Filling in the Blanks

 

 

Recognize that family tree? It has graced the beginning of a few blog posts since I started the story of the McKays. Now I am able to fill in some of the blanks where the surnames of William and Henrietta McKay's married daughters would go. It has been much more difficult to find out the story of the McKay family after they left Bangalore.

William McKay's military service record led me through the various births and moves up to the end of his time in the Royal Engineers. Now I'm using a combination of Ancestry, Find My Past and Trove newspaper searches to find out more about what happened to the family in Australia and, more importantly for my purpose of bringing the families forward, the last names of the married daughters.

Some of the first things that I found on Trove were deaths which can be useful as they are a signal to search no further for events in that person's life. The death of William and Henrietta's youngest daughter, Ethel Hilda, in 1927 at the age of 36 when she was still going by the name McKay let me know not to search for a marriage for her and that it would be unlikely that she had children. But, because I found the information in a newspaper article, it also told me where she died, which was at the house of her sister, Mrs E.J. Woodley. As none of the girls had the initials E.J. it was apparent that the E.J. stood for one of the daughters' husbands. Don't you just love that custom? It's so frustrating when researching married women.

Newspapers on Trove also gave me the death dates of William and Henrietta. William died first in 1909 at the age of 60. Unfortunately, the article was a notice rather than an obituary. I still don't know what William did for a living once he reached Australia. Henrietta died in 1917 at the age of 68. This also happened at the residence of Mrs E.J. Woodley, her daughter. So which daughter married E.J. Woodley?

I thought I had the answer when I found the 1897 marriage of the oldest daughter, Florence Annie, to Edward Horace Woodley. At least his initials started with an E. Maybe there was a mistake about the middle initial. It would make sense that the oldest sister was the go-to person for family. That was my working theory until I found an entry for a 1900 marriage of Maud H McKay to Ernest J Woodley on Find My Past. But was this one of "my" McKay daughters? I had been able to find marriage entries in parish registers for a couple of the daughters on Ancestry so I searched for Henrietta Maud which was the name she was given at birth. I didn't find the marriage but I did find and Anglican parish register for the baptism of Evelyn Deborah Woodley in 1903 which named her parents as Ernest James and Henrietta Maud Woodley. I believe that's a match and the answer to who Mrs E.J. Woodley, the go-to person for the McKay family was. 

Sources:

Ancestry – Sydney, Australia, Anglican Parish Registers, North Sydney Lavender Bay Christ Church – Baptism – 02 June 1872 – 31 December 1916

Find My Past – New South Wales Marriages 1788-1945 (transcription from parish registers)

Trove – trove.nla.gov.au