When I think back to that day in my Grandma's lounge room, she was happy to talk about her grandmother and she knew a lot about her, especially her three marriages which intrigued me, so I probably didn't realize she had said very little about her mother, Henrietta. A few years back, I asked my Uncle Neil, my grandmother's only surviving child at the time about Henrietta and he had said his mother never spoke of her, so he assumed she had died before his mother married. He too said she talked about her grandmother a lot when he was growing up but not her mother. I wanted to know more about Henrietta.
Henrietta was born on 18 January 1877 in Nairne, South Australia to Edward John Rodgers and Ellen Tanner. It was Ellen's second marriage, her first husband had died in July 1875 leaving her with five young children aged between seven and eleven years. She married Edward in the February of 1876. This was also a short marriage! Less than a year after Henrietta was born, the South Australian Police Gazette in December 1877, showed an unexecuted warrant for Edward John Rodgers for deserting his wife. Edward was arrested in January 1878 at Caltowie, South Australia, but died in 1879, again leaving Ellen on her own. Ellen went on to have two more children, Ethel Rodgers and Ernest Gallagher, but there is no record of a third marriage. Eight children in total.
Henrietta grew up with lots of siblings, in what I can only imagine was tough circumstances. At the age of seventeen and a half, in July 1894, Henrietta married William Joseph Walmsley, a man twelve years her senior, at the Adelaide Registry Office. Her marriage certificate said she was eighteen. There was no occupation, no address, just Adelaide as the place of residence and she had misspelt her name as Heneritta when she signed it. Her older half sister and husband were witnesses. Within seven months, and only eleven days after she turned eighteen, she gave birth to my grandmother, Annie. Four years later, Annie's brother, John, arrived. Everything seemed normal, but that was where the information dried up!
So then I started searching newspapers for any snippet of information and came up with this notice in several South Australian newspapers:-
from the South Australian Register
Henrietta was 24 years old and it was only a couple of weeks before Christmas. Annie was nearly six and John just 20 months old. Henrietta hadn’t died young, she had left her family, but where had she gone? I could find no trace of her in South Australia. A few years ago I found a Queensland Funeral Record for a Henrietta Walmsley, alias Stokes born 1876 who had died in 1944. Maybe this was my great grandmother, but after searching for a death certificate under both Stokes and Walmsley, I found nothing. I then checked the Queensland newspapers and found a probate notice in The Telegraph (Brisbane) as follows:-
After some more searching I found that Wills in Queensland available online stopped in 1942. If I wanted to see Henrietta's Will I would have to visit Queensland in person or pay an exorbitant amount to have it copied. Last month while looking for something else, I noticed the Queensland Government had updated their site and you could now download historical records directly. It was worth checking again to see if I could find Henrietta's death certificate and bingo. There it was!
Henrietta's Queensland Death Certificate
There is enough on this certificate for me to conclude this is my great, grandmother Henrietta. It says she was born and married in South Australia. She married a Walmsley and she had a male and female child. It does, however, leave a lot of questions about the missing 43 years from the time she left Adelaide. Another interesting detail of this story is Ellen's death certificate in 1909 is in the name of Ellen Adams and only mentions her first marriage to Thomas Adams and the children from that marriage!
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