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Each August, National Family History Month in Australia and New Zealand invites us to pause and look back. This year's theme, Ancestors: Mundane to Magnificent, may be interpreted with a simple question: what did our people's ordinary days actually look like and where, within the routine, did something like magnificence quietly live?
I've taken this idea to look one hundred years back at the ancestors who were living and working across South Australia in 1926. The mundane is easy enough to imagine: the sifting of flour, the harnessing of horses, the walk home from a Friday-night shop shift. The magnificent is there too though, in the sheer persistence of lives fully lived, and in the small joys people managed to find inside the everyday. Gatherings on Sundays, rain falling on roofs, wheat ripening in the paddocks, wood smoke curling from a farmhouse chimney at dusk, this was the world they inhabited.
So who was alive in 1926, how old were they, what were their circumstances? These are my ancestors who lived in that year.
Paternal Line in 1926
Honora O'Leary (Horgan) - great-grandmother, aged a magnificent 86. A widow, Honora was living with four of her six surviving children on the family farm at Linwood. 1926 brought grief as well as age, during the year she lost her daughter Johanna, after a long illness. Honora died in 1927. The Family Rally around
Andrew Horgan - grandfather, 56. Andrew was married and farming his wife's inherited Smyth family land at Alma. His days would have been largely consumed by the horses that pulled his farm implements, and by the long, seasonal rhythm of tilling, sowing and reaping, daylight to dusk. There was equipment to be maintained, saddles and harnesses to polish and weather patterns to take into consideration. Andrew died in 1951. A Legacy of Resilience: Andrew's story
Elizabeth Smyth (Horgan) - grandmother, 56. Elizabeth's work supplemented her husband's, and extended well beyond it: cooking for three males, her husband and their two sons still living at home. Days were spent cleaning, washing, mending, gathering eggs, sifting flour for weevils and baking cakes and biscuits in the heat of a wood-fired stove. Elizabeth died in 1934. The Grandmother who never was.
Edward Horgan - my father, 18. At eighteen, Edward was an essential hand on the family farm. His days would likely have begun before dawn with milking, and ended late doing it again. There was a constant list of farm tasks in between. Apart from the busy harvest season there was wood to gather and chop, horse and cow manure to move, fowls to be killed for the table. My lovely gentle father died in 1992. He was the only person I knew on my paternal line. Eddie Horgan
The Horgan family living at Alma, participated in a wide range of community events, but Sunday was their most important day: the horses harnessed once more, this time to carry them to Mass at Tarlee or Hamley Bridge. Their participation in and contributions to both community and church life were recorded in the newspapers of the day. The Horgan family on the Linwood farm had their first car by 1926.
Maternal Line in 1926
Maria Crowley (O'Dea) - great-grandmother, turned 84 in August 1926. Family stories have that she had taken to her bed after the death of her husband John in 1922. The widow Maria was cared for by her daughters Hannah and Margaret in their home, "Clare Villa," in Hamley Bridge. Also under that roof was her son Michael, his wife Ethel, and Ethel's nine-year-old son, Jackie Bennett. Another thirteen grandchildren all lived close by, she had much to be thankful for. She died in 1929. Maria from County Tipperary
Bridget Kelly (Bennett) - great-grandmother, 64. Bridget had been living in Goodwood with her youngest son, Albert (Ron), until his marriage in 1926. Sometime afterwards she moved to Hamley Bridge, where three of her children. Mary Olive, Georgina and John Raymond, and their families were living. Bridget died in 1934. A Goldfields Romance
George Bennett - great-grandfather, 67. George had separated from Bridget back in 1915. At that time he was working as an electrician for the Post Office; but where he was living by 1926, I haven't yet been able to determine. George had remarried and died aged 83 in 1942. Finding George and Rosa
Georgina Bennett (O'Dea) - grandmother, 36. A widow, Georgina was raising six children alone on Albert Street, Hamley Bridge; three teenage daughters, and three younger sons. Life would have been hard: she kept chickens and milked a cow, selling the milk around town to help make ends meet. The support of her deceased husband's single sisters and her own married sister and brother all of whom lived in Hamley Bridge may have helped along the way. Grandma died in 1965 when I was a teenager. A Fine Day for a Spring Wedding
Hannah O'Dea (Horgan) - my mother turned 14 in April 1926. Hannah began work that year as a shop assistant at Finey's General Store in Hamley Bridge. She recalled in her memoir that her hours ran from 9am to 5pm Monday to Thursday, 9am to 9pm on Fridays, and 9am to 1pm on Saturdays. She was allowed two weeks of unpaid holiday each year, and any sick days were docked straight from her wage. Alongside all this, she learned to play the organ at the Catholic church, and played for the children's choir. Dear Mum died in 2013 aged 101. Hannah O'Dea
Looking back at their lives, I find I have a great deal to be grateful for. At fourteen, I was in my second year of high school, boarding with other country girls. I had a breadth of opportunity that was simply unavailable to any of my ancestors.
What were your ancestors' circumstances 100 years ago? Join in and post about your ancestors this Family History Month.
My Family History Month activities
Tuesday 4th - Digital skills for the local genealogy group via Zoom
Saturday 8th - Remarkable Stories - presented by six members of local group
Monday 17th - Publishing online in person and via Zoom (email for link)
