A Tale of Two Churches
Feb. 13th, 2005 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xenithI went to Broadmarsh on Friday. I wasn't intending to go to Broadmarsh, in fact, I didn't realise there was a town there, I thought it was just a location on the map. We were actually on our way to Hobart (for what? that will have to wait, unless you want a hint) and we went past a turnoff to Broadmarsh.
"Oh," says I, "that's the place I was trying to remember the other day". Then I was talking about the time I drove down to Hobart, just after I got my license. It was took 6 hours rather than the usual 2. But there were a couple of detours, including one to find the house in the photo.
There's a photo of a house that's been handed down through the family, a decent sized photo mounted on a cardboard surround. On the back, someone has written: Thomas Hall's home in England. Now, Thomas Hall was my g-g-grandfather, which is good, except I happened to know that he was born in southern Tasmania in 1849, and married, raised a family and died in Tasmania.
Then there's the photo itself, at the end of an avenue of pine trees, sits a two storey, square Georgian-style sandstone house, with a verandah over the first storey and what looks suspiciously like gum trees. England? I don't think so. So I take a photocopy and post that to the Archives (it was a few years ago) and they reply with another photocopy of a house, near Broadmarsh. Where Tom's family lived, where the properties his father works on were located. Although it doesn't look like the sort of house they'd have lived in.
Anyway, the next time I was in the area, it's just off the Midlands Highway about 20 mins, so I had to go and find it. Even took a couple of hazy photos of it. Years ago, back in the early 90s, now I can't remember where it is or even its name :(
"The other day?" says Mother, "the cemetery?"
"No, the house but, oh the cemetery. Oh yeah, that must be up that road too."
Cemetery? One of the useful resources for family history research in Tasmania is TAMIOT (Tombstone and Memorial Inscriptions of Tasmania) which is an index/partial transcriptions of all the (existing) headstones, memorials in the state. All of them. If a headstone exists, the details will be on TAMIOT. Which is obviously handy, although it takes a lot of fun out of finding the bloody things yourself. Over the years, we've managed to visit all of the relevant family ones and some of those visits have been interesting e.g. the Catholic cemetery on the hill outside the little mining town of Avoca, with the signs warning you to be careful where you walk because there are very deep holes in the hill.
Thomas Hall, his wife and most of his kids are buried at Perth, just south of Launceston. His parents though -- as far as I can work out, his mother died in New Zealand and his father died near Broadmarsh but I had no record of his burial or headstone. It happens. Headstones are never erected, fall over, go missing, are moved. It's a wonder any manage to exist sometimes. I've been doing the family history thing since I was 16 or so and after a while, you just accept some things aren't there to find. That hasn't stopped me hoping I might still might find one for that couple. Which is why, when I had TAMIOT out the other day looking for something in the Hs, I had another check to see if there was anything possible for Elizabeth Hall. Of course not. Although I did notice a Charles Hall, died 13 March 1850, aged 19, buried in Broadmarsh who might be connected to the family so I made a note. Then I looked this up in the BDM index to find out more about him. Except he's not there. For all that Charles & Hall are common names, there are a whole 5 of them in the index - two infants, a 12 year who died in 1899, a 40 year old in Hobart in 1850 & a 49 year old in Brighton in 1870. Broadmarsh is in the Brighton distract. That's my g-g-grandfather, who died 17 March. Hmm. If the headstone is worn, 1870 is only one digit off 1850 and 17 is one digit from 13 and a 4 would like a 1 in the age. It's possible...
But irrelevant. For all that we drive to Hobart regularly, more these days than in the past, we're usually going Somewhere and have to be there by a Certain Time, so making detours to some obscure country cemetery to check odd theories isn't really something we find time for.
Yet, here we are on a Friday afternoon, we don't have to be in Hobart until "after tea" and we do, actually, have time to kill.
Mum turns around and we head up the road. Except, I can't remember any details other than the cemetery is "on the road to Broadmarsh". There are only 3 roads that go to Broadmarsh. At least, I think it's Broadmarsh where they lived. Or was it Bothwell? Too far away. Hamilton? No, started with a B. Brighton? No, that's on the highway. Has to be Broadmarsh.
Partway along the road becomes unsealed. Arck. Still, we're committed (or should be) now. The problem with old cemeteries is they often look like rocky paddocks or a lot of trees stumps. If you're lucky, there's a church nearby to spot. I'm trying to keep on eye on the paddocks on the either side but they're rather well, not that interesting. The road goes on and on and I'm wondering if it's some magic road that never ends.
"Are those hills getting any closer?"
"We're driving all the way to the hills?"
"No, I was just thinking they don't seem to be getting any closer."
There's a car parked on the side of the road, a young woman patting horses and a young man leaning against the car waiting. But he doesn't know where the cemetery is because they're just visiting and stopped to look at the horses.
Soon we reach the road that actually runs through Broadmarsh, at the base of the hills, literally, the side of the road was the bottom of a cliff cut from the hills. A short way along, we find "Church St", a narrow, unsealed track going up a hill. Of course, we go up there and along, and along, and along. And this road ends up (somewhere rather off the track, heading towards New Norfolk). So we turn back. As we're coming back down the hill, I see... The House!
"House?"
"Yeah, The House. There it is."
And it is, hiding away at the end of slightly thinner avenue of pine trees. Strathelie.
We're in the right bit of the world then. Now where's the bloody cemetery?
We reach the sign that says Broadmarsh soon after this and there is, in fact, a town. A number of houses, one of which might have been a shop. A hall. A striking, two storey, sandstone house with very high gables (the post office, I've since found out) but no church. Not even a weatherboard, single room little church. Odd. We reach the end of the town. Bah. And keep going. Then we see it, on a hill, a church! A decent sized, sandstone church too and, there are, headstones. Yah.
Mum drives up. "Be careful of snakes", she says, and blows the car horn a few times. As we're getting out, a dog barks. "Be careful of the dogs." She leaves the car door unlocked, "just in case" and then as I walk over to one corner of the headstones, she starts on about a bees nest. ...
The first headstone is so worn it's not readable. "That's probably the level of worn we're looking for." If there are as many errors in the index entry as I'm hoping, it's obviously hard to read.
Most of the headstones are the 20th C sort but there's a smattering of older ones.
"Charles, we want. 1849." No, wait. "I can't remember when he died. Or the date, or even his age. 1870! That's it. I think. It might be 1869."
Nothing. Nothing resembling Hall. There's some flat/on the ground ones that are hard to read but they look like multiple graves i.e. family plots.
"Did he have family?"
"No." Pause. "Although the wife did, Elizabeth. Johnson, her father was Thomas I think. Her brother, half-brother, was Hugh, that's how I found them." Why does my memory retain details like these?
After a while, we have to admit defeat. I go back to the first stone, because it's the only possible, but what looks like the last letter of the surname is a diagonal. Considering the nearby graves are Mann, it's probably an N. (For the benefit of those who are sensible and don't wander around old cemeteries, the depth of the carving of the lines that makes up the letters varies, usually the vertical lines are the deepest but sometimes, as with the N, the diagonal line is the deepest. Over time, the carving wears away and the shallow parts of the letters disappear first. So, a word like THE will appear like ||||. Even on a stone in good condition, it can be hard to tell T from L from I. Fortunately, the layout & wording don't vary that much so a bit of guess work goes a long way). Besides, it's small so probably a child's grave.
It does occur to us that we don't know what religion the cemetery is.
"There's no names that indicate what religion it is," mum notes.
"There's not "Pray for the soul of" so it's not Catholic," I add.
It's probably Church of England. When there's one church in a town, it's almost always C of E, the second one will be Catholic, then Uniting (usually ex-Methodist), then other Uniting, Baptist etc. I can't remember what religion Charles was, other than it wasn't Catholic.
"No Johnsons either," mum says.
Bah. Waste of time.
So, I take some photos of the church and we leave. Mum decides to drive a bit further up the road, just in case. We nsee the sign outside the church and it is Anglican.
But we're right out in the country now and there won't be any more, wait, there's a little sandstone, oh, it's disappeared, over there on the left, behind those trees. Yes, another church.
It's probably Catholic, I mutter. Then the sign appears:
There's a little plaque on the gate, mentioning in whose honour they were erected in. Johnson. Hmm. That's a good sign. Mum stops the car part way inside. Hurry up.
She looks at the headstones as we get out of the car. She reads out the names on the first one "Isabell" (her mum's middle name).
"Isabell was a common Scottish--" I pause. "Charles came from Scotland. Oh. So, he's not likely to be buried in a C of E cemetery but rather (think, think) one of the ones that made up the Uniting Church. Like Congregational."
Ha!
Except, this is only small cemetery with a whole three older headstones visible. I say visible because it's a tad overgrown.
Of the old ones, one is broken and badly worn. Another is for Joseph Thurlow. They ran out of room putting his name on it, so the W is written above the rest. The third I can't remember because it was of even less interest to us than the other two. Bah. We poke around a bit. There's a flat stone over amongst some newer ones that we can't get into. Not very hopeful. Mum looks around for something to beat the grass down with. I go back to the unreadable one.
"It does seem to end in two lines," I say. And now that I'm looking at it again, it might be \||. Hmm. Mum comes and helps. She's looking at the year.
"1870," she says.
"Really?"
We spend some time on it, and eventually come up with:
C|__________ALL
Who
March 17 1870
19 (or is it 49?)
Ha again! We write it down to check the date when we get home, take a photo, wander around looking at the church and then home. Feeling very pleased with ourselves.
"They feel more real when you've seen their headstone," mum notes when we're back on the road. Indeed, it's a physical remnant of a real person rather than just a name & date in an index. Which is the thing I dislike about TAMIOT, it discourages you from getting out and visiting those little towns where those people died, and lived.
So, that was Charles Hall, a shepherd from Morebattle in the border counties of Scotland until he was transported to Van Diemens Land for stealing sheep. Here he met the daughter of a free settler, they had a child, married and had a few more children. He was riding home from an auction sale with some friends and they started to race, Chas fell from his horse and died instantly.
(And yes, the date matches.)
"Oh," says I, "that's the place I was trying to remember the other day". Then I was talking about the time I drove down to Hobart, just after I got my license. It was took 6 hours rather than the usual 2. But there were a couple of detours, including one to find the house in the photo.
There's a photo of a house that's been handed down through the family, a decent sized photo mounted on a cardboard surround. On the back, someone has written: Thomas Hall's home in England. Now, Thomas Hall was my g-g-grandfather, which is good, except I happened to know that he was born in southern Tasmania in 1849, and married, raised a family and died in Tasmania.
Then there's the photo itself, at the end of an avenue of pine trees, sits a two storey, square Georgian-style sandstone house, with a verandah over the first storey and what looks suspiciously like gum trees. England? I don't think so. So I take a photocopy and post that to the Archives (it was a few years ago) and they reply with another photocopy of a house, near Broadmarsh. Where Tom's family lived, where the properties his father works on were located. Although it doesn't look like the sort of house they'd have lived in.
Anyway, the next time I was in the area, it's just off the Midlands Highway about 20 mins, so I had to go and find it. Even took a couple of hazy photos of it. Years ago, back in the early 90s, now I can't remember where it is or even its name :(
"The other day?" says Mother, "the cemetery?"
"No, the house but, oh the cemetery. Oh yeah, that must be up that road too."
Cemetery? One of the useful resources for family history research in Tasmania is TAMIOT (Tombstone and Memorial Inscriptions of Tasmania) which is an index/partial transcriptions of all the (existing) headstones, memorials in the state. All of them. If a headstone exists, the details will be on TAMIOT. Which is obviously handy, although it takes a lot of fun out of finding the bloody things yourself. Over the years, we've managed to visit all of the relevant family ones and some of those visits have been interesting e.g. the Catholic cemetery on the hill outside the little mining town of Avoca, with the signs warning you to be careful where you walk because there are very deep holes in the hill.
Thomas Hall, his wife and most of his kids are buried at Perth, just south of Launceston. His parents though -- as far as I can work out, his mother died in New Zealand and his father died near Broadmarsh but I had no record of his burial or headstone. It happens. Headstones are never erected, fall over, go missing, are moved. It's a wonder any manage to exist sometimes. I've been doing the family history thing since I was 16 or so and after a while, you just accept some things aren't there to find. That hasn't stopped me hoping I might still might find one for that couple. Which is why, when I had TAMIOT out the other day looking for something in the Hs, I had another check to see if there was anything possible for Elizabeth Hall. Of course not. Although I did notice a Charles Hall, died 13 March 1850, aged 19, buried in Broadmarsh who might be connected to the family so I made a note. Then I looked this up in the BDM index to find out more about him. Except he's not there. For all that Charles & Hall are common names, there are a whole 5 of them in the index - two infants, a 12 year who died in 1899, a 40 year old in Hobart in 1850 & a 49 year old in Brighton in 1870. Broadmarsh is in the Brighton distract. That's my g-g-grandfather, who died 17 March. Hmm. If the headstone is worn, 1870 is only one digit off 1850 and 17 is one digit from 13 and a 4 would like a 1 in the age. It's possible...
But irrelevant. For all that we drive to Hobart regularly, more these days than in the past, we're usually going Somewhere and have to be there by a Certain Time, so making detours to some obscure country cemetery to check odd theories isn't really something we find time for.
Yet, here we are on a Friday afternoon, we don't have to be in Hobart until "after tea" and we do, actually, have time to kill.
Mum turns around and we head up the road. Except, I can't remember any details other than the cemetery is "on the road to Broadmarsh". There are only 3 roads that go to Broadmarsh. At least, I think it's Broadmarsh where they lived. Or was it Bothwell? Too far away. Hamilton? No, started with a B. Brighton? No, that's on the highway. Has to be Broadmarsh.
Partway along the road becomes unsealed. Arck. Still, we're committed (or should be) now. The problem with old cemeteries is they often look like rocky paddocks or a lot of trees stumps. If you're lucky, there's a church nearby to spot. I'm trying to keep on eye on the paddocks on the either side but they're rather well, not that interesting. The road goes on and on and I'm wondering if it's some magic road that never ends.
"Are those hills getting any closer?"
"We're driving all the way to the hills?"
"No, I was just thinking they don't seem to be getting any closer."
There's a car parked on the side of the road, a young woman patting horses and a young man leaning against the car waiting. But he doesn't know where the cemetery is because they're just visiting and stopped to look at the horses.
Soon we reach the road that actually runs through Broadmarsh, at the base of the hills, literally, the side of the road was the bottom of a cliff cut from the hills. A short way along, we find "Church St", a narrow, unsealed track going up a hill. Of course, we go up there and along, and along, and along. And this road ends up (somewhere rather off the track, heading towards New Norfolk). So we turn back. As we're coming back down the hill, I see... The House!
"House?"
"Yeah, The House. There it is."
And it is, hiding away at the end of slightly thinner avenue of pine trees. Strathelie.
We're in the right bit of the world then. Now where's the bloody cemetery?
We reach the sign that says Broadmarsh soon after this and there is, in fact, a town. A number of houses, one of which might have been a shop. A hall. A striking, two storey, sandstone house with very high gables (the post office, I've since found out) but no church. Not even a weatherboard, single room little church. Odd. We reach the end of the town. Bah. And keep going. Then we see it, on a hill, a church! A decent sized, sandstone church too and, there are, headstones. Yah.
Mum drives up. "Be careful of snakes", she says, and blows the car horn a few times. As we're getting out, a dog barks. "Be careful of the dogs." She leaves the car door unlocked, "just in case" and then as I walk over to one corner of the headstones, she starts on about a bees nest. ...
The first headstone is so worn it's not readable. "That's probably the level of worn we're looking for." If there are as many errors in the index entry as I'm hoping, it's obviously hard to read.
Most of the headstones are the 20th C sort but there's a smattering of older ones.
"Charles, we want. 1849." No, wait. "I can't remember when he died. Or the date, or even his age. 1870! That's it. I think. It might be 1869."
Nothing. Nothing resembling Hall. There's some flat/on the ground ones that are hard to read but they look like multiple graves i.e. family plots.
"Did he have family?"
"No." Pause. "Although the wife did, Elizabeth. Johnson, her father was Thomas I think. Her brother, half-brother, was Hugh, that's how I found them." Why does my memory retain details like these?
After a while, we have to admit defeat. I go back to the first stone, because it's the only possible, but what looks like the last letter of the surname is a diagonal. Considering the nearby graves are Mann, it's probably an N. (For the benefit of those who are sensible and don't wander around old cemeteries, the depth of the carving of the lines that makes up the letters varies, usually the vertical lines are the deepest but sometimes, as with the N, the diagonal line is the deepest. Over time, the carving wears away and the shallow parts of the letters disappear first. So, a word like THE will appear like ||||. Even on a stone in good condition, it can be hard to tell T from L from I. Fortunately, the layout & wording don't vary that much so a bit of guess work goes a long way). Besides, it's small so probably a child's grave.
It does occur to us that we don't know what religion the cemetery is.
"There's no names that indicate what religion it is," mum notes.
"There's not "Pray for the soul of" so it's not Catholic," I add.
It's probably Church of England. When there's one church in a town, it's almost always C of E, the second one will be Catholic, then Uniting (usually ex-Methodist), then other Uniting, Baptist etc. I can't remember what religion Charles was, other than it wasn't Catholic.
"No Johnsons either," mum says.
Bah. Waste of time.
So, I take some photos of the church and we leave. Mum decides to drive a bit further up the road, just in case. We nsee the sign outside the church and it is Anglican.
But we're right out in the country now and there won't be any more, wait, there's a little sandstone, oh, it's disappeared, over there on the left, behind those trees. Yes, another church.
It's probably Catholic, I mutter. Then the sign appears:
There's a little plaque on the gate, mentioning in whose honour they were erected in. Johnson. Hmm. That's a good sign. Mum stops the car part way inside. Hurry up.
She looks at the headstones as we get out of the car. She reads out the names on the first one "Isabell" (her mum's middle name).
"Isabell was a common Scottish--" I pause. "Charles came from Scotland. Oh. So, he's not likely to be buried in a C of E cemetery but rather (think, think) one of the ones that made up the Uniting Church. Like Congregational."
Ha!
Except, this is only small cemetery with a whole three older headstones visible. I say visible because it's a tad overgrown.
Of the old ones, one is broken and badly worn. Another is for Joseph Thurlow. They ran out of room putting his name on it, so the W is written above the rest. The third I can't remember because it was of even less interest to us than the other two. Bah. We poke around a bit. There's a flat stone over amongst some newer ones that we can't get into. Not very hopeful. Mum looks around for something to beat the grass down with. I go back to the unreadable one.
"It does seem to end in two lines," I say. And now that I'm looking at it again, it might be \||. Hmm. Mum comes and helps. She's looking at the year.
"1870," she says.
"Really?"
We spend some time on it, and eventually come up with:
C|__________ALL
Who
March 17 1870
19 (or is it 49?)
Ha again! We write it down to check the date when we get home, take a photo, wander around looking at the church and then home. Feeling very pleased with ourselves.
"They feel more real when you've seen their headstone," mum notes when we're back on the road. Indeed, it's a physical remnant of a real person rather than just a name & date in an index. Which is the thing I dislike about TAMIOT, it discourages you from getting out and visiting those little towns where those people died, and lived.
So, that was Charles Hall, a shepherd from Morebattle in the border counties of Scotland until he was transported to Van Diemens Land for stealing sheep. Here he met the daughter of a free settler, they had a child, married and had a few more children. He was riding home from an auction sale with some friends and they started to race, Chas fell from his horse and died instantly.
(And yes, the date matches.)
