My computer is frustrating me so much! Again I just lost an entire message!
Leonie, I don't have the death cert of Muriel Annie or any other cert's of her sisters. I think I will have to order one, probably Ruby's the youngest. As i mentioned before, the eldest daughter of William & Eliza SMITH was referred to as A) Mary A & b) Annie on the death certifcates of respectively, the mother's & the father's death cert's (informants were a) the brother Charles & b) the sister Edith. Muriel Annie was known by the women Mum knew to be her sisters, as ANNIE or MUR or by her husband (MEM)..Mary Elizabeth Muriel ??. Strange.
She lived as a SMITH, as if she was a SMITH, with SMITH girls as her sisters. Some of the SMITH sisters had children illegitimately & my mother knew these as aunts (eg Gertrude was actually Muriel's niece but my Mum thought she was an aunt. But then, Mum was born in 1924. She was 18 when her grandmother died. So Leonie, it is very confusing. Muriel Annie used an alias when she married & continued to use this alias for several years. MAJM has explained some very good reasons why she may have done this. However she does not look like the SMITHS. I've just found out that THOMAS COOPER who was Mary ANN SMITH's maternal grandfather was only short (5 foot). The SMITH women were small. Muriel Annie was quite a tall woman for her time. She looked youthful in her thirties (strange as I mentioned before if she had been brought up in a poor household); also according to my mother she had a lot of grace about her. Some things just don't add up.
:DThanks Sparett for the info on Charles Stanley..I've seen quite a few references to him where he's called Charles.
Re family likenesses...hmmm..I've checked out family photos of Mum's second cousin's children. There are some slight likenesses but these may be coincidental. There was a lot of tragedy in this family..2 of Muriel's children died in infancy. Her eldest daughter Muriel had 2 children (one accidentally hung himself aged 2, the other daughter Molly or Muriel, has spasticity & never had children (she looks I believe like Sophia, Edward's mother, not like Muriel at all), 2 boys died at Dunedoo drowned..Dudley & Frank, one son Louis Dutlinger (Bob) became mentally backward (became so traumatised by the deaths of his brothers..?? what i was told anyway), another daughter Ihlien Edith had spina bifida & had no children...MY GRAN WAS THE ONLY CHILD to reproduce children who had children..so this reduces the odds of finding familial similarities. AND..my mother looks more like her father's side. My MUm says that I have her grandmother's cheekbones but I think I look more like my father's grandmother who also had high cheekbones...aaaah
MAJM thanks for hanging in here. Thank you for that info on the clerks. This explains why probably the same writing as births were at a similar time, though I think that I checked on thsi once before, got a list of the clerks & they were different.
Re the public trees on Mundia (mine not there yet). Yes people tend to copy paste. I've noticed that my Eliza Cooper is up there in some of these trees as marrying George YEATMAN (an EMMA Eliza Cooper married George Yeatman, not my Eliza). Did you check the johemath one...he is the tree that has about 25,000 names on it. He may not have even accurately written in that she was married using an alias; there isn't much scope on the Mundia site to add in info like this.
It is all very confusing. People have assumed that because Muriel Annie knew & recognised the SMITHs as her family that she was MARY ANN SMITH. She celebrated the birthday of Mary Ann SMITH. At one stage I was so convinced that she was someone else that i asked my sister to do a astrological reading with the birth date of Mary Ann SMITH. She said that the reading corresponded to what she had been told by MUM.
MAJM details of MARY ANN SMITH as follows
date 24.11.1868
place phillip st parramatta
female
father William SMITH
labourer
age 22
father born brisbane, qld
mother eliza cooper
age 21
born parramatta
informants...mother eliza smith
witnesses
1) blank a home birth??
2) Mrs Howlet (spelt with one t not 2)...?eliza's grandmother Mary Howlett?
3) Mrs Cooper ?(eliza's mother Mary Cooper, or aunt)
Partic's of reg'n
Percy Simpson ? 5th January 1869, Parramatta
As she was born late in the year November, the birth wasnt registered until the next year...
