Harriett Irvine

Harriett was born in Jamberoo, New South Wales in 1842. She was the second in her family to have been born in Australia after her parents had emigrated from Ireland in 1839.

She was twenty-seven when she married Richard Gibson in Kiama. He too was Irish arriving in 1867 to join his brother who had come about ten years earlier. His brother was married to Harriett’s eldest sister. Richard and Harriett farmed on the south coast and southern tablelands in Berrima, Burrawang, Kangaloon and Robertson and raised a family of seven.

By the 1913 they had moved to Dapto and later to Unanderra, now both suburbs of Wollongong. In 1926 Harriett was eighty-four and had been a widow for six years. All but one of her children were married, two lived in Sydney but the others were still close by, her unmarried daughter still living with her.

She had twenty-three grandchildren plus five who had died in infancy. Her eldest grandson had been killed in France during World War One. Harriett was also a great grandmother to eleven.

And there you have it – the twenty-four direct ancestors of my daughter who were alive in 1926 and a little it about each of them. Some were surprisingly thin on information so note to self: go research those people a bit more.

Sarah Ann Dickinson

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.