Sarah was born near Lake George in New South Wales north of where Canberra is today. Her father was a plasterer employed at a large station there. He came to Australia as a convict – did her children and grandchildren ever know that?
By the 1860s the family had moved to Queanbeyan where her father worked in his own right. Sarah married Alexander McIntyre when she was sixteen. He was the son of Scottish immigrants. They had fifteen children, only one not surviving infancy. They lived in Queanbeyan and later at Corrimal.
In 1926
Sarah was living in Wollstonecraft on Sydney’s north shore in a Federation
style villa named “Illawarra”. She was eighty and had been widowed for ten
years; one of her sons lived with her. Although most of her children were
spread far and wide throughout the state and even in New Zealand, her youngest
daughter lived just around the corner in the next street. She had seventy-two grandchildren
and already seventy great grandchildren.
