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Martha Brown |
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Martha was baptised in the Free Church at Maybole, Ayrshire, in the southwest of Scotland on the 29th. July 1849. Her parents John Brown and Helen Strachan (sometimes spelt "Stranachan)" had come to Scotland from Ireland some time before their marriage in 1828. Like many people living in that area her father was a hand loom worker who had probably needed to move from Northern Ireland where the cotton mills were closing down. He later became a farm labourer, perhaps due to the spread of mechanisation in the mills in Scotland.
Martha seems to have been one of 12 children although as happened in those days some died young. However it's possible that the 2 youngest children who came to Australia were not in fact Martha's siblings but the children of one of her sisters or brother who perhaps had died. They were 8 years younger than the nearest recorded child, Isabella.
At the time of the 1851 Census mother Helen and 6 children are recorded as living in Kirkhill, Inverness in the north of Scotland. We have not positively identified the family in the 1841 census, although there is a John with 3 children, Helen, Elizabeth and James of the right ages, recorded at Barony in Lanarkshire. Barony has been swallowed up by Glasgow but used to be farming lands 5 or 6 kilometres to the north of the centre of Glasgow. Perhaps Helen and and baby Margaret had returned to Ireland for a time.
On the 29th. June 1859 John, Helen and children Margaret (16), John jun. (14), Martha (11), Isabella (10) and James and Janet (both aged 2) arrived in Port Adelaide aboard the "James Jardine". The 6 eldest children either died young or did not travel out to Australia at the same time as John & Helen.(They may have come later)
Margaret later married William Sharpe and Martha must have been very fond of them as she later named a daughter Margaret "Sharp" (sic) and a son "William Sharpe". (Martha's second marriage to John McCracken also took place at their home in North Terrace, Adelaide in 1874.)
In 1867 when she was only 17 Martha married Lawrence Foster who had also been born in Scotland at Wemyss in Fifeshire. During their marriage they seem to have travelled around South Australia as they were living in Port Lincoln soon after they married but at the end of that year, when their first child, Jessie Adeline, was born they were at the Criterion Hotel in Robe. 2 years later when their second child Lawrence jun. was born they were at Talia on the West Coast very near Colton and the "Kilroy" property. Four years later in March 1873 when Martha was admitted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital for 10 days with a bladder infection she gave her address as Waymouth Street in the city of Adelaide. A family diary tells that Lawrence snr. died suddenly in Adelaide although no record of his death has been found. Martha was recorded as "married" on the hospital admission form so one presumes she wasn't widowed at that time.
Martha then married John McCracken in January 1874 at the home of sister Margaret and her husband William Sharpe in Adelaide. They went on to have another 10 children . (The family diary says that there were also premature twins born first but this seems rather unlikely as the first verified child, Eliza, was born 15 months after they married, but it is remotely possible that any twins were the late Lawrence Foster's children).
Martha's two children by her first marriage lived with John & Martha. Jessie later married and apparently had 10 children, 7 of whom died from disease. Her brother Lawrence jun. also had a sad life as he went to the Western Australian goldfields taking up a lease at Phillip River in the Kattaning district, but in 1902 committed suicide at Ravensthorpe.
Martha Kennedy aged 45 years, of Hundred of Talia died 4th February 1894 at Hundred of Talia, wife of John McCracken District Flinders. |
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