Ancestors: Mundane to Magnificent, 100 Years Ago

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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, to 1926, at the ancestors who were living and working across South Australia that year. 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. Gathering 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.

Paternal Line 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.

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. 

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, and baking cakes and biscuits in the heat of a wood-fired stove.

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 were a constant list of farm tasks in between: wood to gather and chop, manure to move, fowls to be killed for the table.

The family took part fully in the life of their local community, 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 contributions to both community and church life were recorded, in their turn, in the newspapers of the day.

Maternal Line 1926

Maria (Crowley) O'Dea - great-grandmother, turning 84 in August 1926. Family stories have that she had taken to her bed after the death of her husband 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.

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 and their families were living. 

George Bennett - great-grandfather, 67. George had separated from Bridget back in 1915. At that time he was working for the Adelaide Electric Supply Company; where he was living by 1926, I haven't yet been able to determine.

Georgina (Bennett) O'Dea - grandmother, 36. A widow, Georgina was raising six children alone on Albert Street, Hamley Bridge; three teenage daughters and three sons aged twelve and under. Life would have been hard: she kept chickens and milked a cow, selling the milk around town to help make ends meet. 

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. Her hours ran 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.

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 them.

What were your ancestors' circumstances 100 years ago? Join in and post about your ancestors this Family History Month. 

This post first appeared on earlieryears.blogspot.com by CRGalvin