No matter how much we wish it wasn’t so, the fact is that many of our ancestors did not live exemplary lives. They may have been criminals or immoral, or just plain unlucky.
Mine, I think, was just plain unlucky.
Amelia Barrett was born on 1 March 1844 in the village of North Leigh, Oxfordshire, in England. She was the first child of James Barrett, a farm labourer and his wife, Caroline Randall, also the daughter of an agricultural labourer. Amelia’s birth was quickly followed by those of Isabella in 1847, William Nathaniel in 1847 and Maria in 1851. Each child was born in a different place, indicating the family was quite mobile for that time. In 1851, at the time of the British Census, the family were living at 51 Mill Lane, Folkestone in Kent, England. In 1853, the family came to Australia on board the ship “Trafalgar”. James had paid £10 for their passage, which was a considerable sum and indicates that the family was not destitute by any means. On arrival, the family went to Picton in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales to work for the Antill family on the property “Jarvisfield’ where they stayed for some years.
While the family lived in Picton, several more children were born, and by 1859, the family consisted of James and Caroline, Amelia, Isabella, William, Maria, Matilda and Joseph. Another brother, Henry, had been born and died in Picton in 1854. On 26 December, 1859 at St Marks Anglican Church, Picton, Amelia, aged 15, married a young German immigrant, Jacob Andrew Ihle (known as Andrew) who was also working on the Jarvisfield Estate. Andrew was 22 at the time of their marriage. Andrew and Amelia had two daughters while living in Picton (Louisa and Gertrude) and two sons (William Andrew and Charles, who died in infancy) before moving to south east Queensland to join Andrew’s brother, John Charles Ihle, at the new town of Fernvale. The Barrett family remained in Picton, and we do not believe Amelia ever saw her family again.
On 7 October 1868, Andrew died of a heart condition, leaving Amelia a widow of 24 years old with three young children and no family support of her own. Of course, there was no government pension paid to her. In only six months, on 12 April 1869, she married again, to another member of the German community, George Christian Muller. They had one child together, a daughter, Caroline Amelia.
By 1873 Amelia’s daughters Louisa and Gertrude were living permanently with their uncle, John Charles Ihle. We don’t know if George Muller died, if Amelia left him or he forced her out, but by 1879 she was living with Johann Haid (apparently not married to him) and bore him at least three children, of whom one is known to have survived. Amelia died at the age of 37 giving birth to her eleventh child on 1 October 1881 at Stanthorpe in Queensland and is buried in an unmarked grave in Stanthorpe cemetery.
Her career raises eyebrows today – in the 1870s she was a scandal and a disgrace. Certainly her grandchildren, many of whom I met in the 1960s and 1970s, did not know of her life history.
We now return to the Barrett family, who we left in Picton. At some timeafter 1868, James took the opportunity to move his family to Cootamundra in southern New South Wales, and opened a brickmaking factory there. That brickworks was still operational at least into the 1970s. The other Barrett children (including late additions Charles, Eliza, Annie Caroline and Fanny) all led exemplary lives and the family is extremely well regarded.
In the 1980swe were able to contact some of the Barrett descendants with interesting results.
Our first contact was with a grandson of Amelia’s brother William, who remembered his grandfather’s family stories. He had been told that Amelia was a prostitute, a disgrace to the family and had been disowned by the family. Certainly there is no acknowledgement of Amelia’s existence on the death certificates or obituaries of either of her parents, who both outlived her by many years.
Contact was later made with a descendant of Amelia’s youngest sister Fanny. The age gap between these two sisters was such that they never met, and Fanny was actually younger than Amelia’s three oldest children.
Fanny’s granddaughter had been told (as apparently had Fanny) that Amelia had actually died in the early years in Australia. They didn’t know that she had married or had children and descendants.
Amelia’s branch has now been firmly grafted back on to the family tree.
There are so many things we don’t know that could have affected her life.
Did her family agree with her marrying a German? Did the rift in the Barrett family happen at that time? Could Amelia have chosen to return to her family after her first husband died? What happened with her second marriage? Widowed again, left or thrown out? Did she have a say in the placement of her daughters with their uncle, or were they taken from her? Did she go willingly with the man who fathered her later children? Or was she out of options at that time?
So. Was Amelia a “bad woman” as her family believed or was she the unlucky victim of her times and circumstances?
More questions than answers on this one.




















