. Some members were becoming a little too involved in some of the more seedy aspects of the colony. People started calling them 'The Rum Corps' in reference to involvment with rum smuggling and other corrupt activity. The last straw for the High Command back in London came when senior officers of the Corps staged a rebellion and overthrew the Governor, William Bligh. The days of the Rum Corps were numbered!

Immediately after the rebellion in 1808, the Corps was renamed the 102nd Regiment of Foot, and their replacement arrived with th incoming Governor, Macquarie. Roughly 110 of loyal soldiers (including Patrick) who had been in the colony for a long time were allowed to stay and were transferred in the 'Veteran's Company' attached to the incoming 73rd Regiment. 

Patrick married for a second time in Sydney in June 1810. He married widow and former convict Ann Hughes. There were four marriages of soldiers from the Veterans Co on the same day and Patrick is listed as Corporal Patrick ‘Guary'. This was an exaggeration as Patrick remained a private soldier throughout his army career. The marriage was short and Ann died in 1813. 

Patrick then married Mary Moore at Parramatta in January 1817. Patrick was 51, Mary 34. Mary was probably also known as Mary Lee and she was a friend of Ann Huges, Patrick's second wife. The two women had been convicted together in Lancaster and arrived on the same convict ship. 

The Veteran's Company was finally disbanded in 1823 and Governor Brisbane gave each of the soldiers a grant of 100 acres of land. Patrick chose a piece of land on Brisbane Water in what is today known as Saratoga. Patrick and Mary moved to the land where they established a farm in conjunction with Patrick's daughter Catherine, by this time married to Robert Henderson. Patrick worked for a time as a constable at Pittwater, but was dismissed in 1826.

He died at his farm in January 1827, survived by his daughter Catherine and his wife of almost 10 years, Mary. In his will, Patrick provided for his wife Mary, but left his farm to his son-in-law Robert Henderson.

Mary died at Robert Henderson's 'Dove Inn' in Erskine Street Sydney in 1851.

A tip on researching Irish ancestors in Australia, particularly the illiterate ones. The people who made the official records wrote down what they heard and their interpretation of a strong Irish accent could vary. In this case, the name ‘Geary’ was recorded at various times as ‘Gayre’, ‘Garey’, ‘Gary’ and ‘Carey’. 

Catherine's long retirement

Catherine Ward nee Mitchell lived for 22 years after her husband William died in 1876. Catherine was 18 years younger than her husband. They had been married for almost 60 years. 

Right: Catherine Ward nee Mitchell as her grandchildren remembered her. They said she was a rather frightening upright old lady, who wore a little lawn boudoir cap, with two ruffles around it.

By 1876 all Catherine's children were grown up and most were living independently. Mary Ann, Catherine Jnr., Sophia, Agnes and Ephraim were all married and Manasseh would be married within a few months. Emily 29, Emma 23 and John 19 were all still single.

Catherine seems to have thought things through carefully. She continued running the general store and William's timber business for a year after William died, then gave them up and moved to Balmain, where she purchased a cottage. Ephraim and Sophia were already settled in Balmain, and perhaps the prospects were better there for her younger children. Shortly after moving to Balmain, Emma married Sidney Robinson and moved to a home a few streets away. Then Emily married Ned Davis and moved to Nambucca. John never married and lived with his mother in Balmain for the rest of her life. After Emma and Emily married, Catherine's granddaughter, Agnes Beattie, moved in to look after Catherine.

Catherine remained a strong presence in the family throughout her life. She insisted on a large cup of oysters every evening, sent from Brisbane Water each week by her daughter Mary Ann. She also enjoyed champagne.

She died at her home in 34 Arthur Street, Balmain, on June 30, 1898, aged 80.  She was survived by eight of her 10 children, 48 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. She was buried alongside William in the Kincumber churchyard where she shares a headstone with William and their 3-year-old granddaughter Ella Beattie (who had died in 1881). 

After Catherine's burial a new headstone was installed, inscribed with the details of William, Cathrine and Ella. Almost 100 years later, William and Catherine's grandson, Allen Ward was part of a working party cleaning up the cemetery. While working near the grave of Rock Davis, the party uncovered a huge ledger stone buried under the surface. It turned out to be the original stone that had marked William's grave and it had been replaced after Catherine's burial in 1898. 

PS: A ledger stone lies flat on the ground, often on top of the grave. A headstone stands upright, usually at the head of the grave.
Just in case you were wondering - this distinction was new to me!