Luke Wallbridge was born in 1804 in the hamlet of Turners Puddle, Dorset, the son of Thomas and Hannah Wallbridge. Sarah Shepherd was born about 3 years later in the nearby market town of Wareham. Her parents were William and Elizabeth Shepherd.
Luke and Sarah married in Wareham in 1829 and set up home in Turners Puddle, where Like worked as a farm labourer. He also worked as a carter at times. Their growing family can be traced through the parish registers and the 1841 and 1851 English census. They had 12 children baptised between 1830 and 1850. Four daughters died in childhood.
Times were difficult for working class people in England as the industrial revolution and mechanisation made many workers redundant. In 1850, Luke and Sarah's eldest daughter, Hannah, emigrated to Sydney. Within two years she was married to Robert Geary Henderson. Then another daughter, Mary Ann followed Hannah and she too married in Sydney.
In 1856, Luke and Sarah followed their daughters and took their remaining 6 children to NSW. Luke was 50 and Sarah 47. They arrived in Brisbane (then part of NSW), but immediately moved to the Gosford district where they would spend the rest of their lives.
Sarah died in 1879 aged 73 and Luke died in 1884 aged 79. At the time of Luke's death, they had 33 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, all in Australia. By my calculations their great-grandchildren would eventually number over 150 and not a single Wallbridge surname among them! Neither of their sons who survived to adulthood seems to have married.
My family is descended from Hannah Wallbridge's daughter Madeline Geary Henderson, who married Manasseh Ward in 1877.
The Wallbridge family arrived in Australia in the midst of the gold rush, but they were not fortune seekers and did not go to the goldfields. They were probably just seeking a better life for their family. I like to think that their descendants have had a better life than Luke and Sarah experienced in rural Dorset in the early 1800s.
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