Timeline
1849 Marriage
1852 Migration to NSW
1853 Family grows
1863 Family splits
1864 Children grow up
1868 Hannah goes to Stockinbingal
Marriage
William Luxon and Hannah Barnes were married in Tynemouth, Northumberland, England in 1849. I think William was born in Middlesex and probably moved north for work. Tynemouth was a large shipping port. According to the 1841 England Census, there was a William Luxon, a joiner, living in Tynemouth. Here he states his age at 21 – an adult. If that was correct the birth certificate above putting him born 1819 could be the right one.
Hannah was born in 1831 in Hartley, north of Tynemouth. Her father was a farmer, a husbandman. The following is a table of the family of William and Margaret Barnes and their children’s baptism dates.
Their first child, Edward, was born in Tynemouth the year following their marriage. A census was taken in 1851 and showed that William, 28, was a joiner and cabinet maker living with his wife, 22 and their son, Edward, 10 months, in North Shields.
Tynemouth was a major industrial area with large foundries and ship building as well as coal mines so there would have been work for a joiner. It would have been hard!
Decision to immigrate
The year after the census, William and Hannah, along with three year old, Edward, set out for a new life in Australia. I image they sailed from Tynemouth to London to catch the Tamar on the 12 October 1852. Leaving England, it would have been very cold and wet and arriving 29 January 1853 in Port Jackson would have been very confronting. Gold had been discovered in Australia and I wonder if William thought he would make his fortune. When the family arrived the population of Sydney was 60,000. It would rise to 400,00 by 1860. In 1850 the total population of Australia was 400,000 and by 1860 it would rise to over a million.
The ship, Tamar, arrived in NSW and the following is the information for those whose intention it was to hire. Note- he was the only ‘joiner’.
The transportation of convicts had become unpopular from 1833 but the practice continued until 1868. It would have been hard for people to get work if there were convicts available so this was one of the serious arguments against transportation.
Children
The family arrived in January of 1853 and their first daughter, Margarita, was born the same year in Gundaroo which is about 300km south west of Sydney. The journey from Sydney would have taken months as there was very little in the way of roads and transport would have been most probably by dray or carriage. Cobb and Co was only just being established in Victoria to cater for the Gold Rush and railways were years off.
William and Hannah had five children in New South Wales.
The Split
After the birth of Charles, in 1862, things did not bode well for the Luxon family. In October of 1864, Hannah obviously had had enough and decided to leave taking the two year old Charles with her but leaving her other children to their fate. She garnered the assistance of a young man, John Garland, who was later arrested and charged with theft.
Things got much worse for the children. In January 1865, Robert Cameron, a coworker of William Luxon, was arrested and charged with having carnal knowledge of Margaret Luxon then just eleven years old. He was sentenced to three years hard labour.
Grown children
I believe the eldest son, Edward had left home in 1864. He would have been fourteen. He eventually married and made a life for himself in South Australia.
Margaret married Ernest Cooper Duncombe and they had three children together. She then married William Newman and they had five children together. She died on 15 November 1931 in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, at the age of 78, and was buried there. Her husband William died in the August of the same year.
In 1873 William Luxon Jr who would have been about eighteen years old, was charged with lighting fires. William died in Wagga Wagga in 1931 and I don’t know if he ever married.
Hannah Luxon married Richard Tuckwell and they had five children together. She then married Edward James Perkins in 1909 in Gundagai, New South Wales. She died in 1928 in Temora, New South Wales, at the age of 70. The obituary in the Cootamundra Herald refers to Hannah being survived by a son whom I think was William Tuckwell, a daughter, Mrs A Alchin and two other daughters living in Sydney. I am aware of only two daughters – Mary Ann born 1878 in Gundagai and Elizabeth born 1885 in Cootamundra. She also had a son James born 1881 and another William E B born 1887 in Junee.
My great great grandmother was Mary Luxon, the youngest daughter. She would have been just five when her sister, Margaret was abused. I do not know what happened to the children and if they remained with their father. In 1877 Mary married Richard Thomas Haynes when she was seventeen in the town of Gundagai.
Charles known as Chas had a job working on the railways. In April 1883 The Mount Alexander Mail reported – A fatal accident has occurred at the railway works three miles from Young (N.S. W). A young man named Charles Luxon was in the act of jumping on to a passing truck, when he missed his foothold and fell. Three trucks passed over his legs, crushing them terribly. The sufferer died shortly after admission to the hospital. At the time his mother, Hannah Barnes/Luxon/Alchin was living in Cootamundra and he asked that a wire be sent to her. An inquest was held into his death.
Hannah Luxon/Barnes/Alchin
Hannah left her four of her children with their father and went to live in Stockinbingal in 1864. She took two year old Charles with her. She got work with Ambrose Alchin as a housekeeper. Ambrose had married and had seven children to Eliza Roughan who died after delivering her daughter, Rebekah. The eldest child was thirteen.
In 1868 a very strange newspaper report appeared in the Sydney Empire newspaper describing an incident at the Alchin home where Hannah had been left in charge of the children. The accusation was of burgulary but the case was dismissed. Although I cannot find evidence of a marriage it seems that Ambrose and Hannah had two children together- Eva born 1870 and Sydney born 1874. She died in 1906 and her husband errected a headstone over her grave at Stockinbingal NSW
The Tagney Hood 