Bristol_and_Somerset-L Archives

From: "Nancy Postlethwaite" <>
Subject: re legal marriages.
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 09:43:51 +1000

Hi, I'm just a browser to this site as my "home carer" is really the one interested in Bristol. However I had a similar situation to the one described by "JohnO" in my own family in the 19C. My gg grandfather had his 4 children Isabella, Ann, Mary and Lewis join him in Australia after their mother died in G.B. She had remarried, citing her husbands death as proof that she could remarry. Actually they had separated and a reasonable time had elapsed. (But I still think of her as a bigamist.)
Girls were in short supply in the colonies at the time and even before they had arrived, the 2 elder ones were "snapped up" so to speak by a neighbouring squatter for his sons, John and William. However when they arrived, only the eldest, Isabella, consented to marriage with John, and then promptly died in childbirth. The second daughter, Ann, a very spirited lass, who had scorned her proposed husband, William, then eloped with her dead sisters husband, John. They travelled some 400 miles in a gig to South Australia to be married. Not an easy trip with no roads most of the way and only rough bush tracks or general directions to follow through dense bush, with lots of unknown hazards to contend with I might add. (It is family tradition that Ann only married to keep her sisters beautiful things in the family but later grew to love her husband dearly.)
After marriage the young couple returned to Victoria but chose to take up, that is "select" virgin ground some 100 miles from where the furious parents resided. It worked out well in the end as daughter number 3, Mary, then went up to be with her sister and help with her young family, and almost at once married the second brother William, who had be enticed up by his brother. Both couples selected ground ajoining each other in order to help one another, and then enlisted Lewis, the girls young brother as a shepherd to work for them. He liked the area and "upped" his age to 18, in order to select 360 acres. Eventually carving out a sizeable farm of some 1000 acres. A further 2 generations down these families are so intermarried that today it is very hard to work out true relationships within the group.
This is a very common story amongst the early settlers in Australia. Means the old adage :"The nearer you come into relationship with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become." still holds very true.

N. P'thwaite.

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• re legal marriages. by "Nancy Postlethwaite" <>