Exploring the Victorian Connections

We were extremely lucky in 2023 to have had a number of family history tours all thanks to Xander joining the Australian Army and us getting the chance to visit him at the various locations he was stationed.

Of course, our main priority was to catch up with Xander and support him through this major life event he was embarking on but the travel provided us with the opportunity to also visit, purely by chance, some significant family history sites. Wagga Wagga was a boon if you have read any of my posts on Kooringal.

And of course when I say “us” I’m referring to my beautiful partner in crime, Alexandra.

Another opportunity Xander provided to us was when he was transferred to Puckapunyal after completing his basic training at Kapooka. Puckapunyal sits just on the outskirts of Seymour in Northern Victoria. And let me tell you, it is a bloody long way from Forster, especially when you are towing an old pop up van. This was the furthest Xander had ever been from us and we were missing him lots so we planned a final trip for 2023.

I left home on the 30th October and headed to Gundagai, my overnight stop to break up the eleven hour journey.

Gundagai wasn’t a random choice, it is only 30mins drive away from Tumut where my cousin Greg was living, so this provided me with a great opportunity to catch up with him. (Oh yeah, don’t forget you get so much more in these posts than just what the title alludes to.)

We are cousins but have always said that we felt more like brothers.

Unfortunately Alex couldn’t join me for this first part of the trip, she had a work conference on in Newcastle that week. We made a plan for Alex to leave her car with our good friends Cath and Pete at Medowie and Alex would fly from Newcastle to Melbourne when she had finished the conference.

So when I was catching up with Greg on the night of the 30th, Alex had arrived at Cath & Pete’s place.

Just like Greg and I adopting each other as brothers, we adopted Cath and Pete into our family years ago. They protested but we didn’t hear a thing.

A quick pack up and brekkie the next morning with a spectacular view and I was on my way again.

My first stop, an hours drive south at Tarcutta. An absolute family history hot spot for me. If you have read any of my recent posts, you will be aware that the Macveans were all over this part of the Riverina a hundred years ago but now there is hardly a whisper of us to be found anywhere.

This was my second visit to Tarcutta in two months. The Memorial Hall is a bit of special place for me now as it is one of those places that a trace of the Macveans can still be found.

This is William Hill Macvean, my Great Grand Uncle. He survived the war and settled here in Tarcutta with his English bride and newborn baby daughter. Three of his brothers, his sister and brother-in-law, a cousin and an uncle all lived within an 80km radius of Tarcutta at the time. As I said, a hot spot.

After elevenses, (a bacon and egg roll and a coffee) at the Tarcutta Truck stop I headed 40mins down the road to Holbrook Cemetery.

This is the final resting place of a number of my family members but the most incredible find amongst them being, my 3x Great-Grandmother, Christina Strachan, Brookman née Russell.

Christina is buried a couple of rows in front of her daughter Jean Smith Ross, née Strachan. Jean is my 2x Great Grand Aunt and half sister to my 2x Great-Grandmother, Agnes Cox, née Brookman.

Jean is buried with her husband James Ross and their marriage is the link between our two families.

Jean and James are buried a row over from their son Alexander James Gordon Ross.

Alexander, or Gordon as he was known in the family, was a half cousin to my great grandfather, Alexander Ballantyne Smith Macvean. He and my great grandmother, Agnes Brookman Macvean nee Cox, owned “Rooksdale” only a couple of miles down the road from “Hillside” where Gordon lived.

We have one photo of Gordon as a child, he is part of the family group that his mother and father are sitting for above.

I don’t have a photo of Gordon as an adult but I have a photograph of his signature.

Gordon’s signature appears here in the Wedding Autograph book from my parent’s wedding. They married on the 26th of September 1964. Gordon was 77 years of age at the time and drove all the way from Holbrook to Earlwood to attend the wedding. This would have been a trek and a half in those days with no freeway.

I have a personal link to Gordon as well. My parents took me down to Holbrook to visit him when I was about 4 years of age.

That is me on the right. I am not sure exactly where this photo was taken, it might be when we stopped at Goulburn or Gundagai on the way through, but my parents always stated that this was on our trip down to Holbrook to visit family. My memories are vague on the people I met unfortunately. I remember the trip and visiting the homestead and meeting the people in the house but I don’t have a memory of Gordon.

My Mum informed me that we visited Gordon at Jannali Homestead, and not at Hillside. I had the great fortune recently to be contacted by Gordon’s great-grandson, James Ross when he discovered this blog online. James confirmed that Jannali was actually the home of Gordon’s eldest daughter Margaret. She and her second husband, Clem King, who she married in 1950, lived there together.

I don’t have a photo of the homestead but I do have vivid memories of it. I remember it had a huge climbing vine around the entrance into the house and a lounge room with huge picture windows that looked over the paddocks. I also remember there were two big wing backed chairs facing the view. My memories are so vivid but I am also aware that I was at most 4 or 5 years old. Jannali sits about 10kms north of Holbrook (Germanton).

I also discovered my Grandaunts grave site at Holbrook. Grace Macvean née Stewart married to my Grandfather’s brother, Alexander Douglas Macvean. Grace was from a very old Germanton family, the Stewart’s. She is buried with one of her sisters and alongside one of her, brothers, Wallace and their parents, James and Annie.

My next stop after Holbrook was the city of Albury, 45mins south. My reason for making this stop, to check out the birth place of my 2x Great Grandmother, Jessie Davina Macvean, nee Ballantyne.

I wrote a post on Jessie back in February of 2023 and in that I shared that she was born at the United Presbyterian Manse on Smollett Street right next door to the Presbyterian church of St David’s, where her father was minister. I also shared this great description below, from Albury Historical Society giving some landmarks as to exactly where the site of the manse was.

Image 22:
The first Presbyterian Church in Albury was built in Smollett Street where St Patrick’s Church
Hall now stands. The manse was near to the Morton Bay fig tree which is still in the grounds of St Patrick’s School. https://alburyhistory.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Then-Now-Gallery-Albury.pdf

That is St Patrick’s Hall on the left above and there is the Morton Bay Fig on the right. Here is the site as Jessie and her parents, Margaret and David Ballantyne would have known it. There on the right is the younger version of the Morton Bay Fig.

To stand in the same spot as the original photographer was pretty special, especially knowing that I was looking at the very spot that Jessie was born and the place where her parents lived and worked.

Three hours drive south west down the Hume, I arrived at Seymour Holiday Park not far from where Xander was stationed at Puckapunyal.

And the main reason for the trip down from Forster, Xander. He turned up that night at the caravan park after he finished work.

We had a fantastic hamburger dinner at Burger Me on the highway at Seymour, the food was great and the catch up was even better.

The next morning I set out for Melbourne city to meet for the very first time in real life, my cousin Anne Macvean. To be precise, I think Anne and I are 4th cousins, 1x removed. In my excitement of meeting her I forgot to write down the exact link in the tree but what I do know for sure is that Anne’s 2x great-grandfather, Reverend Allan Macvean and my 3x great-grandfather, John Hugh Macvean were brothers.

There is no way to be sure but we guesstimated that it was probably close to a hundred years since the two branches of the family had gotten together.

Our first stop after meeting was this great little inner city cafe pictured below, for a fantastic coffee and to map out our plan of attack on what family history sites to visit first.

Our first choice, the former Brunswick Presbyterian Church, now Uniting Church, where Reverend Allan Macvean was the Minister for over forty years.

This is the original church that Rev. Allan preached in on this site and it is the blue-stone building on the right. Below is what the site looked like when the new church on the left was opened in 1885.

The old church as you can see from the photo above became the Brunswick college.

We were so lucky, Anne had arranged with another cousin, Jamie, who just happens to be affiliated with the church, permission for us to go inside both buildings and check them out.

I tried to imagine seeing the family sitting there in the pews watching Rev. Allan deliver his service. Wow, what a moment.

The image below shows the interior of the new church next door.

This new bigger church officially opened on Sunday the 2nd of August 1885.

The Rev. Allan preached there for another ten years until he had to resign due to ill health in 1895. Anne had told me about this amazing plaque on the wall of the church commemorating Rev. Allan’s service to the church and I was able to photograph it.

Here are the two branches of the family reconnecting on the 1st of November 2023, 127 years since the Rev. Allan’s passing.

This was our first IRL meeting. We worked out that we bumped into each other online about fifteen years ago when searching for family history info and realised that there was a family connection.

Oh yeah, and Anne very kindly confirmed the family link for me. Her father, Allan Arthur Macvean is a great-grandson to Rev. Allan and his wife, Catherine Macvean née Macpherson.

Anne also very generously shared a number of her family photos with me. The first, of her mum and dad, this is Allan Arthur Macvean and his wife Phoebe Christie Macvean nee Millar.

Allan’s father was Clive Allan Macvean, grandson of Rev. Allan and Catherine. Clive was married to Alice Margaret Coverlid.

Clive’s father was Allan Macvean, son of Rev. Allan and Catherine. He was married to May Louise Connebee. The photo on the left is Allan as a young man and then the one on the right is of him and May and their children together.

Our next stop came about from an off the cuff remark Anne made about the fact that the Rev. Allan had a street named after him in Brunswick and did I want to see it? Well you know the answer to that offer.

It is only a short street that runs between Brunswick Road and Park Street. Here it is below looking from Brunswick Road towards Park Street.

There was this very interesting sign attached to the post that Anne is hiding next to in the photo above.

What a wonderful history marker to have. Since returning from this trip I did some further research on this original site where Rev. Allan preached from. I found an amazing article in Trove from 20th of August 1904, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the church. It gives some great insight into the history of the church.

According to the article, the Rev. Allan preached first from a small house in Glenlyon Road in Brunswick for about a month until July 1854, this is when they moved into the blacksmiths shop.

I can find no record of the blacksmiths iron shop but this is the intersection of Sydney Road and Barkly Road today.

Somewhere on one of those four corners above the blacksmith shop sat in 1854. The congregation weren’t there for long as the year after they moved to a new church on Brunswick Road West.

Amazingly, there is a photo of this church on Brunswick Road.

Unfortunately there is no photo of the Manse that adjoined this church. This is where the Rev. Allan , his wife Catherine and their children lived for presumably the next ten years until the new church was built in Sydney Road, the blue stone church pictured in Figure 37 above.

I was lucky enough to find a mention of where this church was actually situated on Brunswick road west. It came from a brochure on a Walking Tour offered by the Brunswick Community History Group and the Sydney Road Brunswick Association.

How incredible to get an actual street number, I went straight to Google Maps and this is 276 Brunswick Road as of December 2022.

You might have noticed in the article above that it mentioned that a manse was built adjoining the church. I wondered if this might have been the same manse that Rev. Allan passed away in back in 1896 or did the family move to a new manse when the Sydney Road church was built? I went searching to see if I could lock down where this manse was actually situated.

I found this funeral notice for Rev. Allan and Catherine’s son, Alister giving the actual street address of the manse. In my experience this is so rare, manses, churches and shops never seem to get a street address printed with them.

This is Alister, my first Cousin, four times removed. He was only 35 years of age when he passed away.

Anne shared with me a copy of his death registration which states he died of Epilepsy and Exhaustion.

Now when I went looking for 114 Park Street on Google Maps, I found it in North Fitzroy, which is a suburb way over adjacent to the eastern boundary of Brunswick, where as Alister’s funeral notice states that the manse was in Brunswick West. I also remember when I drove down McVean Street with Anne we turned left into Park Street and it wasn’t long after that that she pointed out where she thought the manse was. Things didn’t add up.

I wondered if there had been a property number change in Park Street at sometime. The properties along Park Street from McVean Street are today all numbered in the early 800s, late 700s. I went searching for an old map of the area and found this map from 1888 on the State Library of Victoria site showing McVean Street, Park Street and Brunswick Road.

When you zoom in you can indeed see that there has been a numbering change at some time and look what has now been revealed.

114 Park Street, Brunswick West. I know the number is not there but you can clearly see it sits between 110 and 118. So I think we can safely say that this is a diagram of the actual manse the Macvean’s lived in.

This is the site today.

I think the two facades there on the right are number 110 and 108 pictured there on the historic map above.

I can now in actual fact confirm that this is the exact site of the manse, the one that was mentioned in the 50th anniversary article, Figure 46. Here is how, this is an aerial view of the 1888 map today.

You can see that Cope Street marked on the 1888 map has had a name change to Dollman, on the very right in the aerial shot above. It wasn’t until I zoomed in to where the manse was that I was able to confirm for sure that this was the only manse the family had been living in from the late 1850s.

Checkout Wattle Lodge, the other highlighted property behind the site of the manse. That is 276 Brunswick Road, which we now know is the site of the original Presbyterian Church Rev. Allan preached in. And those properties definitely look adjoining to me as it was described in the 50th anniversary article.

How fantastic is that. Because I was focusing on each property separately while working on Google Maps I hadn’t looked at the big picture of where the properties actually sat in relation to each other.

I’m fairly certain that the dwelling pictured on 119 in this map above is not the original church, this map is dated 1888 and I’m pretty sure it would have been long gone by this stage. Newspaper reports from the mid 1870’s suggest that it was about to close and that the school was going to be absorbed into the new school at the Oddfellows Hall. But how fantastic to put this together and confirm that these were the actual sites the family were living, working and dying at.

After Anne and I drove past the old manse site we next headed to the Melbourne General Cemetery. Unbeknown to me at the time I was following the very path that Alister Macvean’s funeral procession most likely would have taken, as this is where he is buried, 2.5kms from his front door.

This is the view the family would have had when following his funeral procession into the cemetery.

As you can see from the aerial shot of the cemetery above it is a maze. Luckily I had gone with some prior preparation done. The Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust has an amazing service aptly called, “Deceased Search”. If you provide the details of the deceased person you are searching for they will try and find the exact location of the grave for you, if they can. I knew that the Rev. Allan and his wife Catherine were buried there together.

I was so lucky, Eva Rivera one of the Records & Archives Officers found all of these details below.

How lucky was I and what a surprise to see all those other people buried in there as well. It was also quite comforting to see that Alister is buried with his parents, and some of his sisters.

Eva even provided me with a map showing exactly where the grave site was. Even with this it was a task to find as grave numbers and road signs are few and far between on the ground.

Anne and I eventually did find it after counting plots back from street intersections and here is the grave site as of November 2023.

The family have owned the site since 1856, when Helen Margaret Macvean was buried.

Helen Margaret Macvean was Allan and Catherine’s first child.

When Helen was born infant mortality rates were very high. The leading cause of death for infants in 1860, just five years after her birth were smallpox, scarlet fever, measles and pneumonia. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60407950/5982604 I wonder if it was one of these diseases that ended her very short life.

Helen passed away in the February of 1856 at just 8 months old. There is no death notice that I can find for her in any of the papers of the day. It is interesting to note the apparent mistake in the date of death on the headstone. To me the numeral 5 on the end of the date, clearly looks like the numeral 5 next to the 18 in the date and not like the numeral 6 in the 1860 date below it.

Birth Deaths and Marriages Victoria confirms Helen’s death date as 1856.

Yeah, I know it says Ellen not Helen but this type of transcription error is so common especially when you consider it is handwriting nearly 180 years old that is being transcribed.

I wonder if Rev. Allan and Catherine ever complained about the date and if so why was it never corrected.

Margaret Helen Macvean, the next name on the headstone, was Catherine and Allan’s third child.

Unfortunately they were back at the cemetery only two years and one month after laying Helen to rest, to bury Margaret.

Catherine and Rev. Allan lose Margaret just a month shy of her second birthday. I can only imagine it must have been heartbreaking. Like Helen, her older sister, there is no photo of Margaret and this is all we know of her story.

Catherine and Rev. Allan luckily have a reprieve of 27 years from having to bury any of their other children. The reprieve ends with the death of their sixth child, Mary Macvean on the 12th of April 1887.

We are very lucky, there was a very small mention of Mary’s death printed the Friday after she passed away. It gives us a sliver more information on Mary. She was 23 years of age at the time of her death and working for her sister, Catherine and her husband George Porter.

This is thought to be a photograph of Mary.

Mary was born on the 20th of September 1863.

We will return to the property that Mary passed away at, Hautpury, when we come to discuss her sister Catherine.

Next on the list is Alister’s burial on the 29th of June 1895, eight years after Mary.

Alister was born at the manse on the 2nd of December 1859.

Next to pass away in the family was not Helen who appears on the headstone after Alister above but rather their father, the Rev. Allan Macvean.

Anne shared a wonderful image she had in her collection of a memoriam card for Rev. Allan. It is from a family photo album that has hand coloured surrounds.

Then almost four months to the day after burying the Rev. Allan the family were back at the site to bury Helen on the 9th of October 1896. Catherine at this time has buried her husband and now six of her children.

There is no birth notice for Helen and this funeral notice is the only mention of Helen in the online newspapers. We can only guess as to what she might have been doing at “Toowong” on the corner of Hampden and Stanley Streets. I went searching to see if there was anything I could uncover on Toowong, and there was nothing.

I went to Google Maps and Stanley Street ends at a T section on Hampton Street, so only two corners to pick from. No 18 or no 19, as pictured below.

This is the house on the bottom corner of the T section above, no 18. According to Buxton Property website, this house is named “Invermay”. It was built in 1890, so of Helen’s time and is described as a late-Victorian showcasing picturesque Queen Anne style. https://buxton.com.au/property/178597/18-stanley-street-brighton-vic-3186/

What a beauty and how amazing that it has survived all of this time and not fallen victim to development. Of course this photo below is no 19, opposite Invermay.

Because I couldn’t find any further details on this property, I thought I might check out the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works historic maps on the Vic’ Library site again. After about an hour of matching streets with map numbers, I found the correct T section.

My thought was that the property might have the name printed on it which would help us definitely confirm it was the right house. You wouldn’t believe it, nearly every other property on the full map has a name on it, even Invermay but not, Toowong. I think it is a safe guess to make, that this property that I have highlighted above is Toowong, the property mentioned in Helen’s funeral notice and the place where she passed away.

I can’t find a build date for Toowong but the footprint of the property on the map from 1906 looks like it is a perfect match for the building that is standing there today.

You might be wondering, why I’m putting all of this detail in here on the property where Helen died and the place that she probably worked at. Well, basically because it is all that we know about her. I wonder why she was living here and not with her mother, who would have had to have vacated the Manse on Rev. Allan’s death. Was his death what motivated her to move out. What was her role here at Toowong, was she a nursemaid or governess? What was her relationship with the owners of the property? So many questions.

Helen was just 27 years of age when she passed away, and she was unmarried, why? She would have had hopes and dreams and a story to tell and 128 years later, they are all but gone. Focusing in on this scrap of a detail of her life, just brings her into focus a little.

These photos are thought to be of Helen. She was Catherine and Allan’s youngest daughter.

The only fly in the ointment here with this photo above, is the rings on the wedding ring finger. Is it an engagement ring, or could this actually be a photo of one of her two sisters that were married, Catherine or Jemima?

The next person on the headstone to pass away is Catherine Macvean nee MacPherson, Rev. Allan’s wife. Catherine passed away on the 30th of December 1898 and was buried at Melbourne General Cemetery the next day on the 31st of December, New Years Eve. What a terrible way to start the new year for the family.

Catherine has only one death and funeral notice printed in the newspapers on the 31st of Dec and they are printed together in the same paper.

There are three other mentions of her death in the first week of January 1899 and then that is it. No obituary or article discussing her history in the colony or her work supporting her husbands work.

For a woman who was a Minister’s wife for forty two years, gave birth to ten children in that time and kept home for all of them, there is virtually no trace of her left anywhere today.

Apart from these notices above, I found a single mention of Catherine’s marriage to Rev. Allan way back in 1854.

I will take us back to the details in Catherine’s death and funeral notice in a moment but first lets just look at the tiny bit of info in that marriage notice, which doesn’t even state that it is a marriage notice.

Helena House, I was very lucky this time and found some very interesting information about it. I found mention of the house in a Thematic History produced by Allom Lovel & Associates for the City of Yarra Heritage Review completed back in July 1988. It stated that a property called Osborne House at 40 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy was originally named Helena House. https://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/-/media/files/ycc/the-area/heritage/city-of-yarra-heritage-review-1998-volume-1.pdf

This advert below printed in the review, shows a diagram of the original house.

The review goes on to describe the original house as a ten room villa built in 1850 for John Macpherson, who just happens to be Catherine’s father. After John’s death in 1875 the house was sold and eventually in 1887, George Nipper who founded the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne brought it, expanded it with two three story wings in the front and back of the house and added 88 rooms. It operated as a boarding house for the next 93 years. https://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/-/media/files/ycc/the-area/heritage/city-of-yarra-heritage-review-1998-volume-1.pdf

Before we discuss the house any further, you might have noticed that the marriage notice in Figure 91 above, sates that the property was in Collingwood and then the Thematic Review states that it was in Fitzroy, bit confused? Well to help with that, my Cousin Anne, after running her keen editorial eye over my original musings, provided me with this wonderful background snippet that clears up any confusion.

And now, having just been able to confirm exactly where Helena House was, I can’t believe it, but I just found the most amazing photograph of the house before any of these changes took place.

Nicholson Street where the house sits is also the site of the Melbourne Exhibition Building built almost opposite Helena house some thirty years later in 1880. The next photograph was taken from the top of the Exhibition building looking back at Nicholson Street and St Patrick’s Cathedral and it just happens to capture Helena House.

Here is the house that Catherine and the Rev. Allan married in on the 31st of August, 1854. It is the white two storied building with the columns on either side of the portico entrance.

Talk about luck, 174 years later, the original house still stands, although it is buried in the midst of those 1880 extensions and looks a little worse the wear.

You will note right in the center of the photo, there are the two columns on either side of the doorway and checkout how the fence and gate have survived. They match perfectly with the photo from 1880. Imagine the people who built it thinking that it could possibly still be standing nearly two centuries later.

Another sliver of information that the thematic history review provided about Catherine was that one of her brother’s, John Alexander MacPherson was actually Victoria’s 7th Premier. John held office for 201 days from the 20th of September 1869 to the 9th of April 1870. https://australianpolitics.com/states/vic/victorian-premiers-since-1855 And here is an amazing photo of John, Catherine’s brother.

Back to Catherine’s death and funeral notice in Figure 89 above. There is nothing online about the property named Cintra, Catherine’s last residence. I even traveled the length of Carpenter Street in the Melbourne Metropolitan board of Works maps on State Library Victoria site but there was no property labelled with Cintra. So where she died will remain a mystery to us unfortunately.

I did find one last mention of Catherine in newsprint from the day. She was involved in a court case regarding an incident where her purse went missing and was presumed stolen.

One other article printed on the same day as this one above, actually reports the testimony Catherine gave. This is the closest we get to hearing her actual voice.

Yeah, I know, mistake again. Her husband named John and not Allan. Perhaps the court reporter was aware of Allan’s brother, the squatter, John Macvean and transposed his name instead.

Here is a photo of the very courthouse Catherine sat in to give her evidence.

This is then it for Catherine, not one other piece of information is out there that I can find at the moment. I even checked the outcome of this court case. The bus driver was committed for trial to answer for stealing the purse in February of 1883 but there is no mention of the trial and so no other mention of Catherine.

There are three other internees at the Macvean burial site that we haven’t discussed as yet. The first is Catherine and Allan’s grandson, Donald Norman Macvean. Donald was born in June 1901 in the small village of Loch in the Victorian Gippslands.

Donald was the third child of Catherine and Rev. Allan’s son, Allan Macvean and his wife, May Louise Macvean, née Connebee. This article below explains why they were in Loch, a little rural town about 100kms south east of Brunswick.

Donald was seven months old when he passed away.

I don’t have a copy of Donald’s death registration so I’m not sure what he died of but I imagine it was worrying enough that Allan and May brought Donald to Melbourne to seek help before his passing. I’m assuming this is why he died at Fitzroy. I wonder if they took rooms in Allan’s grandparents old home in Osborne House.

The last family member to be buried at the site was Catherine and Rev. Allan’s 5th eldest child, Petrena Macvean, twenty two years after her nephew Donald’s burial.

Petrena has just as little information out there as her mother. Like her sister Helen, I could find no birth notice printed for her at all. I did find two other mentions of Petrena apart from her death and probate notices.

The first is attending her cousin, John Hugh Cameron’s eldest daughter’s wedding. John’s mother, Margaret Macvean is sister to Petrena’s father, Rev. Allan.

The second mention I found for Petrena, was appearing on a passenger list traveling to London on the R.M.S Malwa on the 27th July 1915.

What is interesting to note here is that this is a war time sea voyage that Petrena undertook. I wish we knew why she was going to London. Maybe to be part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) The VAD were units of civilians providing orderly care for military personnel. https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/vad

And next her death notice. Petrena’s second last mention in print.

Petrena was 60 years of age when she passed away and what is fantastic about this death notice, if that can be said, is that it gives the street address of where she passed. Her probate notice provided some further details about where she died.

So the house on 19 Carpenter Street was called Lybster and John Bishop mentioned in the probate notice was Petrena’s brother-in-law. He was married to Petrena’s sister Jemima Gibson Macvean, pictured below.

No photo of Lybster has come up as yet and this is what sits on the site today.

I did manage to find the house on the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works plan from 1906. It looks like it would have been an impressive property and house, what a shame it is gone and there is no photo.

You might recall we have already mentioned Carpenter Street, Brighton in this post. It was where Petrena’s mother was living when she died. I wonder if “Cintra”, the house I couldn’t find, was part of the Lybster estate. There is a good chance that Catherine was living with her daughter Jemima and son-in-law, John before she passed away.

There is one last person to mention who appears on the burial list for the family burial site mentioned in Figure 65 above, and that is James Black. He doesn’t seem to be a family member that we can tell so far. His name doesn’t appear on the headstone but the cemetery records confirm that he was buried on the 1st of February 1858 and he was just four days old.

My Cousin Anne, mentioned to me recently that when she saw the name she recalled that her mother had discovered the fact of James burial decades before the internet came about but unfortunately his identity remained a mystery. Anne however, having access to the internet was able to discover that James mother’s family name was McGowan.

I had a bit of a dig around on Ancestry and I found this interesting listing for a birth record for one James Black in 1858, with mother’s name noted as Jessie McGowan and fathers name John Black.

These details then seemed to match with the birth record on Victorian Birth Death & Marriages site.

The names match, the date, the registration number and Brunswick is listed as place of birth which is where we know the Macvean’s were living. James’s death registration matches with these details as well.

I did search on Ancestry’s site for all three names. Jessie Anderson McGowan/Black, John Black and James Black and interestingly not one of them appears in a family tree anywhere. I have never come across this before where someone isn’t listed somewhere, let alone three people. All three have a few records coming up in the online records but they are not linked to any trees. Anne suggested that they may have been parishioners of the Rev. Allan who couldn’t afford to pay for their baby sons burial and this is why he is now resting with the Macvean family.

I did find a Jessie Anderson Black and a John Black living and working in Teralba, NSW, decades later in 1913.

John passes away in July 1916 and Jessie seven months later in February 1917. Their headstone states “In the memory of our dearly beloved parents…“, so presumably they had other children, perhaps the other Black surnames above are their children.

Hopefully one day more information might come to light and we will be able to reunite James with his parents, online at least.

At this stage in the tour, Alex is still in Newcastle presenting.

Well I thought it was Newcastle and Anne and I have finished our search at Melbourne General Cemetery. We are about to move on to our second stop for the day, Boroondara General Cemetery, 15mins drive east in Kew. This is the burial site for Rev. Allan and Catherine’s daughter, Catherine Isabella Barbara Macvean and her husband George Porter. We will take a break here and pick up the rest of the tour in Part Two.