My Maternal Great Grandmother and Grandfather

Now Dunedoo! Well almost. I have some amazing stuff to share with you before we hit Dunedoo, and it relates to some of the information I shared in part 2 of Kathleen and Joe’s story.

I just had my first visit to Sydney in two years, (thanks Covid). Alex had to catch up with her team at the head office in Parramatta, so I tagged along as the self-employed trophy husband. While Alex was working hard on her coastal management strategies, I got to stretch my research skills hard at the State Library and also at the NSW State Archives out at Kingswood.

They were pure fishing expeditions. Over the exiled time from Sydney, I had built up quite a list of potential resources to chase up. Both the Library and Archives websites have the ability, to save any items you might want to view into your own saved items list. Which is brilliant.

I had twenty-five items at the library and thirty-five at State Archives to investigate. Luckily, we were in Sydney for a couple of days, so I got to spend a day at each site. Talk about working hard to try and view all those items in one day.

The Mitchell/State Library was the first stop and provided these gems first cab off the rank. A detailed map of Gular the little village next to the old railway station where Kathleen and Joe were living before they married. Gular was the address given on their marriage registration.

There are no names on the map, so no way to pinpoint where they might have been. I’m assuming they didn’t buy and were renting a home somewhere in here. It is interesting to note here that when you look at the aerial view of the area today it looks as though hardly any of the plots of land were taken up.

Alex with her planning and development history shared that this was an example of a paper subdivision. Obviously, someone or a group of someone’s were hoping that the area was going to take off and presumably some money was to be made, but it looks like the potential for Gular never eventuated.

In my research, I have come across another of Kathleen’s sisters living in Gular, but at a later date than 1914, the year Kathleen and Joe married. But I do wonder if this might be the reason they were living in Gular, taking haven with a family member while Kathleen’s pregnancy grew and while waiting for the marriage to be arranged.

Talk about luck, I just found the article about Kathleen’s sister. It was her eldest sister, Margaret Anne Francis Anastasia Ashton. She is the sister that made the trek across Australia to Onslow, North Western Australia with her husband Timothy Byers. (Shared in the previous post)

After Herbert’s death by the lightning strike, Margaret and the children make it back to Green Hills and she marries George Cohen in 1910 becoming Mrs Cohen as mentioned above. And there is her previous married name, Byers, of course, her daughter’s name and not just Gulargambone but more specifically, Gular, the place of residence marked on Kathleen and Joe’s marriage registration. So I think I might be right about why Kathleen and Joe were in Gular.

The next two finds from the library come from a couple of books in their collection on Gulargambone. The first was from The Gulargambone Historical Society, which documented the old houses and shops in the area, and the second, was from the Gulargambone Central School documenting their centenary celebrations in 1981.

Both are amazing resources, jam-packed with information on the area, but specifically for us, both had photos of the IXL store where Joe worked. This is, you will remember from the article I shared in Part One, the store where the horse returned to with an unconscious Joe slumped over the sulky after being knocked out by the flying pieces of the broken harness.

This first photo shows what the store looked like when the original owner, Mr. A. F. Garling had it.

The next is when the third owner, Mr. Bolger, was in residence, and you can see it has had some major renovations done. There is no way to know when they were completed, so I don’t know if Joe and Kathleen ever saw it like this, but how wonderful to actually see both versions of the store. I’m sure the A F Garling version is the one they would have known best.

The IXL store, as we discovered in Part One of these posts, burned down in 1928 with only the one mention in the press of the time. You might remember I shared in the previous post on this issue that I spent hours searching for an image of the store with no luck, so you can imagine how excited I was when I stumbled across these on my fishing expedition.

Just as a reminder, here is the site as it was back in 2008, unfortunately, the most up-to-date photo Google Maps has.

The next piece of information that I came across that relates to Part Two, was discovering exactly where the Ashton compound was situated in Green Hills.

You will remember that we placed it just to the south of Cassilis somewhere in the vicinity of Turill and Uraby. I went back to the NSW Land Registry site and I began to search to see if I could find that area on the Parish maps of Bligh. I couldn’t. It is incredibly hard to match up these maps especially when there is no main town listed on the map to use as an anchor point.

It was probably the frustration of not matching anything from those Google maps in Part One to these Land Registry maps but I had the thought of checking the next Parish map adjacent to Bligh. And low and behold they matched. The property doesn’t sit in the parish of Bligh but in the County of Bligh and the parish of Bobadeen. Check out those highlighted parts below.

I couldn’t believe it, there was George’s name. I finally found it. The Ashton compound. It looks like it was a fairly decent holding, 539 acres according to what is written on the map. It sat on lands that are part of the Wiradjuri Nation. https://majorprojects.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRestService/mp/01/getContent?AttachRef=MP08_0184-MOD-4%2120190826T022825.781%20GMT

I was trying to work out how long the family was in possession of the land, but it was proving a little difficult to find a purchase date. I know, potentially we are talking records of sale that are over a hundred years old but I have found some previously for other branches of the family, so I’m not giving up.

We know that the property was sold after Kathleen’s father, George Bernard Ashton, passed away, and his probate was approved. George died in late 1922, and the first sale notices came out in early 1924.

So obviously, from reading that sale notice, the size of the estate increased over the years from the 539 acres noted on the Land Registry map to 1179 acres. What is fantastic in this notice is to see the name of the estate, Auburn Hills. I had seen that name before on an electoral roll listing for the family, but at the time I thought it must have been another name for Green Hills.

What is not so fantastic, is the misogyny on display again. My 2x Great Grandmother is not even mentioned by name or at the very least by her husband’s honorific but rather she is reduced to the title of “…Administratrix…” I would love to know the reasoning behind this. Anyhow here is a copy of the electoral roll below.

Here is my 2x Great-Grandmother with her full married name noted, Catherine Elizabeth Ashton, her daughter, Ethel, husband, George, and sons George and John. All residing at Auburn Hills.

I thought knowing the name of the estate might help with tracking down the purchase date but still no hits on that. Then by chance, at the same time I was checking through the Ashton branch in Ancestry, I came across this buried bit of information on a death certificate for Kathleen’s uncle, John Ashton Jr.

Auburn Hills is marked as his place of birth, so potentially this means the property has been in the family for a while. John passes away in 1919 from Influenza, and when you look at that timing, I can’t help but wonder if he was a victim of the emerging worldwide pandemic at that time.

I found another piece of information on John from Ancestry, his year of birth. Check out below when he was born.

1861, that is pretty compelling to me. I know we can’t be entirely sure, it might be referring to another earlier property, or it could be information from faulty memories, but it links with the little we know already. So it could well be that the family had possession of the land from as early as 1861 when John, was born.

There is another wonderful potential link with the property, Kathleen’s father George. Apart from possessing the land, the family lore is George, either owned or ran the Green Hills pub on the Ashton estate. My Nan, Kathleen, George’s granddaughter, had this fantastic photo of him in her collection.

That is George Bernard Ashton, the older bloke with the white beard and hat, second from the right standing on the balcony of the Green Hills pub. I think possibly the way he is standing lent credence to this belief he owned it. I haven’t been able to find any link between George and the pub apart from him being there, but when I scanned this photo in I was able to make out the Licensee’s name above the door. D Fleming.

This information about Mr. Fleming enables us to date this photo of the Green Hills Hotel with some confidence between the end of 1914 when Mr. Fleming takes over the license and 1922 when George Ashton passes away.

I found some really interesting information on Mr David Fleming and his wife Mrs Christian MacDonald Fleming. Being such a small close-knit community I’m sure that Kathleen would have known of them before she left.

How lucky to have access to all of this information, tracking it down just from that name above the door of the pub in that old photo. I know it is only a quick snapshot but it just felt like the right thing to do to mention them here. I wonder if Kathleen and Joe ever caught up with Mrs. Fleming later in life? What a woman for her time.

Now back to George for a moment. I just worked out the link between him and the hotel. It is, that Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald who transferred the Green Hills Hotel license to Mr David Fleming, is in actual fact George’s nephew and therefore, Kathleen’s cousin. His mother, Mary Maria Fitzgerald, nee Ashton is George’s older sister.

Cousin, Patricia had a fantastic photo of Gerald as well as his mum in her family tree.

I went searching for another photo of the Green Hills Hotel but had no luck, then when I went searching on Google Maps, look what I found sitting on the edge of the estate boundary with Ulan Road.

Wow, I wonder if this is what is left of the original Hotel. I mean, this building has a very distinct similarity to the picture of the hotel in Figure 9 above. This is the land at the edge of Mr Horn’s properties and George’s indicated on the map in Figure 4 with Ulan Road passing it.

I’m also wondering if details might have been lost in translation over time, and this is how we lost the fact that George owned the land that the hotel sat on and that it was his nephew who actually ran it and not George.

The map below shows the Ashton estate and Green Hills sites today. Curryall Creek is clearly marked and you can see that it intersects with Ulan Road exactly the same as the Land Registry map back in Figure 3. It looks like Green Hills just disappeared. I can’t wait to visit the area and see what might still be standing.

I know that was a bit of a rabbit hole we went down but this is all part of Kathleen’s back story and I know we are so close to the correct information.

Well, we have reached it, people, Dunedoo.

I haven’t uncovered any information confirming when Kathleen, Joe, and baby Joseph moved to Dunedoo, but this article below certainly plants them there 18 months after Joseph’s birth. It was one of the first articles I ran across with their name mentioned in it and the town of Dunedoo.

This is the local Catholic Church in Dunedoo and there is Kathleen mentioned, helping out with the arrangements of the children’s evening. It is an assumption I know, but looking at the date of this article, it looks like Kathleen and Joe might have stayed in Mudgee for 12–18 months and then made their move to Dunedoo.

I can’t find a picture of the church Kathleen and Joe would recognise but this is the site today, it sits on Lot 6, Section 13, the corner of Merrygoen and Tucklan Streets.

I’m fairly sure this building is not the one described in this wonderful article below about the opening of the new church in Dunedoo.

I hope a photo of this church turns up at some time, I would love to see where Kathleen and Joe worshipped in Dunedoo.

The next article I came across doesn’t give the first initials of his name, but I’m pretty sure that it is referring to Joe.

I have searched, and I can’t find another family of Raymonds living in Dunedoo at the time, so I’m claiming this is our Kathleen and Joe. I spoke to my Uncle Peter, Kathleen, and Joseph’s grandson, and he said that he remembered his mum talking about his Grandparent’s house at Dunedoo.

I then had some more luck on the NSW Land Registry site. Check out the name on the block of land here on the corner of Tallawang and Tucklan Streets. The first map is from 1910 and the second is from 1921.

Well, this is great, the initials fit with Joseph’s full name, Joseph Henry Raymond. The only fly in the ointment for my reasoning here that it is Joe and Kathleen’s property, is that the first map is dated from 1910. We know so far that Joseph is still in Sydney in 1910 when his mother dies. Perhaps Joe saw the For Sale flyer depicted in Figure 11a above and acted to secure some land near the woman he intended to marry. Remember we still don’t know when he and Kathleen meet. Maybe they already knew each other before 1910.

It might be that Joseph moved straight out to the area after his mother’s death and buys the land before moving to the township. I mean that fits with the timeline we know. But this raises the question of, where did he get the money from?

This wasn’t the first I had seen of any information on Joe and Kathleen having a house in Dunedoo. The original article I came across was when they were advertising the sale of all their possessions in 1920 which I presumed was in preparation for a move.

This sounds like something has happened and Kathleen, Joe and the baby have had to leave Dunedoo quickly for some reason. I haven’t been able to find any family dramas that correlate with this timing so none the wiser on why they leave Dunedoo at this stage.

The fact that it is a Mr Harry Parson that is instructing on the auction of all of their possessions and not Joe or Kathleen, that definitely adds to the mystery.

I dug about on Trove and found out that Harry Parsons was a local business owner and I’m assuming also a friend of Kathleen and Joe’s, in order to be trusted with the auction.

Now that I knew which corner Kathleen and Joseph built on in Dunedoo, I turned to Google Maps. The latest run past of the area by the Google camera is again, from 2008, so the picture quality isn’t that good, but the house definitely looks like it could be from their era.

Another piece of information I have had trouble confirming is where the actual site of the Loneragans store was in Dunedoo where Joe was working. There are only a smattering of advertisements for the store on Trove but again, like so many ads of the time, there is no location or street address mentioned.

There is also no mention of the store in Trove, that I can find before 1910. An article in July describes a public meeting to consider Longeragans erecting a flour mill in the town. After that, there are just a handful of ads over the next few years. A selection of which follows below.

There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to their timing, they don’t occur at regular intervals, and no photo of the store has turned up as yet. Also, there is no article describing the opening of the actual store. I did find one article that at least confirms the existence of the store outside of advertising, it comes from James Loneragan’s death notice in 1914.

I also had this article below in my research for a while that again at the very least confirms the existence of the Dunedoo store and the link with Joe. It’s a bit of a time jump as it was printed in 1954.

This is the only mention of Joe and the fact that he was manager of the Dunedoo Loneragan’s. This could be the old faulty memories at work again though.

Just in case you can’t quite follow who is who, Mr J Raymond in the first line above, is baby Joseph born in Mudgee, and his wife, Dorothy. And of course, Mr. and Mrs Joseph Raymond of Leichhardt are Kathleen and Joseph and they were visiting Kathleen’s brother and sister-in-law, John (Jack) Ashton and Mary Ashton, nee Farley. Again with the luck, here they are pictured below thanks to Patricia. (Cousin)

Below is the only photo I have of Joseph and Dorothy together. It was taken at my mum and dad’s wedding in Sydney in 1964.

The following is a small collection of what I think are mentions of Kathleen and Joe and their life in Dunedoo.

That is 2nd place for Kathleen in Best Loaf of Home-made Bread. Both my mum and my Aunty Jan have shared that their Grandmother was an amazing cook, especially with her baking. Kathleen used to get the girls to help her in the kitchen whenever they visited and everyone always wore an apron whilst working in the kitchen.

The following two articles refer to the death of Mrs. Herbert Rusten. Kathleen and Joe were obviously there to support their friends while they were going through this very hard time.

Mrs Herbert Rusten was Beatrice Rusten, nee Cluff. She was only 25 years of age when she passed away and left Herb with four sons aged 6 years to 3 months old to raise.

Here is Joe donating to the school prize fund.

And here, in the article below, is Kathleen, Mrs. Raymond working with Mrs. Garling again (this will make sense in a minute) to organise a very successful fundraising bazaar.

That is the extent of mentions of daily life for Kathleen and Joe in Dunedoo that I can find so far.

I wanted to get a sense of what Dunedoo looked like when Kathleen and Joe were living there, again to put their lives into some context. I had some great luck discovering some wonderful old photos of the town on the Macquarie Regional Library website.

I spoke to one of the Librarians, Melissa, who also happens to be a member of the Historical Society board and she gave me permission to share them here. They are a wonderful glimpse into Kathleen and Joe’s world.

The first photo I’m sharing is very interesting and at first, I thought it was a link back to Kathleen and Joe’s time in Gulargambone.

Do you recognise the name? I thought this was Mr A F Garling who Joseph worked for in the IXL store but it was actually his brother Alfred Ernest Garling. I can confirm it was his brother from the details shared in the article back in Figure 12 about Kathleen helping on the Catholic Church school children’s night. If you look down at the end of the article it mentions a list of other women who helped out with organising the function, Mrs. A E Garling, the same Mrs. Garling in the article above in Figure 37.

The following three photos are all street scapes of Bolaro Street Dunedoo. This was the equivalent of Dunedoo’s, main or high street.

The shop fronts above have had a little bit of work done to them over the years but you can clearly see that they still match up with the older photos. And I love it when you find gems of information like in Figure 42c, where it states that the Pharmacy was situated next to the firm of Baker and Campbell. You can see that there is no name visible in the photo above but this piece of information confirms for us that it was Mr Shanahan’s store pictured. Love that, especially when it took about an hour of digging to find that information.

Baker and Campbell whose name is clearly visible in the photo, were land and stock agents. They actually brokered the sale of the old established Dunedoo grocery store of F.J. Turner’s to T.H. Marks and Co in 1914. Remember Joe worked for T.H. Marks in Mudgee.

When I discovered this sale I started to wonder if this might be a lost-in-translation moment again and that it may be that Joe was actually managing at T. H. Marks and Co and not Loneragans in Dunedoo. I haven’t found any details to confirm this hypothesis as yet.

The next photo shows one of the communities meeting halls of the day, the Lyceum Hall.

The three articles below are just a few examples of functions held at the hall at the time.

I have taken a virtual stroll up and down Merrygoen Street on Google Maps but I can’t find a building that matches the Lyceum Hall that is still standing. I did however stumble upon the Honor Roll as part of the memorial in the Lions Park on Bolaro Street. You’ll note the centerpiece of the memorial below is the Honor Roll being unveiled in the photo above.

That, I’m sorry to say is it for Dunedoo for the moment.

As I have stated already, I don’t know what the catalyst was that made Kathleen and Joe pick up and move to Sydney. I thought maybe it was another family emergency so I started looking to see what might be happening in the family at the time. I found a few things that I will share here but none unfortunately fit the timeline exactly or support the theory of having to move quickly.

We do know that Kathleen, Joe, and Joe Jnr are definitely in Sydney in the first week of January, as that is where Hector, their second son’s birth is registered. The auction notice for their possessions (Figures 15 &15a) is only 5 months earlier in the first week of August 1920 so this information definitely fits with the timeline of their leaving Dunedoo.

The first of the family emergencies I uncovered relates to Kathleen’s older sister Ethel.

This must have been so worrying for the family and for Ethel, as she has fallen victim to the worldwide pandemic that was sweeping the world at the time, the Spanish Flu. Which, as we have just discussed, had already claimed her Uncle John as a victim.

The pneumonic influenza virus didn’t originate in Spain, it was called this as the outbreak was originally reported extensively from Spain. The first cases appeared in Australia in Melbourne around the 9th of January 1919. There was some uncertainty as to whether it was the virus or just a continuation of the seasonal flu cases which lead to a delay in its reporting and allowed the virus to spread to New South Wales and South Australia. https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/influenza-pandemic

New South Wales was the first state to officially proclaim an outbreak in the last week of January 1919. Three months later Ethel is infected and battling for her life. Ethel was 29 years of age at the time which was the demographic that had the highest mortality rate. https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/influenza-pandemic

This phenomenal photo below was generously shared on another Ancestry family tree and it shows Ethel at a much younger age than any of the ones I have in my collection. Ethel might even be in her 20s here. The one on the left is the original and the one on the right has gone through the new colourisation and sharpening software that is available now.

I’m mentioning this here as it is an example of the new Generative AI tools that have hit us in 2023. If you are reading this in 140 years time you’ll know if it was the downfall of the human race or not. Or maybe it might be Trump’s reelection next year that might be that catalyst. Anyhow enough of that, back to Aunty Ethel.

The sister who Ethel was visiting in Sydney when she became infected with the virus was her elder sister, Hanorah Kebblewhite, nee Ashton. Another phenomenal photo to show you is below. This is Hanorah dressed as maid of honor, for her sister Catherine, at her wedding to William Cleary in 1906.

I just recently had the great pleasure of connecting with Marcia, the cousin who shared this photo of Hanorah, when I viewed a comment that she made on a photograph I had shared on Ancestry. The photo was of Hanorah and Kathleen’s mother, Catherine Elizabeth Ashton nee Boyce.

We have had some great email chats over the last couple of weeks and Marcia was able to share some information on Hanorah and her family life. Hanorah, like her elder sister, Catherine, chose an obviously very troubled man as a husband. I shared the little I knew about Catherine’s marriage to William Clearly and how badly that ended in the previous post. Unfortunately, it seems like it was a very similar situation for Hanorah.

Hanorah and Alfred were married in 1909 in Kingsgrove in Sydney and Marcia shared that like her sister Kathleen, she too was pregnant at the time of the wedding.

Over the next eight years, they had four children all of their births are registered in Coonamble. They must have moved there not too long after the wedding as Alma the baby Hanorah was pregnant with at the wedding, was born that same year, 1909. This is the first mention I can find of them officially in the area, dated two years later.

We next pick them up on the 1st of August 1917 when Alfred was demoted from 1st class constable to ordinary constable. Cousin Marcia shared that in that same year, just after Hanorah gave birth to her mother in March, Alfred was caught in a compromising position with another woman in the Police Station of all places.

Presumably, circumstances didn’t improve, as 11 months later, Alfred resigns from the Police on the 16th of July. The next day, he is advertising the sale of all their possessions, probably in preparation for the move to Sydney.

Hanorah and Alfred must have stayed together for the next couple of years because Hanorah is pregnant again with their fifth child in 1921. In October 1921, the next tragedy hits the family when Hanorah passes away in childbirth and presumably the baby as well. I can find no record of the baby’s birth or death.

I found this one notice for Hanorah’s funeral. I know it mentions no names as to who attended the ceremony but I’m sure that Kathleen and Joe would have been there.

The house below is the address in Enmore noted on Hanorah’s death certificate, how amazing that it is still standing.

I’m assuming again, that the children must have remained here with Alfred for a couple of years or at least in the Sydney area. I’m making this assumption because Marcia shared with me that in 1923 just 12-18 months after their mother’s death, Alfred places the three youngest, Alfred John Jnr, Myra and Eli, (pictured below) in the Catholic orphanage in Sydney.

Thanks to another Ancestry Tree I think I found the reason that Alfred places his children in the orphanage.

Marcia also shared that by 1928, five years later, the children were all still there in the orphanage, apparently just around the corner from where their father was living but Alfred never went near them again.

I did a bit of digging and I think this is the home they went into. St Anthony’s Home for Destitute Children.

This is what is left of this grand old building pictured above. The only things really recognisable are the bay window and what is left of the brick retaining wall.

The home was operated under the auspices of the St Vincent De Paul Society and was the closest Catholic orphanage to Marian Street if this was where Alfred stayed with his new bride. You can see below just how close they were.

Alfred became a Detective for the Railways after leaving the police but disappears off the face of the earth in 1928. Obviously, things didn’t go so well with his 2nd wife, this note appears in the Police Gazette in May 1928.

And this note below, from his Railway file is the last official trace of Alfred.

The big question for me here is, did the family step in and help? Kathleen and Joseph are not far away at all. As I shared earlier, the first mention of them in Sydney is when Hector is born and his birth is registered in Newtown.

He was born on the 7th of January 1921. This is the Sands Directory listing for Joe and presumably Kathleen as well, in 1922.

Now 9 Regent Street Newtown doesn’t exist today but I have worked it out, that it is either, 9 Regent Street Chippendale on the eastern side of Newtown, which is now part of the IGA supermarket site pictured below.

Or 9 Regent Street Petersham, on the western side of Newtown which is now part of the Petersham RSL club site.

The Petersham address is only 900 meters from the orphanage and the Redfern one is about 5kms away, a 20min tram or bus ride.

I so hope that Kathleen and Joe were involved in the children’s lives. I unfortunately can find no link in Trove in any articles between them and the orphanage but what I do know is that it obviously left a lasting impression on Kathleen. She eventually goes on to start up her own home in Leichhardt for unwed mothers and orphaned children but that is at a much later date than here in the early 20s.

As we have reached 63 Figures and then some, in this post, and it is already coming in at a 25-minute read, (I just checked) I think we will take a break here.

Just to remind you, we are in the middle of discussing what other family dramas might be happening in Kathleen and Joe’s lives and their families in the early 1920s, that might have been the catalyst for their move to Sydney from Dunedoo. We haven’t found it yet but hopefully, in Part 4 of their story it will appear.