Somewhere in County Cork THE SEARCH FOR THE BIRTHPLACE OF CATHERINE O’BRIEN BY ROBYN GRAHAM Growing up in Australia I had only minimal contact with my father’s family. All I knew was that Grandfather Kelly’s family had lived in Wollongong, NSW and Grandmother Betts’ family had lived in Gooloogong, NSW. As an adult I felt the urge to find out more about unknown ancestors. We had no Internet back then, no fancy search engines that could mine whole libraries of data in a mere second. I started researching the old-school way, visiting libraries, archives and family history centres, purchasing birth, death and marriage certificates, including the marriage between Thomas Campbell Betts and Catherine O’Brien, my greatgreat-grandparents, held at Bungerellingong, Lachlan River, NSW in 1864. Thomas was a blacksmith, aged above 21 and residing in Goolagong, NSW. Catherine O’Brien was a spinster, aged under 21 and residing in Goolagong. The witnesses were Hugh Hurst and Margaret Stack. They were married by James Adam and the religion was recorded as Presbyterian. Thomas and Catherine’s birthplaces were both recorded as “unknown” as were their parents! I had no places of birth, no parents and no ages. Why were they married at Bungerellingong, a large pastoral property between Cowra and Gooloogong (formerly spelt Goolagong)? Was this, like many other colonial marriages, a case of romance between the pastoral worker and the domestic servant? I’ve also wondered why they were married by a Presbyterian clergyman. James Adam was a pioneering Scottish Presbyterian minister in the Upper Lachlan Valley, travelling widely to perform his ministry. Catherine was baptised as a Catholic, but perhaps James Adam was the only marriage celebrant to ever visit the area. Local folklore states that James Adam was once held up by the notorious bushranger Ben Hall and that it was only the polite, patient manner in which he treated the bushranger that allowed his release 70 | THE IRISH SCENE
“Irish Research – Challenging, not impossible!” is the motto of the Irish Special Interest Group (ISIG) of Family History WA (FHWA). In this intriguing story, long-serving ISIG committee member Robyn Graham outlines some of the twists and turns on the road to learning more about her nineteenth century emigrant ancestor Catherine O’Brien’s family back in Ireland. without harm. It could be that James Adam used that same polite, patient manner to convince Catherine that a marriage blessed by the Presbyterian Church was better than no marriage. After their marriage, Thomas and Catherine lived on several pastoral stations in the Lachlan district and for a while followed the gold prospecting trail in central NSW. Pastoral stations and prospecting camps were often isolated and had few amenities. There would have been no easy access to registry offices and although Catherine gave birth to six children, only two of the births were registered. Fortunately, one of those birth registrations, as well as Catherine’s death record, gave enough information to establish Catherine’s birth place as County Cork and an approximate birth year of 1844. This still didn’t give me a lot to go on. Catherine O’Brien is a very common name in County Cork and even knowing an approximate birth year, without parents’ names, the task was nearly impossible. So, I filed Catherine in the “too hard basket” for a number of years. Enter Genealogy DNA matching as a tool for family historians. DNA testing gave me the breakthrough I needed when it revealed a match with previously unknown cousins in the USA. Correspondence with these cousins led me to focus my O’Brien research in Kilworth Parish, County Cork. Searches through Kilworth Parish records and the 1851 census showed that Catherine had been born in Kilally West and lived with her parents, one sister and three brothers on a small tenant farm. Perhaps Catherine had an adventurous spirit and decided that life in a new country on the other
