Helen Moyle
PhD candidate
I am a PhD candidate in ADRSI studying historical demography and looking at the fertility of couples marrying in Tasmania in the 2nd half of the 19th century. I am looking at the birth histories of 4 sets of couples: those who married in 1860, 1870, 1880 and 1890. Tasmanian digitised birth, marriage and death records are my major source of data in reconstituting families for these couples. Most studies of historical demography look only at couples who have births within the defined area that they are studying. For instance, Wrigley et al.’s (1997) famous English family reconstitution study of 1580 to 1837 looked only at couples’ births within the selected English parishes. In my study, however, I decided that I would follow couples who had births outside Tasmania and track their births using a variety of sources, including historical births, deaths and marriage indexes for other colonies (later States) of Australia. I was surprised to find that a relatively large number of families had births outside Tasmania.
Of the 713 couples who married in Tasmania in 1860, for instance, 84 had births outside Tasmania. Most of these births occurred in other colonies, mainly Victoria, but several families went to New Zealand and had children there, while a few families had births in the UK. While I assumed at the outset of my research that couples would leave Tasmania and not return, I found some couples who had births in Tasmania, moved to Victoria (or even to England) and had one or more birth and then came back to Tasmania and had more children.
One of the most mobile couples I have encountered was Elizabeth Spink and Charles Jesser who married in Launceston on the 1st August 1870 (see table below). I couldn’t find any births for them in the Tasmanian data, so looked up the Victorian records and found that they had 5 children in Victoria: Charles (1870), Robert (1873), Mary (1875), William (1877) and Victor (1894). I thought it was very odd that there was a gap of 19 years between the last two children’ s births, but at that stage did not look at any other birth records.
When I was looking for the parents’ deaths, however, I found that both of them died in Queensland: Charles in 1913 and Elizabeth in 1930. I decided to look at the Queensland birth registers and found they had another 4 children: Yandina (1889), Edward (1891), Ivanhoe (1893) and Beatrice (1895). So in the year after Edward’s birth, the family went to Victoria and had Victor and then the next year went back to Queensland and had Beatrice.
There was still, however, a big gap in the birth histories, between William born in 1877and Yandina in 1889 and I was convinced that given their birth patterns, the couple had had more children in another colony. When I tried the South Australian birth index I finally found them: Fanny (1878), Beltana (1880), George (1883), Edward (1885) and Laura (1886).
So, if I had only looked at Tasmania, I would have presumed that this couple had no children, but by tracing them around the colonies I found that they had 13 children over a period of 25 years.
Children born to Charles Jesser and Elizabeth Spink
References
Wrigley, E.A., Davies, R.S., Oeppen, J.E. and Schofield, R.S. (1997) English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Photo: Family group. State Library of South Australia, B 69055/4, http://www.catalog.slsa.sa.gov.au:80/record=b2104845~S1.