Jacob Denniss was born in October 1847 near Dapto New South Wales, most likely at Marshall Mount, where his father Richard and mother Sarah were raising their growing family. Richard and Sarah had emigrated from Appledore, Kent on the Westminster, arriving in Sydney in January 1838. They brought with them their three young children and went on to have ten more after settling in the Illawarra where Richard farmed. He was involved in municipal goings on as well, being nominated for elections, working on roading projects and voicing his displeasure with some of the decisions made by councillors and questioning their qualifications to be making those decisions, in letters to the editor in local newspapers.
But this is not about Richard.
Jacob and his younger brother Abraham did not follow their father's farming footsteps. Instead, they made their homes on the shores of Lake Illawarra where a fishing community was developing near Mullet Creek, Kanahooka and Berkeley.
Abraham was also a champion sculler in the Illawarra competing for many years with Edward Barber. Lake Illawarra was popular with scullers, Abraham and Edward's rivals Tom Clifford and Bill Beach went on to become world champions.
Jacob married Mary Green, daughter of Lincolnshire emigrant John Green and his first wife, in 1864 and three years later, Abraham married Mary's younger sister Naomi. Both brothers fished in the Illawarra for near on two decades being joined in their endeavours by their sons.
In 1883 Abraham and some of the Clifford's, including two who had become his sons-in-law, left the Illawarra and relocated to Tuggerah Lakes establishing themselves there at Canton, Tacoma and Noraville where they pioneered the Lake fishing industry. Generations of fishermen would follow in their footsteps. Fish were boxed up at Canton and carted to the sheltered cove at Noraville to be transported each day to the markets in Sydney. Later they were taken from Tacoma to the railway station and on to Sydney.
In 1989 and 1990 Jack Darcey interviewed a cross section of men and women involved with various aspects of the fishing industry in Australia as part of a project at Murdoch University. He travelled over 26,000 kilometres. One of his interviews was conducted with Pat Clifford, a great grandson of Abraham, who recalled fishing as a child with his sister using a chaff bag which they dragged through the river to catch prawns.
Jacob meanwhile remained at Lake Illawarra. Just as two of Abraham's daughters had married into the Clifford family, two of Jacob's daughters married into the Massey family. The Massey family had also been fishing the lake since at least the 1860s. Both the Massey's and the Denniss' have streets named after them in Berkeley.
Jacob died in 1895 and Abraham in 1918. When George, Jacob's son, died in 1952 his obituary mentions that he and his father were the first people to send prawns from Lake Illawarra to the markets in Sydney.
Totally unrelated to fishing but connected to these families I came across a couple of articles in newspapers where Jacob was committed to trial in November 1888 for shooting a young man named Charles Massey. It turns out that Charles was amongst a group of young men who had proceeded to Jacob's house "tin-kettling" a newly married couple. The couple were Jacob's daughter Emily and Charles' brother William who were married 13 October. Jacob, not realising who was in the group, apparently just meant to scare them off. Oops. Keeping up the theme of pedigree collapse in this branch of the family, another of Charles' brothers had married a daughter of Jacob's in 1882. I wonder what effect the even had on family dynamics.
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