Sepia Saturday: holiday postcards

Cigarette dispensers, cigarette advertising, smoking. Hmmm. Can't follow the theme this week for Sepia Saturday with a photo from my family albums - I can't find a single photo with anyone smoking! But I have got a few postcards sent to a relative early in the 1900s. Smoking? Tick. Sepia? Uh, uh :(

Now you could wander over to the Sepia Saturday page to see what others made of the theme this week.

Martha Taylor the midwife

Martha Taylor nee Brown is my great-grandmother. She grew up on a farm near Cobden in south-western Victoria and married Henry Taylor in 1893 when she was 19 years old.

Henry was a vegetable grower, a market gardener, and they lived at South Ecklin west of Cobden, then Cobden, also Lismore and in the Rochester district of northern Victoria. Ecklin is good farming country now but in those days the farmers had to clear an awful lot of trees and undergrowth off the land before they could start ploughing - it was hard work. And Martha worked hard too because she produced eight children and raised them all successfully. In doing so she must have learned a lot about childbirth and put the knowledge to good use by becoming a registered midwife. As far as I can work out she was a midwife for well over twenty years, using her own home as a 'private hospital'.

Martha Brown and Henry Taylor, 1893

Martha Taylor, Sylvester St, Cobden, with her chooks (chickens) and house cow.
The house in the background was her private hospital.

My friend Pam found the following entry for me when she was doing some indexing. I hadn't realised that midwives had to be registered.

Victorian Government Gazette, 26 May 1930.
It lists Martha Taylor as a registered midwife, her address, the date of her original registration (1918)
and the fact that she was involved in midwifery in 1913 (code 14b).

And I found this notice in the local newspaper report about council correspondence in 1917. Martha's residence is approved as a private hospital.

Camperdown Chronicle 15 Sep 1917

Martha (2nd r) and Henry Taylor (l) with family members in mid 1930s.

Martha Taylor with her daughter Dorothy Wyllie, my grandmother.

I wonder what sort of person Martha was. In the photos she looks very stern. She had dealt with some very sad events in her life, but she had also cared for a number of foster children as well as her own so must have been generous by nature I think. And I'd love to have a chat with her because I reckon she'd have some stories to tell.

Monday is washing day

Sunday Jan 15th.

A terribly hot day; wind blowing, dust flying, everywhere so hot and disagreeable. Mr Cock preached here today, a splendid service; Matthew 2, 11.

Monday Jan 16th. Washing day.

Tuesday Jan 17th.

Ironing day. 

It was 1888. Rhoda Andrew was 18 years old when she wrote those words in her diary. She was living with her parents and older sister on a wheat farm in central Victoria. Her simple life revolved around corresponding and socialising with friends and relations, attending church, helping her father on the farm and her mother with housework. She kept a diary for about 18 months and I've used it to glean bits and pieces of family history, but with these entries I'm highlighting her daily life.

Weatherboard cottage c1900.  This was a town house in NSW but country farm houses were very similar.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/3073212700/

Rhoda is complaining about the weather and the only thing she finds to write about on Monday and Tuesday is the washing and ironing she has to do. The Bendigo Advertiser report confirms the hot temperature for Sunday 15 January 1888, about 107 degrees F (42 C). Bendigo is south of where Rhoda lived near Pyramid Hill. 

Bendigo Advertiser, 16 January 1988

Can you imagine Rhoda in her long-sleeved floor-length dress slaving over a copper washing tub and a fire to heat the water, and wooden scrubbing board? (I wonder when wringers were invented.) If you had called her workspace a laundry she wouldn't have known what you were talking about. She would have called it a wash house and it was usually a separate building from the house. And nearby would have been the clothes line suspended between trees or props with a forked branch handy to lower and raise the line as required.

Can you see her heating the flat irons on a hot wood-burning stove? And then, poor girl, she had to do it all again the following week. 

Flat irons on the stove. Source unknown. Copied off the web a while ago.

I've written about Rhoda's diary previously here, and will probably blog more of it in the future.

Trove Tuesday: Dunmunkle Parish

I remember years ago spending days at the Public Record Office (PRO) in Victoria trying to track down the properties that various ancestors selected in the 1800s.

We first had to locate the parish maps and that led to the wonderful selection files that are held at the PRO. It wasn't easy to find the appropriate maps - some editions of the maps didn't include the famous fraction and without the fraction it was very difficult to access the selection files. The fraction? If you look at allotment 48 on the map below you can see in the bottom left a number 5735 over 19. That was the magic number that led to the selection papers of my great-great-grandfather, William George Smith. W G Smith and his wife Sarah Alice (nee Hillgrove) lived all their married lives on this property. Their home there was called 'Eulong'.

Part of Dunmunkle Parish, County of Borung, Victoria, Feb. 1880
Online at State Library of Victoria. Accessed from a link at Trove.

The same area today, entirely cultivated for crops. Google Maps.

So if William George (known as George) owned the land why does the map show Mary Smith as the owner?

Mary was George's sister and so was Alice Rebecca Smith whose name is on the allotment next door. Both girls and several brothers selected land in the parish at the same time as their father Ephraim when the family moved to the Wimmera district from Warrnambool in the 1870s. Anyone over the age of 18 years was able to select a maximum of 320 acres so that meant the girls could apply. George wasn't old enough. The family members would have all worked as a team on all of the land parcels. There were strict government regulations to comply with including improvements, enclosing, clearing and cultivation, as well as a requirement that they live on the land.  In 1892 Mary transferred the lease on allotment 48 to her brother George.

The dry bed of Dunmunkle Creek. Copyright David Craker

See that wriggly line on the left side of the map? That's Dunmunkle Creek. When the Smiths first moved to the area Ephraim's wife Elizabeth went looking for the creek, in vain. It looks like this most of the time - not exactly a reliable water supply.

Today the parish maps are easy to find. I found the Dunmunkle Parish map on a link via Trove to the State Library of Victoria's website. If you know where to look they are also on the PRO's website. Not so easy is accessing the selection files. You have to go to the PRO in person for those but it's worth it. They are little goldmines. It's amazing to be able to hold in your hand, as I did, a letter written by an ancestor 120 years ago explaining to 'the government' that he wouldn't be able to pay his lease because the crop failed.