Sepia Saturday: Euphemia

You know the saying. 'Behind every successful man there is a good woman.' Well there was a 'good woman' in our family. Her name was Euphemia and she was my husband's great-grandmother.

Euphemia Sims (nee Yeaman) 1866-1941

Euphemia was a daughter and a wife, a mother and a grandmother. She lived in Victoria, Australia for 75 years and was never an 'independent' woman or a 'career' woman. She was the daughter of a farmer and the wife of a farmer/butter manufacturer/storekeeper.

Charles Yeaman was born in Scotland and his mother's name was Euphemia Craig so naturally he would want to name his daughter after her. His English-born wife probably yielded willingly because almost all of Euphemia's siblings were given family names.

Euphemia in Greek means 'speak well' (euphemism comes from the same roots) and has never been especially popular as a name for girls, but it was used fairly frequently in Scotland up to the 1800s. Nicknames were common too so some of the Euphemias were called Effie of Phemie or even Mia, and our Euphemia was called Pheme. And she wasn't the only descendant of Euphemia Craig to carry her name. She named her daughter Euphemia Evelyn Sims (known as Elvie) and a grandaughter was called Euphemia Joy Phelan (known as Joy), and there was also a Euphemia Paynter (known as Fame), Louise Euphemia Yeaman and Euphemia Elizabeth Rigby (known as Effy).

Until she was about nine years old Grandma Euphemia lived on a farm at Cobaw east of Kyneton and then her parents selected land at Tennyson about half way between Echuca and Bendigo. They were very good farmers, innovative and industrious. And so was the man she married about twenty years later, Charles Sims. He lived nearby, at Pine Grove, and as well as farming he established a store and a butter factory on his farm. (Descendants still own the farm.)

Riverine Herald (Echuca), 23 June 1892

Charles and Euphemia Sims

Charles and Euphemia Sims with their family in 1916.

Charles and Pheme had six children while they lived at Pine Grove and then they left the oldest son on the farm and moved to Mitiamo, a nearby town that had grown up around the railway station. Charles was a very busy man because he ran a successful country store and had numerous other interests and investments as well as maintaining an interest in farming. Church was a very important part of their lives too. He and Euphemia were leaders in their community and for Euphemia life was busy too - as well as the normal cooking and cleaning and preparing for family and community events there was the unexpected.  During the Great War women knitted and baked and sewed for their soldiers, frequent letter writing was crucial. The family had a holiday house at Hepburn Springs too so like all holiday houses that too had to be cleaned, especially after it had been rented to other people.

Later in Euphemia's life another war took family members overseas to serve and once again the women in the community rallied.

Pheme was much loved by her family. I asked my father-in-law what his grandmother was like as a person and he said one word. Kind. She was a kind lady. And then he added that she was also an excellent cook. I could have guessed the latter because her daughters were great cooks. When I first met her daughter Annie (my husband's grandmother) she made an apple pie for dinner. From scratch. She made the puff pastry by breaking butter pieces over the rolled out pastry before folding and rolling and buttering again repeatedly. It was an amazing thing to see and I was properly impressed. I didn't guess that Euphemia was kind because in photos she looks quite stern, but there are hints. See in the photo below how her daughter is snuggling close and has one leg behind her mum? And notice in the family photo, above, that four of her children are touching their mother.

Euphemia with her daughter Euphemia Evelyn (Elv) and grandchild.

In 1936 Euphemia turned 70 and the family got together at Annie's house in Mitiamo to celebrate. You can imagine the preparation that was involved and the cooking that was done. It was a sit-down meal and the photo show a table laden with cakes and slices on stands, flowers, nibbles and who knows what else. The birthday cake has two layers and 70 candles.

Family at Euphemia Sims' 70th birthday party, Mitiamo, 1936.

When Euphemia died five years later each of the children and her husband inserted a moving notice in the paper with phrases like "God's richest gift, our mother." and "A life made beautiful by kindly deeds."

The Argus, 3 September 1941

This blog is in response to the theme photo for this week's Sepia Saturday. I suggest you make a glutton of yourself and wander over there to feast on other blogs.

Trove Tuesday: In which they danced all night

Wow, they really knew how to party in 1889.

Sarah Yeaman and William Rigby partied with friends the whole night to celebrate their wedding. Auld Lang Syne was sung at daybreak - I'm surprised they found the energy!

Riverine Herald (Echuca) 6 Nov 1889

Pannoobamawm is a farming area near Echuca but you won't find it on Google Maps. Bamawm, Pine Grove or Tennyson are other names used for the area. The Yeaman families farmed in the Tennyson area and Sarah's parents, Charles and Sarah, had a farm they called 'Shadyside'. The house must have been bigger than I thought because the newspaper article states that after the midnight supper the 100 guests filed back into the ballroom to listen to songs and recitations and to continue dancing.

The house had a ballroom? They waited until midnight to serve supper?

Sarah, a sister of my husband's great grandmother, was 25 years old but she had apparently already made a name for herself as an exhibitor at agricultural shows and had won Champion Butter of Australia at the Melbourne Show. Champion Butter of Australia! And her husband, William Rigby, was first President of the local Mutual Improvement Association. I'm not sure what the association was exactly but it seems to have encouraged education etc.

Riverine Herald (Echuca) 1 Aug 1889

William and Sarah Rigby lived in the Tennyson area for a number of years before retiring to Melbourne.

PS Just as an aside. I'm wondering what the bathroom facilities were like at 'Shadyside'. It was November so it was probably warm, one hundred guests for about twelve hours, lots of dancing, supper, fifty or more ladies in their beautiful long and complicated dresses, corsets etc ...
How did they manage?

A team of Yeamans

Bendigo Advertiser, 18 Aug 1893

A cricket team has eleven players and according to another article I found about this match they all had the surname 'Yeaman'. So I checked the family tree.

The Yeaman family migrated from Scotland in 1841 and settled down to farming in the Kyneton area of Victoria. By 1893 the next generation had spread to several other areas of Victoria including Tennyson and Pine Grove near Echuca. There were seven surviving children but two of those were daughters. Of the sons in 1893, Robert was living in Williamstown and his son was too young, William was living in Williamstown and his sons were too young, George (56 years old) didn't have any children, Charles (aged 60) was farming in Tennyson and had seven sons, Archibald (aged 63) was farming at Tennyson and had six sons. So in my reckoning it was possible to put together a full cricket team of Yeamans.

Sister Yeaman

More Than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I , Kirsty Harris - Google Books

I accidentally  found Edith when I was looking in Australian Archives for World War 1 service records of relatives. In my mind I was looking for soldiers, all male, but then up popped a female. So of course I had to have a look at her file and I've sincebeen to the library and borrowed the book More Than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I  by Kirsty Harris. (I also found sections of that book on Google Books and that's where the picture above came from.) Edith is a relative but somewhat distant (first cousin of my father-in-law's grandmother!) so her close family might be surprised to find her here but, as far as I know, she's my only female relative who went off to war as a nurse.

Edith Wilson Yeaman, at the age of 30, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in Victoria in May 1915, about three weeks after the landing at Gallipoli. She was a nurse at Melbourne Hospital and was also a member of the Australian Army Nursing Service, a reserve that was established in 1900. In the AANS Edith would have attended lectures, done first aid, paraded and attended field camps. But it didn't actually prepare the nurses for the harsh conditions in a field hospital. The organisation and the nurses themselves were thrown in the deep end and they had to learn 'on the job' how to cope with trench foot, frostbite, shell shock, mustard gas, dysentery, gangrene, surgical nursing and shrapnel wounds. As well as nursing in tents, an extreme lack of supplies of food and equipment. And hospitals run according to strict military routines (when to get up, when to shave, when to bathe). It seems madness to insist that patients who were able had to stand to attention at the foot of their beds when the Medical Officer did his rounds each day! Nurses also had to escort convalescents to Egypt, England or Australia, they wrote letters home for ill soldiers, they became adept at scrounging supplies and extras for 'their boys'.

Edith was appointed to 3 A.G.H. (3rd Australian General Hospital), left Melbourne on the Mooltan and arrived in Egypt. A year later her file records her as returning from a period of recuperation in a British convalescent home for sick nurses at Bulkeley, just outside Alexandria.    This quote is from a website about the 3 AGH <http://throughtheselines.com.au/research/3-AGH>

The unit arrived in England on 27 June 1915, expecting to be posted to France. However, on 1 July, the commanding officer was informed that they would instead be deployed to Mudros, on the Greek island of Lemnos, where they would nurse the sick and injured troops fighting in the Gallipoli campaign. Lemnos was only 50 miles from the fighting, whereas the hospitals in Egypt were over 650 miles away, a journey of 1½ days.
When 3 A.G.H. first started admitting patients, the majority were wounded men from the August offensive, and it was these patients the hospital had been set up for, with operating theatres and surgeons on the staff. In later months, nearly all the patients were ill with either dysentery or paratyphoid. The staff of the hospital also fell ill, though the nurses suffered less, probably by practising better hygiene. in late November and December, the casualties changed again – troops were caught in freezing weather on the Peninsula without adequate clothing, and many were admitted to the hospitals on Lemnos suffering from severe frostbite.
The last Australians were evacuated from Gallipoli on the night of 19/20 December, and many spent Christmas on Lemnos while waiting for further orders. The whole evacuation of allied troops took three weeks. In spite of earlier predictions that up to half the remaining forces could be killed, the evacuations were so well planned that there were minimal casualties, which was a relief to the hospital staff who had been prepared for casualties. With the end of the Gallipoli campaign, the hospitals on Lemnos were disbanded. The nurses boarded the hospital ship Oxfordshire on 14 January, and sailed out of the harbour at Mudros on 17 January, bound for Egypt.
We have just seen the last of Lemnos. Of course we are glad, yet there are many things we will miss; the unconventional freedom and the unique experiences we had there… Goodbye Lemnos. We take away many happy memories of you. I would not have liked to miss you, yet I have no desire to see you again. —Sister Anne Donnell
3 A.G.H. was re-established at Abbassia in Egypt in early 1916 in an old harem, where it operated for approximately eight months. The staff then operated the Kitchener War Hospital at Brighton, England from October 1916 before moving to Abbeville, France, from May 1917.

Staff, No 3 AGH Christmas Day, Lemnos
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:1090

Nurse Yeaman worked at hospitals in France and England in 1917 and 1918, was promoted to Sister in July 1917 and was herself admitted to hospital several times extremely ill with severe bronchitis and influenza in the winter of 1917/1918. In March 1919 she embarked at Portsmouth, England as one of the nursing staff on the ship Czaritza returning to Australia with a full quota of injured soldiers. At Port Said they transferred to another ship, the Dunluce Castle. 

Papers Past, New Zealand 

One of the passengers wrote about the voyage: 

Beneath Hill 60, Will Davies                 Source: Google Books

Edith disembarked at Melbourne 15 May 1919, almost four years after she left. She never married and continued to work in hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney. Like many of her fellow nurses Edith's brothers also enlisted in the AIF and served in France. Pte Wilfred Charles Yeaman left Victoria several months after Edith and also returned in 1919, Pte Lindsay Frederick left Australia in 1915, was injured four times in action and returned to Australia in 1919.

Edith Wilson YEAMAN, daughter of William Bunyan YEAMAN and Harriet Mary Ann WILSON, was born in 1884 in Elmore, Victoria, Australia. She died in 1963 in North Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.