Samuel Lovell and Elizabeth Smith

My last blog about Mary Rose, was a peep into the life of the fourth of my grandmother's grandparents. Having found no birth record for my Mary Rose nee Lovell, I now look backwards to find her parents.

I find their beautifully hand written  marriage document. Samuel Lovell age 20, a farmer, marries Elizabeth Smith, age 17 at the Huon Chapel on 20th April 1843. Witness are Joseph Lovell and John Smith, either brothers or fathers, and all parties sign their names with an X.

There are a few clues here. Firstly, they are in Huon. We are now getting into far earlier times of settlement in the Huon area. The X means illiteracy, common amoung convicts. The Rank, they call it Rank, not Profession, is Farmer. This could perhaps indicate a non-convict as even if free, convict status is usually recorded on a marriage certificate (the only Samuel Lovell on the convict register is a non-contender). Obviously I'll need to go further back to find Samuel's origins.

Huon Chapel is possibly the early church building at Franklin.

Five years after their marriage, a Census record lists Samuel and Elizabeth living at Huon River with two little kiddies, and again in 1851, at what is now listed as Franklin, with four children. Samuel is a settler, a farmer, a sawyer and a master mariner on each birth registry. Finally I find their 5th child an as yet unnamed female born on Christmas day 1852, this would be our Mary and would explain why I could never find her birth certificate under her name.

Sadly Elizabeth dies in 1854 at the young age of 26, with our little Mary only 2. Elizabeth is probably buried in the beautiful, but dilapidated old cemetery in Franklin.

Six years later on the 24th of December, Samuel marries again. Myra Thorpe is a widow and age 35 and their ceremony is witnessed by William and Louisa Scott. Samuel and Myra have four more children together.

Myra is easily researched because she was a convict. Convicts lives were so regulated and documented by the authorities that primary sources often abound. Myra came aboard the Cadet in 1847 as Myra Baggelly. Her conduct record shows he had an illegitimate son George in 1851 and applied for permission to marry Andrew Thorpe in 1853 which was granted as she married him 48 days later as Myra Bayley. Andrew and Myra had three children together. They lived at Cairns Bay where Andrew was a sawyer.

google images Cairns Bay. Old house on Scott's Road, probably named after William and Louisa, witnesses at Samuel and Myra's wedding.

I've found it interesting in my family research to get an overview of how convicts married and how they managed to integrate into a society with prejudices against them.

Martin Cupit, convict, married Sarah Murphy, daughter of a convict but with the added social disadvantage of having been an inmate of the Queen's Orphanage. Both building their lives from the social and cultural bottom-of-the-heap upwards. 

Charles Rose, son of a convict woman marries Mary Lovell, who is looking like she may have free settlers background, up a rung. 

And later, Kezia Rose, comfortably removed from her partial convict heritage, marries William Cupit, son of a convict.
The females of the place had the advantage. With an immense gender imbalance, women could afford to be picky and their choice of men seeking a wife was from a large potential pool. Plenty of fish in the sea.

So Myra did well in marrying Samuel. Myra also bucked the trend with her children. Well known historian (and my lecturer) Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is researching fertility and child bearing rates amoung convict women in Van Diemen's land. Surprisingly he identified convict women as on an average producing .9 children after arrival, that's less than one per woman. In other words, they had very few offspring. He explains this possibly because their lives were so regulated and when they did marry, they were older. This has certainly been the case for my two Irish forebears, by the time they married, children were a non event.

But for Myra, even though she married Samuel at age 38, she had four more children and with her previous four, she must have brought that average figure up considerably. Myra registered a couple of these births herself and named herself Mary and Maria.

Perhaps this explains why our Mary got married at age 15. Here was her father with his new wife producing more children and she needed to make her own way. She was married and out before their last daughter was born in 1869 when Myra was 47.

Visual Family Tree, with our Mary, born 1852, Mary being my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother. Apologies to Samuel, Myra and the children. Elizabeth is a likeness taken from a photo found on a genealogy site:              http://www.mickjansen.com.au/page5.htm


So far no real answers as to who Samuel Lovell was and why he ended up in the Huon, and then there's Elizabeth, what of her parents? This means I've now got four more people to reseach, Mary Rose's grandparents. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment.

PS
My recent trip to Franklin found me walking the old cemetery. There are few graves sites intact and legible, but I came across some names I recognised from my research.
The very first grave I find is dear Lottie. She was David Cupit's fiancee. She nursed David until he died at age 30 from gassing in WW1, and was 'adopted' into the Cupit family and never married. She has no descendants, but is remembered.

Next I find Louie and Maria Diefenbach, Sarah Cupit's friend.