From the Land Down Under to the Rising Sun

Taking a short detour from June and Milton’s missionary journey on this post – this is a continuation of the theme of grandmothers. A few months ago, I posted about June’s mother (my grandmother) and before that in the “Convict story” post, I traced back to her paternal great grandmother. So, this post is a little more about Milton’s mother and grandmother.  

Dad wrote extensively about his childhood in Fiji (earlier post) and included quite a bit about his mother Margaretta Hibberd, but here’s a paragraph I had not previously used:

Milton:

To me, she was a perfect mother. Until I was well into adulthood, I thought ‘mothers’ as such, didn’t get sick. They were some special beings. I had seen our whole family groaning in bed with Dengue fever and Mother running the house and caring for us all like a bee buzzing from flower to flower. I don’t know if she was sick or not. I never saw her tired and she was ever helping someone. But I think she was tired sometimes; tired of the whole life in a closed-circuit tropical island society and hemmed in by the ocean. The old family fears of Dad marrying a ‘Doctor’s bill’ evaporated in the glow of bearing and caring for four noisy kids and a very busy husband.

Mary

Dad shared (in earlier post) that when his mother and father met (Margaretta and Matthew) they were living in a coal mining area of Minmi, New South Wales.  When it looked like they were destined to be married, Matthew’s parents, seemed to be concerned that their soon to be daughter-in-law was a sickly young lady who would only be a burden. When I read that, I felt Elizabeth sounded like perhaps not the warmest of mothers-in-law I was a little intrigued and wanted to dig a bit deeper into the life of Elizabeth (Wells) Whan, Milton’s grandmother.

She died in 1930 so Dad was 12 years old and living in Fiji. I believe much of what he knew and wrote about her he learned from his Auntie Beth and probably his mother, which wasn’t a lot.

However – Darelyn kindly has done tons of research and provided me with a nice timeline of her life with Ancestry.com so we now know a lot more than the short anecdotes Milton had heard.  

Elizabeth Wells was born in 1860 in County Down, Ireland. So yes – she was Irish! For the Wayne family people reading this, this accounts for a portion of the Irish DNA in you – there is also some from June’s side.

She was the youngest of at least eight children. Her father, William, was 49, and her mother, Margaret, was 48 at the time of her birth. I wrote “at least eight children” because I noticed a seven-year gap between baby #2 George and #3 Thomas and that is a long gap considering that all the other children were no more than three years apart. Some records may have been lost.

Sometime after 1862, the family migrated to Scotland. Conditions in Ireland at the time were dire and many Irish moved to Scotland.

On the 1871 census, she was living with her parents in Shotts, Lanarkshire, Scotland . Also on that census were three other siblings, Samuel, William and Mary. Shotts was known for its mining and ironworks – below is a picture that includes Elizabeth’s sister Susan who is second from the right. Susan was eight years older than Elizabeth and on the 1871 census she was married and living with her husband. I do not know what year this photo was taken.

The picture comes courtesy of one of Susan Wells’ descendants, Kevin on Ancestry. Susan is his great grandmother as Elizabeth is great grandmother to me and my siblings & first cousins. So Kevin is our third cousin! What a gem of a picture – it has to be almost 150 years old.

 In 1874, when Elizabeth was 14, her mother Margaret passed away at the age of 62.  By then, many of her siblings were married. Her brother George immigrated to Australia in 1864.  It might be George or brother William who paved the way. All but one would wind their way to Australia. The only one who did not go was the oldest, James. It looks like he had married in Ireland before the family went to Scotland so may not have ever moved over to Shotts.

Five years after the death of her mother, Elizabeth was sailing on the “windjammer” ship, the Samuel Plimsoll, with her widowed father and her older brother #3, Thomas, with his wife and four children.

I wish I knew the story of how Elizabeth Wells and Andrew Whan met. But within three years of arriving in Sydney she was married to Andrew Whan, the Scottish stonemason who had arrived in the country a year later than her.  Darelyn even found that they were married in the home of the Primitive Methodist minister who performed the ceremony on Riley Street in Surrey Hills.

Andrew, Milton’s grandfather, had migrated to Australia from Scotland as a stone mason.  The area in Scotland he came from, Creetown, Kirkcudbrightshire was known for it’s granite quarries. In fact in the 1871 census, Andrew was listed as a Granite apprentice.

Milton:

My grandfather Andrew Whan migrated to Australia from Scotland as a stone mason. Some of the bridges that granddad built still span little creeks around New South Wales. His wife, Elizabeth was a five foot 0 inch money maker: a “business wiz”, my auntie said.

They had six children and were financially well established and socially moving up in the world. Then the banks crashed under the crunch of a depression around the turn of the century. Granddad and Grandma lost everything. The family packed up and moved north to the coal fields. Granddad started building stone walls for the mining company in Minmi. Within a few years my polio cripple Auntie Beth used to hobble on her crutches onto a train for Newcastle to collect rent from houses Grandma had invested in. They were on their way again.

Mary:

So to put it in perspective- Elizabeth left what was probably a harsh mining town in Scotland and probably was pleased to be married to a stonemason… then because of an economic depression she and her husband and six young children to move up north probably because her siblings were up in the area – to another coal mining town, Minmi.

After they moved north, they had one more child, Stanley born in 1902.

Elizabeth Wells Whan died at age 70 in 1930. If you can make out the obituary below, her eldest son was in Fiji at the time.

So quite a life – from Ireland to Scotland to Sydney then up to Minmi. She sounds like a tough cookie – maybe that’s why she wanted to make sure Matthew’s soon to be wife was up to the challenge. If only we knew more!

Bonus Info! Darelyn provided a copy of an exchange between Matthew Whan and his sister Beth. His letter was written 1933, three years after his mother had died and he had many questions about her youth. Things you just read about because in this age with digitized records we have access.

And the following two images are Beth’s reply. “Auntie Beth” was the source of information for the things Milton (her nephew) wrote in his story. Somehow seeing the questions my grandfather who I never knew write out makes me smile because he was just as curious about Ancestry as some of his descendants are 🙂