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