Quite a few years ago, during the lockdowns, I stumbled across an article that had been written by a Carolyn Webb at Fairfax. It piqued my interest for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that Webb had the same great-great-great-grandparents as I did on my maternal side. The second being that it mentioned them surviving the wreck of the Sacramento ship at Point Lonsdale.
The survival of the Tuttlebys has been documented by Webb, and another cousin named Judy Baird. I am a descendant of Mary (nee Hockley) and Henry's son Alfred, who was born here, and married twice - his first wife Sarah Brown is my great-great-grandmother. Their son, Cyril Purser Tuttleby, was my great-grandfather. He married Bertha Robinson - a woman of Irish and English descent - and they had four children. Their youngest, Ernest Frank Tuttleby, was my grandfather.
Due to this link, there are so many of my family members who are buried in unmarked graves at the Will Will Rook Pioneers' Cemetery. Mary Hockley remarried when Henry died and is buried out there with her second husband, under her married name of Bogle. Henry is also buried near her. Sarah Brown Tuttleby is buried there, having died young of kidney failure. I went walking out there, mindful of just how many family members I was probably walking over as I did so, but how I will also have no clue just where they are.
In her article, Webb details the strength and will of Mary Hockley, and it is quite an incredible story. By chance, I was contacted by Webb recently for a different article she was preparing. I mentioned not only the fact that we were related and shared these forebears, but that actually, I have a second set of forebears who survived that exact same shipwreck - Mary Purser and her husband, Joseph Brown. It is therefore a bloody miracle that we came to exist at all, let alone are still around, five generations later to tell the tale!
I have mentioned that I had to correct records in the Waller/McVeigh lines, and this was no different in the Tuttleby/Robinson lines. Because Sarah Brown was unwell and died quite young, for example, there are more living descendants from Alfred's second wife Mabel Palmer, and therefore, I think a couple of them may not have taken as much care checking Sarah's records (they were not as relevant to them). It also doesn't help that there was another Joseph Brown living with his wife (Margaret Rowley) in a similar area, and these two also called their first two daughters Sarah and Mary. It was therefore that I dug down into the births, deaths and marriage records, confirmed Sarah's parents names, and corrected this record.
Mary Purser and Joseph Brown were newlyweds when they boarded the Sacramento. From what I have been able to find out about both of them, they came from families of agricultural labourers in Kent. There was something else though: Mary's parents were Sarah Meen and Richard Purser. Both the Meens and the Pursers were kind of renowned for having extraordinary constitutions - Richard died the youngest of his brothers, the rest were in their 80s. There seems to have been one very clear reason why Mary and Joseph decided to move to Melbourne - she already had family here. It appears that her uncle, Edward John Purser, who had served as part of the colonial forces across the world, had settled with his wife and family in NSW, and he had, in-turn, become the first teacher in the Castle Hill district.
Joseph Brown died at the corner of Regent and Spring Streets, Preston - mere minutes from where I live. He was discovered collapsed outside by a neighbour, and the cause of his death was listed as exhaustion and hepatitis. Mary never remarried, instead, she brought up her children, and did some domestic labouring to keep things going.
I deduced that they were the Mary and Joseph Brown listed on the manifest of the Sacramento for two very basic reasons: firstly, the age profiles were correct - they were 22 years old. Secondly, it was the only ship they could have taken to have gotten here in time to have given birth to my great-great-grandmother Sarah at the "Merri Creek". For years, there was a letter in possession of members of my family, that had been received by my mother's cousin from the state library. While I think that people easily recognised the Tuttleby names in that letter as forebears, I am not so certain they also realised that the Mary and Joseph Brown listed were also our forebears. My correcting of these records meant that this became apparent.
It is my belief that Mary Purser and Mary Hockley, having survived the ordeal of the shipwreck, remained friends, or at least in contact, for the rest of their lives. I actually cannot think of another way that their respective children, Sarah and Alfred, could have met and married if they did not maintain this contact, as they were located in Preston and Campbellfield respectively. Alfred's final address was 45 Byfield St, Reservoir - again, not far from where I live now.
Unfortunately for Mary Purser, half of her children inherited their father Joseph's constitution, they died quite young. Mary though, on the other hand, lived until 1915. She was in her mid-80s when she passed away from "senility" - dementia, in modern day parlance. At the time, she was living with one of her sons and his wife, and she became the first of four generations of my family to live at 19 Parslow St, Clifton Hill. It is this address which will pick up the next bit of this tale.
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