Eight who carried it

The Women

This archive is full of soldiers, printers and constables because those are the people governments write down. The women here bore sixty-seven children between them, and one of them gave the most useful evidence on the site.

Read the rest of this archive and you would think the family was made of men. That is not a fact about the family; it is a fact about what gets recorded. A soldier has an attestation paper, a service record, a casualty form and a medal roll. A printer has a salary in the Blue Book. A constable has a staff file. A woman who bore nine children and buried four of them has a marriage line and a burial plot.

And yet the single most valuable document in this archive is a woman's testimony. When Miriam Wakefield stood up in the Brisbane Police Court in September 1902 and said "his father's name was Samuel Sneyd, Gaol Governor, his mother's name was Catherine", she settled a question four separate research passes had been circling — and she named Catherine Mulcahy, a Cork housemaid dead forty-four years, whom no other record in this archive connects to that family at all. Her evidence in full →

The eight

Wives of the direct line, oldest first. The last column is the number of children the tree records — sixty-seven between them.

Who	Out of	To	Children
Jean Ward 1754–1823	South Leith, Midlothian — Scotland	Chatham, Kent	10
Catherine Margaret Mulcahy 1812–1858	Cork	Adelaide Street, North Brisbane	9
Jane Creech 1830–1885	Limerick	1 North Quay, Brisbane	9
Eliza Keeling 1837–1918	London	Brisbane	7
Miriam Wakefield 1840–1909	St Paul, Bristol	Lutwyche Cemetery, Brisbane	6
Ida Kathleen Atkinson 1869–1937	Brisbane	South Brisbane	4
Martha Blum 1870–1904	Rockhampton	Lutwyche Cemetery, Brisbane	7
Ivy Miriam Sneyd 1891–1979	Boulia — the remotest birthplace in the archive	Mt Thompson, Brisbane	5

Jean Ward · 1754–1823

Married Robert D'Arcy at Portsea on 21 June 1779 and followed the Corps of Royal Engineers for forty-four years. Their first child Joseph was baptised at Portsea in March 1780 — the first record of this family ever found in England. She was buried at Chatham on 21 March 1823, entered as JANE D'ARCY, aged 66, which puts her birth nearer 1756 than the tree's 1754.

Catherine Margaret Mulcahy · 1812–1858

A housemaid out of Cork who married a private of the 4th (King's Own) at Camden, New South Wales, on 13 February 1837 — and whose husband ended as Governor of Brisbane Gaol. She did not live to see it: she died in 1858, aged forty-six, the year before he took the post.

Jane Creech · 1830–1885

Married the organist Paul Cole Atkinson at Carrigaline, County Cork, on 27 September 1853, and emigrated with him in 1862 with the children already born.

Eliza Keeling · 1837–1918

Married George Lindsay D'Arcy in Queensland in 1863 — the year he arrived in the colony.

Miriam Wakefield · 1840–1909

Born in Bristol on 11 April 1840 and registered there that June quarter; married William Hartley Sneyd at Brisbane on 15 November 1859, aged nineteen. Sixty-two years later she stood in the Brisbane Police Court and gave the single most useful piece of evidence in this archive.

Ida Kathleen Atkinson · 1869–1937

The organist's daughter. Married George Pitt D'Arcy at Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley, on 10 October 1888, and outlived him by six years.

Martha Blum · 1870–1904

Married at Muttaburra, six hundred kilometres inland, on 20 January 1891. Bore seven children and was dead at thirty-four.

Ivy Miriam Sneyd · 1891–1979

Married nine weeks before her husband sailed for the war. Lost a brother at Pozières five months later. Widowed at forty-five with five children. Lived another forty-three years.

Lutwyche Cemetery · Portion GP5, Section 42A, Grave 78

Two of them are in the same grave

Miriam Wakefield died in 1909. Martha Blum, who had married Miriam's son Arthur at Muttaburra, died five years earlier in 1904, aged thirty-four, leaving seven children — among them Ivy, who was thirteen.

The burial record this archive carries gives both women the same plot: Lutwyche Cemetery, Portion GP5, Section 42A, Grave 78. The mother-in-law was buried with her son's wife.

from the family tree, not yet checked against the register Two identical plot references is the sort of thing that is either quietly true or a copy-and-paste error, and the archive cannot yet tell which. The Brisbane City Council cemetery register would settle it in a minute, and it is now on the list. Queued →

What the numbers say

Sixty-seven recorded children between eight women. Jean Ward had ten, Catherine Mulcahy and Jane Creech nine each.
Martha Blum died at thirty-four, having borne seven. She is the youngest death among the wives and the only one who did not see her children grown.
Catherine Mulcahy is the only woman in this archive with a recorded trade — housemaid. Not one of the other seven has an occupation against her name, which is not the same as not having worked.
Ivy Miriam Sneyd outlived every man on this site. Born at Boulia in 1891, widowed in 1936, died in 1979 — eighty-seven years, and forty-three of them alone.
Three of the eight were born outside Australia — Scotland, Ireland and England — and one, Jean Ward, never came near it.

What is missing, and why

Almost everything. There is no photograph of any of these women. No letter. No will yet found. Catherine Mulcahy's parents are unknown; so are Jane Creech's, and Eliza Keeling's. Miriam Wakefield's are known only because the Queensland death register names them — James Wakefield and Hannah Saniger — and that single line is what carries the deepest documented branch in the whole archive back to a Gloucestershire yeoman born in 1654.

The pattern is worth stating plainly: where this archive has looked for a woman in a civil register rather than a service record, it has usually found her. The gap is not in the records. It is in where the searching has been done. The queue → · Sources →