Catherine Riley

[Marcia Powell]

hi all again,
I feel I may have to give up on ever receiving information re catherine rileys mothere and fathers name, but was wondering has any of her descendants have any old photos of maybe ctherine or her children?    Would so love to know this,
regards Marcia

[kenneth cooke]

We know very little about the early Browns and Rileys, as Irish records are difficult to find, and
many have been destroyed. It was not compulsory for Catholics to register births, deaths or marriages, until general registration began in Ireland on 1 Jan.1864.
Before that, it may be possible to find church records of baptisms, marriages and burials but there are many gaps. In some parishes, burials were not recorded at all.
 
Thomas Brown, c.1830 and Catherine Riley, 1832, were the Irish parents of my paternal grandmother, Jane Cecilia Brown (1870-1954). He was from Westmeath, and she was from Fermanagh in the north. Their exact birthplaces are not known.
They first met in Melbourne in about 1851, a year or so after Catherine’s arrival, perhaps at St.Francis' Church in Lonsdale Street, which had been consecrated in 1845. Thomas was then a policeman and Catherine was in domestic service as a nursemaid.
The details of Thomas’ arrival are not so clear, but he probably arrived a little earlier than Catherine. I have followed up all the Thomas Browns of the right age, and excluded all except one.
The only likely candidate is a Thomas Brown who came on the ‘Joseph Soames’ via Hobart, arriving at Port Henry (Geelong) on 24.9.1847, one of 249 men who had been ‘exiled’ for petty crimes.
In other words, they were convicts, but they were pardoned on arrival, and could move and work freely as long as they stayed in the colony for the duration of their sentences.
This Thomas, 15 years old, had been apprehended in Birmingham for ‘stealing from the person’, which meant picking pockets. On 9 Jan.1846 at the Birmingham Quarter Sessions Court he was sentenced to 10 years exile. Whether he was Irish or English was not recorded.
On the same day, a James McCarty, an Irish youth, was sentenced to 7 years exile for stealing an apple pie. The boys were held at Millbank Prison from 20 Jan.1846 until they sailed in June 1847. Thomas was single, could read and write and was taught ‘the tailoring trade’ while in Millbank Prison. We know that our Thomas was Irish, not English, but there was an influx of hungry and homeless people from Ireland as a result of the potato famine, 1846 to 1849.
249 men from four English prisons were embarked on the ‘Joseph Soames’, which sailed from Spithead (Portsmouth) on 4.6.1847, bound for Port Phillip via Hobart Town. Before they sailed, a pardon, signed by the Queen, was announced. Even so, the residents of the District of Port Phillip, which was then part of the Colony of New South Wales, were not enthusiastic, as the district refused to accept convicts, not even those who had served their time in other colonies or districts, so-called ‘ticket of leave’ men. (Victoria became a separate Colony in 1850.)
On arrival at Port Henry, a Lieut. Addis boarded the ship and read to the convicts the conditions of their freedom, at the same time advising them to head for the bush, as the residents of Melbourne and Geelong would not welcome them in the towns.
Once ashore, they were indentured to employers in the same way as immigrants on ‘assisted passage’. The ship’s disposal list states that the convict Thomas Brown was to work as a general servant for Rupert Simson of Geelong for 12 months at £22 p.a. but it seems that he was instead employed as a ‘shepherd’ by John Brock of Mt. Macedon for six months at £20 p.a.

Whether or not the boy on the Joseph Soames was ‘our Thomas’ remains to be verified, but James McCarty turns out to have been from Ballymore, Westmeath, which is the home county of ‘our’ Thomas Brown, so perhaps they knew each other.

See also topic 'Joseph Soames'.

[kenneth cooke]

As for our Thomas Brown, the story goes that he became a policeman in Melbourne. It seems strange that a freed convict could become a trooper (mounted policeman), but there was a gold rush on, and there were many desperate men who ambushed the gold transport convoys, and more troopers were needed. And it was not thought necessary to check police records of applicants, as officially there were no convicts in Victoria.
Also, the number of dismissals was very high, as many of the newly recruited troopers were found to be unsuitable. In fact, in the 1850s we find the dismissals of three troopers named Thomas Brown, one English, one Scottish, and one Irish.
In any case, the story has surfaced from several sources in the family that our Thomas had been
a trooper. There was even a claim that one of his grandsons kept Thomas’ helmet and reins in his garage, up to the mid-1900s. But on the birth and baptism records of his children, Thomas was always a miner, so his career with the police must have been short, perhaps two or three years.

We know a little more about Catherine Riley. She was classified as an ‘orphan’ when she entered Enniskillen workhouse on 12.10.1847, the second year of the famine. She was ‘16 years, orphan, clean & healthy’. ‘Orphan’ in that context, meant that her parents either were dead, or that they could not afford to keep her.
I think her parents were still alive. She never once gave her parents’ names in Australia, and they are marked as ‘unknown’ on her death certificate. Not even her children knew who their grand-parents were. Perhaps the names given to her children might provide a clue in the future. She left the workhouse on 3.10.1849 to begin her trip to Australia.
Her workhouse record mentions three places- Whitehill, Larragh and Ballycassidy, just north of Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. One genealogist from Enniskillen told me that all three places were ‘gentry houses’ which would have employed a number of people, especially young men and women. He believes that she was working at one of these places when the famine struck, but may well have been from a neighbouring county.

[kenneth cooke]

In Ireland, as in England, the Poor Law was set up to help needy people. Property holders were obliged to pay a tax to establish and maintain a workhouse in each district. This was not a great expense, and those who were able, worked in the workhouse and generated some income for the house. But when a million people suddenly could not pay the rent, and became homeless, hungry and desperate, they flooded the workhouses. Property owners, also desperate, looked for another solution. One was found.
It cost £5 per year to keep an adult in the workhouse. This was ‘a permanent drain’ with no end in sight. It only cost £5 for a passage to the colonies or to the USA, a one-off cost. At first people were shipped to the USA and Canada, but there was a limit to this outlet, and it was soon restricted. The British government looked to Australia, but the colonial authorities objected that there were far more men than women there, four to one in the towns, and twice that number in rural areas. What Australia needed was young, healthy, single women. It was decided to select this category from the Irish workhouses, and send them to the colonies in Australia.
The first shipload of 200 orphan girls from Ireland came to Port Jackson (Sydney) on the ‘Earl Grey’ in 1848. They were under the medical supervision of the surgeon superintendant, Doctor Henry Grattan Douglass, who was returning to Australia after a number of years in Europe.
(Incidentally, I am distantly related through another line [Cooke/Sweny] to his wife Hester, née Murphy, whose mother was Margaret Swiney of Wexford) Both the Douglass’ died in New South Wales.
There was much trouble on that voyage, which gave a bad name to orphan girls from Northern Ireland. It was due partly to the behaviour of the girls on the Earl Grey, (known as ‘the Belfast girls’ as most of them were from the Belfast workhouse), and also to the biased and negative report of Dr. Douglass, who was later removed from public office.
The scandal caused the authorities in Sydney to immediately send about 25% of the girls to Maitland and Moreton Bay (Brisbane). Consequently, future transports of girls from the north were destined for Port Phillip rather than Port Jackson. This was fortunate for us, because the girls on a later ship, the ‘Diadem’ came to Melbourne, not Sydney.

[kenneth cooke]

Catherine Riley was one of 204 ‘orphan’ girls on the Diadem which sailed from Plymouth on 13.10.1849. One girl died on the voyage, and several babies were born.
Catherine was RC, she could read but not write, and was in possession of a bible. In fact, every
girl had been given a bible as well as clothing. They arrived at Port Phillip on 10th. January 1850. The girls were taken to a ‘depôt’ from where they were assigned to employers according to their suitability. Catherine was indentured to Daniel Leahy, a grocer of Latrobe Street, to be a nursemaid for 6 months, at a salary of £9 per year. After that she would be free to move as she wished.

She met Thomas in Melbourne. Later he was transferred to a police camp at Elphinstone, near Castlemaine. Catherine served out her indenture time, and either went with him or joined him later. Their first child, Mary Ann, was born there on 19 March 1852. In those days, there were very few priests and churches in country areas. Priests visited camps, gold mines etc. from time to time. Father Maurice Stack of St. Francis’ Church Melbourne, the first priest ordained in Victoria (1851) came to the Castlemaine district and was asked by Thomas to baptise his daughter. He insisted that Thomas and Catherine should first get married. This meant returning to Melbourne, which they did, and they were married on 5th. May 1852 by Fr. Stack at St. Francis’ church.  When Father Stack next visited Castlemaine, in August 1853, Mary Ann was baptised.

It was around this time that Thomas parted company with the police force, and became a miner. They moved to Liberty Flats, between Taradale and Malmsbury. Nine more children were born, Elizabeth on 24.8.1854 at Fryerstown, the rest in Taradale where Thomas was a miner- Catherine on 28.5.1856, Thomas Henry on 5.4.1858, John Edward 3.7.1861, Margaret (Maggie) 29.11.1862, James Sylvester 23.4.1865, Ellen (Nellie) 7.4.1868, Jane Cecilia (Ginnie) 26.7.1870 and Henry Phillip (Harry) on 22.12.1873.
Thomas Brown died on 28th August 1886 at Piper St. Kyneton. The certificate gives his age as 56. He died from an inflamed middle ear, meningitis and a cerebral abscess. About his parents, we have only the dubious information on his death certificate, that they were Thomas Brown, farmer, and Catherine McGuiness. His place of birth was given as Dublin. These details are questionable, as he always said he was from Westmeath. The informant was his eldest daughter Mary Ann Sims of Taradale. Thomas and Catherine were her own parents’ names.
Catherine lived another 26 years, and died on 9th April 1912 at Malmsbury. Senile decay was cited. No parents’ names were given. It was said that in old age she had thick wavy white hair, ‘like a washboard’.  She and Thomas are buried at Malmsbury.

[kenneth cooke]

Re the origins of Catherine & Thomas, I have just noticed a few details from the birth registration
of their youngest child Henry, in 1873.
Thomas Brown was the father, he was a miner, aged 42, and was born in Westmeath County, Ireland. The mother was Catherine Brown, formerly Riley, 42 years born in Fermanagh County, Ireland.
I thought this was someone else's version, until I saw that the informant was Catherine herself. She signed with a cross. So there we have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Only the ages don't quite tally.