So many questions, no answers

My father’s family lived in the country – densely forested country, not far from a very small town in the north of Australia. Twenty or thirty years earlier, prospectors had searched for gold but found tin instead, so mining for tin was the main industry.

My father was one of ten children in a family who lived in poverty. All had had to go to work at a very young age to support the family. His parents (my grandparents), Margaret and Edwin, visited rarely when I was a child, and when they did visit, we children were sent outside to play. I never really knew them; I never heard any of their life stories, none of the kind which many families pass down through the generations.

My daughter has started researching our family history, and it has become a source of fascination. But on my father's side, there are so many questions, and so few answers.

There are some areas where she can progress no further, despite seeking out birth, marriage, and death certificates, other public records and notices of that time, looking up newspapers, googling the landscape of the area, and even checking out school records, and adoption and fostering agencies.

As she has shared her findings with me, I have become increasingly intrigued, and we are both left wondering and conjecturing about my grandmother’s mother, Mary. Hers is a strange story.

I wish I knew what happened to her, my grandmother’s mother. Perhaps no one knows. Why can we not discover more information? Why is the silence so impenetrable? Did her life mean nothing? Did her children’s lives mean nothing?

Mary’s first husband, Richard, drowned while swimming in a river with his friends.

That’s what can so easily happen after some time spent drinking, doubtless in an effort to recover after a hard day’s work with the sun beating relentlessly down on these manual labourers. The relaxation, after drinking alcohol and becoming merry, was followed by yielding to the temptation of a cooling swim in the river … he was not the first twenty-three-year-old to end his life in this tragic way, and he doubtless won’t be the last.

Nevertheless, there was an inquest, and the results came back that there was no foul play; his death was an accident. The details were reported at length in the local newspaper.

At the time of her young husband’s death, Mary, aged 21, was pregnant with their first child, my grandmother.

Mary very quickly married an older man, Thomas, in his mid-forties, even before the birth of her baby, my grandmother, Margaret Jane. It would have been very difficult for Mary to be a single mother in those days. Perhaps it was a marriage of convenience, rather than love. Nevertheless, Margaret soon had several half-siblings.

It seems that after about twenty-one years of marriage, Mary’s second husband died in 1904, aged 67, leaving behind his large family, ranging down to a seven-year-old. Once again, Mary was widowed.

In 1907, just three years later, there was a strange happening.

Mary, by now around forty-five years old, was walking home one stormy evening. In the tropics, once the sun sets, darkness falls quickly. Rainfall in the tropics is heavy, and can be sudden. In those days there were no cars; transport was usually on foot or on horseback. People walked kilometres through the rugged countryside, and thought nothing of it. There was no telephone system, no communication of any kind.

Mary never arrived home. There were six or seven children, the youngest by then ten years old, as well as Margaret, by now twenty-one and married, who never saw their mother again.

The next day, Mary’s body was discovered - she had drowned in the bottom of a disused mineshaft; some say it was a well. Apparently, this mineshaft or well was on the country property of a wealthy neighbour. 

Where had Mary been? Why was she on his property? Was she working as a maid for this neighbour in order to support her many children? Had she been checking on animals and their well-being in the storm?

Had she simply lost her way as she travelled home on the stormy night? An unlikely scenario for those who had lived and worked in the area for many years.  Surely, she would have been following a country road, or at least a well-worn track?  

Had she been working in the town, and was she trying to take a short-cut through his property in order to reach home quickly? Had she simply tripped and fallen? Was it just unfortunate that she fell into a mineshaft or well? Had she been calling for help all through that wild night? Was it a frightening and lonely death, or was she so badly injured that her death was instantaneous?

Did they try to find her on that dark rainy night, or did they all assume she would arrive home safely the next day, having sheltered from the storm? Perhaps the children were used to being left while she worked in the town or at the neighbour’s large house.  Children and young people in those days were tough and resilient. However, considering the area, and the dense terrain, how did they find her body so quickly? Was the neighbour ever questioned?

Apart from a small death notice in each of a couple of local newspapers, nothing was mentioned. There was no inquest, despite the mysterious circumstances of her death, and no police involvement.

Had she been murdered, and her body thrown into the mineshaft? Why was there no investigation? Was it simply that women were not counted as important in those days? Just the ones to bear and raise children .... Or was a crime committed and hushed up, never to be spoken of? Had she become a person of questionable reputation and was not counted worthy of justice?

There had been an inquest for her first husband, who drowned in the presence of his friends, and extensive reporting in the newspapers, but no inquest for this mother of eight, all in now orphaned, no interest in this tragedy.

And the children? Yes, Margaret, the eldest was married, but what became of the others? Who looked after them and provided for them? Impossible for Margaret and her husband to take them all in!

There are simply no records of my grandmother’s half-siblings. No records of other relatives caring for them, or of adoption, or fostering, orphanages, nor of any descendants from them. No marriage or death certificates for any of them at any time. They have simply vanished without trace.

My grandmother, by the age of twenty-one, had now lost her father, her stepfather and her mother. And no one knows anything about her siblings.

Some truths will never be known. I feel an unsettling sense of sadness and loss, without quite knowing why. Is it because no one seemed to care? Personally, I think the neighbour knew something ... and had powerful connections.