Chapter 2 - My family history

Family Tree

Here is my family tree...

And here is a map I did of where our families originally came from before they arrived in Australia:

My mum and dad

My mum was born in Newcastle, 1977, she moved around a bit - to Bathurst, then Wagga Wagga then the Blue Mountains where she spent her teenage and university years. She studied arts/law at university and then worked as a legal editor.

My dad was born in 1970 and grew up in St Ives. He studied arts/law at university too but half way through he decided he wanted to be a pastor one day so he just finished the arts degree and trained to be a teacher. He studied to be a high school teacher and then worked as a high school English teacher for a few years. Then he went and studied theology so he could become a pastor.

My mum and dad met when dad was studying theology and mum was at uni. They met at something called 'Scripture Union Family Mission' - which is something that some churches do up and down the coast over the summer holidays, providing fun activities for kids in caravan parks. They were good friends (and secretly liked each other) for three years before they started going out. It wasn't very long after that before they got engaged.

They got married in 1999, at Springwood Baptist church, in the Blue Mountains. They moved to the inner west of Sydney after they had been married for one year as dad got a job as the pastor of Petersham Baptist Church. I was born while they were there.

Now I'll tell you a bit about the history of each side of the family. I've just chosen some of the more exciting and interesting stories to share.

Dad's side

Ian Starling and Robyn Strong

My dad's parents are called Ian and Robyn Starling. My grandma, Robyn was born in Sydney and she moved around a lot as a child because her father worked for the navy.

My grandpa was born in Brisbane and moved down to Sydney when he was six. They met through Chatswood Baptist Church and married in 1965. They had three kids - my Aunty Anne, my dad David and my Aunty Kathryn. They all lived in Sydney while the family was growing up. Now my grandpa and grandma live in Queensland again, my Aunty Anne lives in New Zealand with her husband, Uncle Neville and two kids and Aunty Kathryn lives in the Blue Mountains with her three kids and my Uncle Andrew. We are spread out so we don't see everyone together very often.

My grandpa

My grandma

William Starling (and his ancestors)

William Starling, my Grandpa's dad was born in Brisbane 1905 to an English father, Walter Starling and a Scottish mother, Margaret Norris.

William, Win and Walter Starling

Margaret Norris

His parents separated when he was still very young and he was brought up by his grandparents and other members of his family. He had an elder sister, Win Starling, born 1903. William started working when he was a teenager, and spent most of his life working in an office for a company that made paper. During World War II he moved from Brisbane to Sydney.

My Starling ancestors were shepherds in West Wratting, Cambridgeshire. We have seen the church they used to go to and the site of their house.

St Andrews, West Wratting

There is a story I have heard about one of our Starling ancestors which I will now tell you.

The squire of West Wratting (a squire is the man who owns the most land in his village; usually he lives in a mansion) invited one of my ancestors over to his mansion for a meal. The squire got my ancestor (who was also called William Starling) drunk and tricked him into signing over his land to the squire. When William realised what he had done he cursed the squire, saying he would die in a ditch. Not long afterwoods, the squire was in his cart when his horse suddenly bolted, throwing the squire out of the cart and into a ditch. The squire died of his injuries. We have also seen the squire's mansion.

West Wratting Hall (Squire Frost's family mansion)

Jean  Stevenson

Jean Stevenson

Jean Stevenson, grandpa's mother, was born in Brisbane to an Irish father named Thomas Stevenson and a German mother, Christine Magdalena Metzger.

Thomas Stevenson

Christine Metzger

Thomas was born in Bessbrook in County Armagh, Ireland. When he was only sixteen, he was given the job of escorting his nephews on a ship to Brisbane. The ship was called the Merkara. The nephews' parents, Isaac and Jane McGaw had left their two sons back in Ireland, while they settled in Queensland.

Jean got a scholarship to go to Brisbane Girls Grammar School but took the commercial strand and left school before she  finished high school to get a job. When she married William Starling she stopped working. She had only one son, grandpa and when he was six the  family moved up to Sydney.

Les Strong

Les and Joan Strong on their wedding day

Les Strong, my grandma's father was born in Melbourne in 1914. He went to University High School then got a job as a pupil teacher when he had finished school. His next job was in the Department of the Navy, which meant that he had to move house a lot. His family had to move from Melbourne to Sydney to Perth to Sydney to Melbourne to Sydney. He helped to organise the British atomic bomb tests at the Monte Bello Islands in the 1950s and later died when he was still quite young from bone cancer. All through his life he loved to read and write.

My Great-Great-Great grandfather on the Strong side was Richard Dobson Clement. He was born in Sunderland in 1839 and married Jane Burdon in 1860. At the time he was a butcher. 5 years later, when they had two children, Jane died. Richard became a ship's Steward around this time, maybe a little earlier. When he was away on long voyages, Jane's parents would look after the children. On one trip he visited Melbourne and met a widow named Agnes Hitchcock. The two fell in love and before long were married in Melbourne. Richard set up a butcher's shop again and in 1870, Agnes gave birth to a son. When the poor baby (Claude Weston, Weston being Agnes's maiden name) was only six months old, Agnes died, possibly of a stroke. Not long afterwood Claude got sick with diarrhoea, Richard didn't know how to handle the situation and Claude Weston died, aged only eleven months. Meanwhile, it seems that Richard lost touch with his family back in England.

Next Richard moved to Geelong, set up another butcher shop and married a lady called Margaret Bushell (nee Knight). Together they had seven children. We are descended from one of them, Isabella Strong (nee Clement).

The Clement family outside their butcher shop in Geelong. My great- great- grandmother is in the pram.

 Richard died in 1929 (aged 90) and Margaret in 1935 (aged 84).

Richard Dobson Clement in his old age

Joan Cross

Joan Cross, my grandma's mother, was born in Melbourne in 1913. Her mother had been a Methodist (a type of Christian) deaconess in the slums of Sheffield and her father was a Baptist minister. Her family moved around from town to town in Victoria because of her father's job. Her mother died when Joan was still young and she had to care for her younger brother and sister and help run the church. She left school to become a fruit preserving demonstrator and travelled around to country shows in Victoria. She married Les Strong and had two daughters. She's still alive and is 99, nearly 100. I know her and her memory is quite good for her age. When we visited her back in Australia, she used to tell us things about her childhood. One of the things that she told us when we visited her just before Christmas was that about the day when her mother died. As the eldest child in her family she had to comfort the younger kids and help them to enjoy their Christmas, even though she was equally sad.

One of my Great-Great- Grandfathers on that side was Walter Cross. He was born 1890 and arrived in Sydney on a ship called the "Demosthenes". On the same ship was his future wife, Mabel Jackson. They were engaged and planned to marry soon after they arrived.

Walter Cross

Mabel Jackson

Not long after my great- grandmother was born in 1913 he went to fight in World War One. He came back alive, but with shell-shock and terrible nightmares.

Mabel Jackson's father was called Joseph Jackson. When he was a teenager, Joseph worked as a metal planer. Later he became a marine and his first afloat assignment was aboard the coast guard vessel, HMS "Revenge".

HMS Revenge

 Not long after he joined the Revenge, he commited a crime and spent six weeks in jail.

After he was released he married a person called Mary Ann Lee and became a marine on the Revenge again. He then went on a trip to China and was promoted to being a corporal. He sailed on 3 more ships (the "Princess Charlotte", the "Juno" and the "Implacable") while his wife lived in a very crowded house back in England, with several other sailors' wives and their children. He received a discharge after being in the Navy for 12 years. He died in 1920.

Mum's side

Trevor Cairney and Carmen French

My grandad was born in Newcastle in 1952. His dad was a coal miner and his mum had a beautiful singing voice. His parents would often perform together in local pubs and clubs. He tells us some great stories about what he used to be like as a young boy - he used to get into a lot of trouble, like the time he threw a rotten egg on a car windscreen.

My nanna was born in 1952 and grew up in Tuncurry, a little fishing village on the NSW mid north coast. Her dad was a fisherman and the family owned the local skating rink for a while and my nanna used to skate there and run the games.

They met at teacher's college where they were both learning to be primary school teachers. They have two children, Auntie Louise and my mum.

Now nanna and grandad live in Ashbury, in Inner-Western Sydney, a half hour drive from our house. Auntie Louise lives in Bathurst with her two kids and husband, Uncle John.


Henry Cairney

Henry Cairney came to Australia with his parents in 1921. His father, John Cairney was a coal miner and came from Lanarkshire in Scotland. His family originally came from Ireland but they left in the 1850's after more coal mines appeared there. Henry's mother was also from a Scottish coal mining family who had come over from Ireland.

Margaret Gallacher and John Cairney

They were very poor. This is a picture of the terrace housing my great grandmother lived in before she married John.

Henry Cairney had 8 brothers and just one sister who died when she was only two. The death was very sad and affected the family a lot.

Margaret Gallacher

the register of the ship that my great grandfather came on

Henry also worked as a coal miner from when he was young and took part in the Rothbury Riots! The riots started when the owners of the coal mine Henry worked in lessened the worker's wages. The miners disagreed with that and the owners shut the mine gates so the miners could not come in there to work.

All the miners did not have a job and could not earn any money for themselves or their families. The miners grew angry and the government passed a law saying the police should supress any gatherings of angry miners. In one gathering, the miners had a band at the front playing pipes, Henry Cairney was playing in the band. Soon the police were on the scene and began shooting the miners. 27 were killed. It was the most violent industrial conflict in Australia's history.

Henry Cairney and Mary Linton - wedding day

Mary Linton

Mary Linton and Henry Cairney

Mary Linton's parents owned an old fashioned shop in Kearsely, near Maitland, NSW. My grandad can remember going in it and seeing the sweets on the shelves and the way his grandmother would weigh the things like flour and sugar for the customers.

Alexander and Viola Linton - Mary Linton's parents who owned the shop

Mary Linton met her future husband, Henry Cairney for the first time when she was helping out in the shop, Henry was working down the road in the mines at the time.

One side of her family also came from Scotland and were coalminers. Here is a picture of one of the Lintons in his kilt!

Hugh Lugton-Linton

Her great, great grandfather, James Bell, was a convict (see convicts below). We think that he may have been a bushranger, but are still not quite sure. We know he went to gaol several times and lived in the same area that the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt came from, and that he had the same name as one of Captain Thunderbolt's gang (whose alias was 'Jemmy the Whisperer').

Robert Bell, James Bell's son

Robert Bell and Sarah Hall (Mary Linton's great grandparents)

Lyle French

I was lucky enough to know my Great Grandfather, Lyle French before he died in 2011. It was very sad when he died. We drove up to Forster to attend his funeral. I have heard some great stories about him and his life.

Lyle French grew up near Taree on the mid north coast and had 10 brothers and sisters. He didn't have shoes when he was a kid and he used to ride a horse or walk the 12 miles to school. He left school when he was 12 years old and his first job was as a bullock driver. Later he was a sawmill owner. When my nanna was a little girl, he left that to become a fisherman at Forster. He owned his own boat. One day when fishing, he saw a waterspout! He used to talk to me about how he fished and how he caught a shark! 

 His family had been some of the first European families in that part of NSW. Quite a few of them were convicts (I'll talk about them separately!). One of them lived until he was 100 years old!

Lyle French, at Timbertown, showing my mum how he used to crack a whip!

Elsie Sheather

Elsie and Lyle French

My great grandmother grew up in the mid North coast of NSW too. Her family were dairy farmers and had lived in the area for a long time too. While there are a few convicts in her side of the family, most of them had come to Australia voluntarily from England and Ireland.

One of her great great grandparents, Jesse and Harriet Pullen came to Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1820. The oversaw the 'female factory' there in 1828 until they resigned in 1831. Now during that time Port Arthur was reserved for the very worst convicts in Britain so the convicts had probably all done very bad crimes. We know that there were some bad riots while Jesse was there with the women trying to burn the place down!

Anyway, Jesse and Harriet  oversaw one of the female factory and taught convicts to do things like sewing. The convicts sewed a christening gown for her daughter (also called Harriet). The gown is on display in a museum in Tasmania.

The christening gown

Jesse Pullen

It is said that Harriet was also the first women preacher in Australia. We know her husband was a Wesleyan minister and she preached when he was absent. What we don't know is whether someone preached before her. It is said in a diary entry from the time that:

Her earnest appeals, exhortations and entreaties made a deep and lasting impression on the minds of her hearers...all who sat there looking steadfastly on her saw the face of an angel.

She died during childbirth in 1838 , when her husband Jesse Pullen was away in Sydney. Jesse had two more wives and died in 1871.

While we've been in England, we had the chance some of the places the Pullens' came from, including the churches where they were christened and married and buried.

Next to grave of my great,great, great, great, great, great grandfather William Pullen - Chilham, Kent.

This the village church in Chilham (where the Pullen family came from) 

 List of Convicts

When we started finding out about mum's side of the family tree for this assignment, we discovered that she has a lot of convicts in her family tree! Here is a list my sisters and I put together (click on the link).

One of my ancestors, Joseph Woodward, was involved in a riot called the Nottingham riots. At the time, Nottingham was a horrible mass of brick slums, open sewers and narrow alleyways. The people were cross about how they were underrepresented. The working class people all over England sent a bill asking for reform but it was refused by parliament. This led to lots of riots all over Britain, including the nottingham riots during which Nottingham castle was burned down. Joseph Woodward was sentenced for death but instead was transported over to Australia.

On the other side there is a convict who was an Irish Catholic. He was involved in a riot called the 'Macken Fight' in Northern Ireland where 4 protestants were killed and 17 men were put on trial. He was shipped over to Australia and his family followed him once he was released.