James Thompson & Margaret Duckworth

I have a letter found in my Grandfather’s desk, which illustrates the lengths to which we need to go to work out what our ancestors were doing. I sometimes think they intended to hide things from us, but I guess they just never imagined that we would be trawling through their letters and their lives 100 years or more after they had died, or what kinds of things we’d be able to find out. They often wrote their letters the way we write social media posts, no need for long explanations – If You Know, You Know!

The letter is addressed from Blackwell near Carlisle, but undated. From the mention of a family death I was able to work out it was written in late 1913. I believe the “Dear Sister & Brother” it is addressed to were Grandpa’s parents, Sarah Jane and her husband Arthur Butler, and the signoff at the end, “from your loving Sister & brother SM & J Duckworth” refers to Joshua and his wife Sarah Mary Routledge. I wish I had a copy of the “photo of Mother” they received from Australia. It would be nice to see what Margaret Duckworth looked like. The nearest thing I have is this photo of her daughter Sarah Jane.

When I started tracing this part of my Grandpa’s family, I began with quite a bit of information, which my mother had gathered, about my Great Great Grandmother Margaret Duckworth. She was baptised in November 1844 in Carlisle, Cumberland. Between 1851 and 1872 Census and Baptism records show her living with her parents and raising 3 illegitimate children.

Then in 1880 she left Carlisle and travelled to Australia with James Thompson and her 2 daughters, leaving her 17 year old son Joshua with her parents. The family travelled under the name Thompson, but I can find no record of an official marriage between James & Margaret.

The birth certificate of my Great Grandmother Sarah Jane, born in 1882 in Melbourne, is very informative in spite of the convenient fiction of her parents’ marriage date being Feb 1863 (before Joshua’s birth). It lists the names of Margaret’s previous three children, and also lists another child recorded starkly as “Grace – dead”. Investigation of baby Grace revealed that in 1877 Margaret had married a Robert Dixon, 15-20 years older than her, who died before their baby was born, and then poor little Grace succumbed to convulsions at just 5 months of age.

I found a couple of potential death records for Margaret Thompson in Melbourne but couldn’t definitely confirm them as Margaret Duckworth, and without any idea of a time frame for the death of James it was hard to narrow down the many James Thompsons in the records. So James remained a brick wall that I couldn’t breakdown until I decided to investigate what I thought was mistaken information on the death record of daughter Jemima in 1948. Jemima’s father’s name was given as William Thompson and there was no first name for her mother, just the surname Coyle. The information would have been supplied by Jemima’s surviving children from her 2nd marriage, who may have been too young to have known James & Margaret. So it seemed they only knew that their grandparents’ surname was Thompson and used the first name of their own father, William Staveley instead of James; but where did the surname Coyle come from?

Surely after her brief tragic marriage to Robert Dixon Margaret would not have married again, but a search of the Register of Births Deaths & Marriages soon found the death certificate of Margaret Coyle in 1917, and a death notice from TROVE with lists of children and grandchildren confirmed it was her. Margaret’s details would probably have been supplied by her daughters Jemima (Staveley) and Sarah (Butler) who were able to piece together what they knew to give an “almost” accurate picture. They knew about the Dixon marriage, but not Robert’s first name or about baby Grace, so they attributed their brother Joshua in England and their deceased sister Elizabeth to the Dixon marriage and added Jemima as well as Sarah Jane and their younger brother John James as issue of the “second marriage” to James Thompson. They also listed Margaret’s age when she married James Coyle as 50.

So now I was able to find the Coyle marriage record showing that Margaret had been widowed in 1889, which led me to James Thompson’s Death record giving the names of his parents, his fathers occupation as a stationmaster and, in that column on Australian death certificates which asks how long the deceased had lived in the “colonies”, the fact that he had spent 8 years in New Zealand.

The Devil is in the Detail is usually taken as a caution to read the fine print!
But apart from the ‘devilish’ details that can trip you up if you miss them, the fine print can also contain some sparkling gems of information, which can be easily overlooked, but might lead to new discoveries.

A small note in the margin of a Census form about the person you are investigating having lost his sight and an arm, in an accident in New Zealand, might seem to rule him out as the James who is your missing great-great-Grandfather. No one in the family ever mentioned that he was disabled, and would a blind man with only one arm pack-up and leave the security of home in England to come to Australia with a women whom he seemed to barely know and her 2 youngest children?

Now I could match my James to the James Thompson on the Cumberland Census records, because the 1871 Census had that little note in the margin. With all these records and the amazing newspaper articles from Otago NZ detailing the mining explosion that had caused James to experience his own version of tragedy and loss, I had finally broken down the brick wall, and was able to produce the timeline below that suggested a triumph of love over loss.

My Assessment of the facts

Following the story, in NZ newspapers, of the shocking mining accident that left James incapacitated, I noticed that the dates of his departure for NZ and his return to England seem to coincide with the 9 year gap between the birth of Margaret’s first child (Joshua born at the beginning of 1863, with no father named) and then the birth of the 2 younger daughters who she and James bought to Australia with them. Like their older brother, the girls were also registered and baptised with Margaret’s surname but they later took James’s name. Was this just because they were making a new start as a family on the other side of the world or because he was in fact their father?

Why had they not married? Was James more interested in exciting adventure when he was young? Later perhaps he didn’t want to burden Margaret with his disability?

The birth certificate of Sarah Jane in Australia had already yielded the story of baby Grace, and the last record I can find of James’s parents is the 1871 census. Was it her sad experience combined with the loss of his parents that prompted the two of them to finally embark, on a journey into an unknown future in Australia? That seemed to me like enough tragedy to make them want to run away to the other side of the world.

While there are possibly too many assumptions in my analysis and I may be proved wrong about James being the father of all or even some of Margaret’s older children, I will continue to hunt for clues as to who these two strong-willed people were.

The Timeline

About 1834 James was born in Hayton near Brampton in Cumberland, England.
In 1841 (aged 7) he was living in his mothers birth place, the village of Faugh, about 3 miles from Hayton, with is mother Sarah and 3 brothers. (Their father William, may have been living in railway housing.)
In 1851 both of his parents and 2 of his brothers, as well as his younger sister Dinah were living in Bullgill, a mining and fishing village near Crosby, 50 miles from Brampton, where his father was a station clerk for the railways. James (aged 17) was working as a farm labourer for Thomas Dalzell at nearby Allerby Hall.
Margaret Duckworth (aged 6) was living with her parents, 3 brothers and 1 year old sister in Blackwell near Carlisle.
In 1861 James (aged 27) was back in Brampton, boarding with and working for William Mounsey, a Publican and Horse Breaker (possibly at the Nags Head Inn). James was also described as a Horse Breaker on the Census.
Margaret (aged 17) was still living at home, (about 15 miles from Brampton) with her family, including 2 more brothers, and was working in a factory (probably the Calico Printing works with her father and 2 of her brothers).
[I have no evidence to support the idea that James and Margaret knew each other at this stage.]

In September 1862 James went to New Zealand where he worked as a gold miner in the Otago goldfields, becoming a shareholder in several mining companies.
In March 1863 Margaret gave birth to a son and the following month she baptised him as Joshua Duckworth. No father’s name was listed on his baptism or birth certificate.
In 1869 James was injured in an explosion which blinded him and caused the amputation of part of his left arm.
In January 1870 he sold his interests in the mining companies and returned to England.
In April 1871 Margaret was still living at home with her parents and 8 year old Joshua, but she now also had a 1 month old daughter, Elizabeth. No father’s name is listed on birth or baptism records.
James was living with his brother William, who was recently widowed and bringing up 4 children. A margin note on the census mentions James’s injuries from the accident in NZ. James and William’s mother Sarah was housekeeping for her 2 ‘injured’ sons, while their father William Snr was staying with daughter Dinah and her family.
In 1873 Margaret gave birth to another daughter, named after her mother, Jemima Sewell Duckworth. This time the baptism record lists the child’s father as JAMES Duckworth, but there is still no father’s name on the birth registration.
[The next eight years passed without any real evidence that James and Margaret even knew each other, let alone may have 2 or 3 children together.]

In July 1877 Margaret married Robert Dixon, a widowed blacksmith more than 20 years older than her. (On the marriage certificate Margaret raised her age from 33 to 36 and Robert dropped his from about 56 to 50)
In December 1878 after only 18 months, Robert died, possibly without even knowing that Margaret was pregnant with their daughter Grace, who was born in August 1879.
In January 1880 5 month old Grace died of convulsions.
[Within a year our two apparent strangers had decided to start a new life together. Their only link seeming to be a shared experience of tragedy and a strange coincidence of time and place.]

In November 1880 James, Margaret, Elizabeth and Jemima boarded the ship “Chimborazo” and travelled to Australia, under the name Thompson.
In the 1881 Census Joshua Duckworth, now 17 remains with his grandparents and cousin Adam in the house in Blackwell in which he had grown up.

In Australia James and Margaret had at least 2 more children, Sarah Jane (my Great Grandmother) in 1882, and John James in 1885. On John James’s birth certificate, as well as baby Grace, it lists a 2nd deceased child, William (a name shared with James’s father and brother) but I can find no record of his birth in either England or Australia.

In December 1889 James died at the age of 55, from chronic alcoholism; the only evidence that he suffered psychologically from the effects of his disastrous accident.
In 1894 Margaret’s daughter Elizabeth died at the young age of 23, 5 years after losing her own baby Emily Rose Groat.
In September 1897 53 year old Margaret, ever the optimist, married James Coyle, a ship’s fireman 11 years younger than herself.
In 1898 James Coyle died in Sydney.
Not surprisingly, Margaret never married again.

She died in 1917 at the age of 73

Survived by 4 of her 7 children
Joshua Duckworth (1863-1925)
Jemima Duckworth-Thompson (1872-1948)
Sarah Jane Thompson (1882-1930)
John James Thompson (1885-1922)

Categories: Pieces of History

Tagged as: Australia FamilyHistory Geneadons Genealogy

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