Valentine

This week for #52ancestors, I decided to check my database to find someone born in the 1800s on Valentine’s Day 14 February. I could only find one person born on Valentine’s Day but that was in 1981 which is too recent for me to write about and research.

But I did find William Demingo SMITH born 16 February 1883 and only surviving till 16 September 1885.

William was the fourth child born to Captain William SMITH and Sarah Ann TEDMAN. He had an older brother Thomas Alexander (Albert) Smith born in 1880. These two young chaps did not survive infancy. William and Sarah had 10 children in total and 7 surviving till adulthood.

At this time, Captain William Smith was master of the whaling ship Marie Laure, based in Hobart and often calling in to Recherche Bay where his family lived near Cockle Creek. This is one of the most southern towns in Tasmania and in the 1870s and 1880s would have been a wild area to live in. There had been a convict station nearby at Southport and the main occupations were sawyers and whalers.

In September 1885, the two young brothers went down suddenly with diarrhoea. Their deaths on the 15th and 16th September were registered by Henry John Daldy, the coroner at Franklin on 20 September. But an interested person naming himself Recherche, wrote to the local Hobart paper The Mercury and had a piece printed on 29 September 1885.

 

 

 

 

 

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