A remark made between two of my dad’s cousins had caused me to assume that my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Henderson may have died from dementia. The comment – “oh, isn’t she the one who went mad” – was passed on to me by my mother, who was notorious for getting things wrong when it came to my dad’s family, so I thought I should investigate it a bit further.

When I started to look more closely at the timeline of this pair of 2xgreat grandparents it soon became clear that dementia was fairly unlikely as Elizabeth died quite young. Thomas Henderson married Elizabeth Walker Smart in June 1868. In September of that year their only child John William was born. Checking her death certificate, I realised that Elizabeth died in 1875, at the age of 28, from Consumption (Tuberculosis). Her husband Thomas died 4 years later at the age of 35 from exhaustion due to alcoholism, leaving 11 year old John an orphan. I wonder if Thomas was always a heavy drinker or if he only took to drink after the death of his wife.

Later one of John’s sons, who was named Thomas after his grandfather, also died young – only reaching the age of 7.

John William Henderson married Christina Caven in November 1890. They had 9 children; 4 boys and five girls. Their 6th child, was my Nana Christina Caven Henderson. She told me her mother called her Teenie, and she claimed to be her mother’s favourite, although I suspect her sisters might also have claimed the same honour if I’d asked them.

In contrast to the early deaths of his parents, John was 64 years old when he died on 5th August 1931, and his children’s lives spanned 110 years from Mary’s birth in 1892 to Isa’s death in 2002. The longest lived of John & Christina’s children, auntie Isa, had outlived her brother James by 5 months when she died at the age of 91.

My Nana, Christina, married William Guy and they left Scotland in 1927 to come to Australia with their 2 sons. They travelled on the SS Jervis Bay arriving in January 1928.

Growing up, I knew all my dad’s aunties on the Henderson side of the family as Nana’s sisters all eventually came to Australia, but the only brother I had heard of was uncle James in Scotland, until I was in my 20s, when Hugh’s granddaughter came looking for my Nana to help her fill in the family tree. When I asked why we’d never heard about uncle Hugh and his family in Sydney, Nana explained that they didn’t keep in touch because “none of the sister’s got on with his wife”.

That’s when the stories of the other brothers came out too. William had been killed at the age of 22, during the first world war, at the battle of the Somme. Nana’s mother told her that little Thomas got pneumonia after being sent home from school – for misbehaving. It seems great-granma blamed the nuns for his death because they sent him home in the snow. She withdrew the younger children from the Catholic school and sent them to the Kirk from then on. Thomas’s death certificate however, shows his cause of death as Tabes Mesenterica, which is a form of tuberculosis of the intestinal lymph nodes, so perhaps not the fault of the nuns after all.

The story of Thomas was an even greater surprise to me because my grandfather had always been a loudly anti-catholic atheist, in spite of (or maybe because of) his very strict religious upbringing in an Irish Protestant household. The idea that he had married a girl from a Catholic family was quite unexpected. I didn’t think to check with Nana whether Pop actually knew about her religious background. Although perhaps he found Nana’s family sympathetic to his viewpoint because his mother-in-law had also abandoned her family religion just as he had, albeit for different reasons.

I recall as a child going to Station Pier in Port Melbourne to hold onto the ends of paper streamers thrown by my dad or my uncle while we all waved to auntie Mary as she left on a visit back to Scotland. We were allowed on the ship before it sailed and in auntie’s cabin I recall listening spellbound to the adults discussing how she was carrying the cremated remains of her late husband in her luggage. The adults probably thought we children were too young to understand the discussion, but, at the age of 9 or 10, I understood enough to realise that she probably wasn’t supposed to be carrying “ashes” in her suitcase and certainly hadn’t told anyone in authority about it.

Margaret brought her two daughters, Christine and Laurene to Australia after the breakdown of her marriage in Scotland where her son Alec remained with her husband William McPherson.

Sue never married and she died on Easter Sunday 1980, the same day as her nephew Jamie Guy. Their funerals were held on the same day and after attending Sue’s funeral Margaret’s daughter Laurene McPherson joined the rest of the family at the home of my uncle Jamie’s widow Ella. Accompanying Laurene was a cousin visiting from England who was introduced to the family as “Terrie”. We were to meet her again on future visits to Australia and learn that she was actually Charlotte (Lottie) Henderson the daughter of Great Uncle James. From Lottie we learned more about the relatives in Scotland and England and she was able to tell my dad what it was like growing up knowing their mutual Grandparents John and Christina Henderson. My dad had missed out on getting to know any of his grandparents because he and his brother were only toddlers when their parents brought them to Australia.

Isa married James (Jimmy) Anderson in Sydney in 1932 and they had a son, Gordon. After Jimmy’s death in 1965 she married Carl Black.

Auntie Sue and auntie Isa had both lived in Sydney when I was young so we didn’t see them often. Later in life, after the death of Isa’s second husband they both moved to Port Fairy on the Victorian coast to live near their sister Margaret who’s second spouse, Wally Hook had also died by that time. I can’t find any record of an official marriage between Margaret and Wally possibly because neither of them had divorced their first spouses.

Categories: Genealogy Pieces of History

Tagged as: FamilyHistory Fediblog Genealogy

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