2020 Research realities

 

 My personal library often supplies the books for my research

Much of the research for this blog is done online but sometimes, especially when looking into historical background, nothing fits the bill like a book on the subject. Most of the time my personal library can supply that need. My research is usually in the UK, Canada or the US and I have a few books about the history of those areas. When it comes to books about Australian history, however, I'm going to have to rely on the library. At this time, it isn't a simple matter of browsing the library shelves to find a book that will have information about life in the country that William McKay and his family immigrated to. I have to wait for a notice that the book I've selected has been found and is waiting at the library for me.

It seems like I should know more about Australian history anyway. From the recent addition of new regions to the Ancestry Ethnicity Estimates for their DNA test, I have links to Australia that, so far, don't appear to include the McKay/Chubb families. Why did any of those other family matches end up in Australia? A history of the country and its peoples may help to explain that and may perhaps give me incentive to pursue these new Australian family links that Ancestry tells me I have that I didn't even know were missing from my UK families. 

 

The McKays arrive in Australia

 

                        Family Tree Harold Strange Chambers sent to his daughter

 

There are no passenger lists available online for the time period around 1888 so it wasn't clear exactly when or how William McKay and family immigrated to Australia. His military record ended on December 31, 1888. Did this mean that they left Bangalore on January 1, 1889? They must have travelled by ship. Was it a direct journey from Bangalore to Sydney? Perhaps I will find out one day. I do know for a fact that they were in Australia by 1890, as they had another daughter born that year. William and Henrietta registered the birth of their daughter, Ethel H McKay, in the St Leonards district of New South Wales in 1890.

 

I was surprised when I found the birth. It seemed like the couple were so much older as William had been in the military for over 25 years. But both William and Henrietta were 39, or thereabouts, when Ethel was born. I should have been expecting to find that birth because it completes the children of "my auntie" in the family tree that Harold Chambers sent to his daughter but I had assumed that I missed Ethel's birth entry in the Bangalore records.

 

The McKays had spent almost 10 years in Bangalore/Madras. Australia would have been a real change for the family, especially for the younger daughters who had never lived anywhere other than India. Not being attached to the military must have been hard to get used to for them all. In Australia, they were part of a large wave of immigrants who had entered the country in the 1880s when the economy was going great guns but unfortunately they came in at the end of that period. The 1890s saw a downturn in the economy. According to the timeline in A History of the Department of Immigration, in the 1890s "A weakened economy and severe drought resulted in widespread unemployment, poverty and industrial strikes, and brought immigration to a standstill". That doesn't sound like an auspicious beginning. I wonder how the McKays fared.

 

 

 

Sources:

A History of the Department of Immigration https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/news-subsite/files/immigration-history.pdf 

 

Find My Past – New South Wales Births – 1890, McKay Ethel H, St Leonards, New South Wales, Australia, Father William, Mother Henrietta  

 

 

Leaving Bangalore, 1888

 

Did Eliza Chubb or Sarah Ann Chambers spend time in the Victoria Hospital in Bournemouth?

 

In 1888 William McKay gave the military three months notice and was discharged on December 31. He had served for 25 years and 161 days. Henrietta had been with him for all but six of those years, the earliest ones, as he had enlisted at the age of 14 years and 7 months. In the time that William and Henrietta had been together, they had experienced a lot of ups and downs, most particularly the time in 1876 when he was tried for fraud and desertion. They had been in Weymouth, Malta, Portsmouth and Bangalore and along the way Henrietta had given birth to seven children. But their thought was not to reunite with family in England.

 

William's military record includes the information about the family's intended destination as the British liked to know where their well-trained men could be found in case they needed to be called upon in the future. Under the heading "Intended place of Residence on Discharge" was written: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Had they spent so much time in the warmth of India that thoughts of resettling in England left them cold or was it something else?

 

Perhaps the news from England was discouraging for a couple with a young family. By that time, Henrietta's mother, Eliza Chubb, was living with Henrietta's sister, Sarah Ann Chambers and family. At this remove it is hard to tell if the Chambers family was rescuing Eliza or if she had moved in with the Chambers to help out. Perhaps it was a little of both.

 

While on Jersey, Eliza Chubb had run a shop at 32 Queen Street in St. Helier. She also lived at that address. A news article in the Jersey Independent and Daily Telegraph on March 14, 1885, recounted the story of repeated flooding of the shop because of a drainage problem. In 1886, a while after the article ran, Eliza joined her daughter, Sarah Ann, and son-in-law in Wareham, Dorset and was with them when they moved to Bournemouth. If Henrietta had thoughts of joining her mother and sister in Bournemouth, she probably thought twice about it when she found out about her sister's health. It appears that Sarah Ann was diagnosed with phthisis (tuberculosis) in 1886. That may have been the reason behind the Chambers' move to Bournemouth as it boasted a reputation as a place for rest and restoration.

 

Did Henrietta feel a pang when she and William and family went off in another direction to start over in New South Wales? I have found no records to indicate that she made her way back to England; sad really as she wouldn't have seen her mother or sister again. Eliza Chubb died in 1889 and Sarah Ann Conway Chambers died in 1890.

 

 

Sources:

Find My Past – British Army Service Records 1760-1915 Records of William McKay enlisted 23^rd July, 1863

Find My Past – Newspapers & Periodicals: “Defective Drainage” Jersey Independent and Daily Telegraph, March 14, 1885

GRO certificates: 1889 April 5, death of Eliza Chubb at 7 Commercial Road, Bournemouth

1890 June 29, death of Sarah Ann Conway Chambers at 7 Commercial Road, Bournemouth

Streets of Bournemouth Health - https://www.streets-of-bournemouth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Health.pdf

 

Images:

Victoria Hospital, Bournemouth, UK – line drawing By Creek and Gifford, Architects - The Building news and engineering journal v.58 :1(1890) circa p.123 - https://archive.org/details/buildingnewsengi5811unse/page/n127/mode/1upImage cropped from https://ia801304.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/7/items/buildingnewsengi5811unse/buildingnewsengi5811unse_jp2.zip&file=buildingnewsengi5811unse_jp2%2Fbuildingnewsengi5811unse_0128.jp2&ext=jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92370337