Theme: Migration.

My Great Grandmother was Adela Campbell Scott Macloskey (1848-1874), the 13th child of merchant tailor John Macloskey (1789-1854) and Mary Ann Brooks/ Brookes (1805-1886). Her father is thought to have come from Rostrevor, County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland; her mother was also Irish but where they met and married is not known. Their children were all born in Greenock in Scotland apart from the last one, James Power Macloskey (c1851-1926) who was born in Liverpool; perhaps the family had moved there for business reasons.

The name of their immigrant ship so far remains undiscovered, but what is known is that the whole family with the exception of the first and sixth-born (who both lived less than a year) arrived in what is now Melbourne, Australia in early 1854.

Why did they emigrate? It was the time of the Victorian goldrush. John was a tailor, not a gold miner; perhaps he saw business opportunities in Ballarat, one of the towns which sprang up after the discovery of gold in 1851.

Initially the family lived at Collingwood Flat, low lying ground along the Yarra River in Melbourne, an overcrowded working-class suburb doubtless with water and sanitation problems. Sadly the father John Macloskey died of dysentery six weeks after their arrival, on 11 March 1854.

Mary Ann was left with ten children aged from 25 to 2 – all listed on John’s death certificate, the informant being his eldest living child William Joseph Macloskey, aged 23.

She remarried just a year later, to Alexander Richard Minzies/Menzies (c1807-1883), who must have been a wonderful man to take on ten step-children! There were no further children. They always lived in Melbourne but as Richard was a Victorian Treasury official, doubtlesss in far more comfortable surroundings.

Alexander himself had emigrated from Liverpool just months before the Macloskeys, on the “Covenantor” which arrived in 1852. Like Mary Ann he had been married before, to Christina Campbell (c 1806 -c 1839), and had a daughter Mary Campbell Menzies (1835-1921) who in 1855 married the Macloskey’s eldest son Richard Brooke Macloskey (1830-1876) – just a year after Richard’s mother had remarried – to his new father-in-law !

It was probably just serendipity that Mary Ann’s second name was Campbell. No family link can be found – perhaps thankfully as the family tree was already very complicated and difficult to draw.

In addition, my Great Grandmother Adela Macloskey married Frederick Wentworth Wade (1838-1912) and had seven children with him before dying of phthisis (TB) at the age of 26; within two years Frederick remarried …. To Richard Brooke Macloskey and Mary Campbell Menzies’ second child Ada Gresham Macloskey (1858-1931)!!