Margaret Hannon Co Wicklow to Victoria Australia 1850s

Searching for origins of Margaret Hannan or Hannon or Hanning who came to Victoria, Australia in the early 1850s from Co Wicklow. I have no information on date of arrival or the ship or whether she came out under some assistance programme. I have no information on her siblings.

Her Catholic marriage certificate from Melbourne on 26 Nov 1853 gives her age as 21, spinster, and parents Matthew Hannon and Eliza Hannon. Matthew was called a Farmer.

Her spouse was Thomas Fitzpatrick, age 24, Bachelor, tradesman living at Bendigo Victoria, born in Co Down, Ireland.  His parents were Thomas and Rose Fitzpatrick, Farmers.

Margaret and Thomas has several children around the goldfields of Bendigo and then moved to Tantawangalo in the south coast of New South Wales near Candelo.  There they had more children and Thomas was a road construction contractor and also built telegraph lines for the government.

Their children, as best we can determine, were Mary Ann (b. 1854), Elizabeth (b. 1857), Thomas (b. 1858, d. 1859), Margaret (b. 1859), Rose or Rosanna (b. 1862), William (b. 1864) and Thomas Joseph (b. 1867).

Margaret died 8 Aug 1876 aged 41 yrs in Tantawangalo of womb cancer according to her death certificate for which daughters Mary Ann and Elizabeth provided the biographical information. She is listed as a married woman but there is family hearsay that husband Thomas may have been already dead, killed in Fiji in the 1870s. It says she had been 25 years in NSW which would put her arrival date at 1851.  It contradicts the marriage certificate by saying her father was Michael Hanning (Shoemaker) but says that her mother was Elizabeth Maguire. So her father’s name and his occupation are in some dispute but, as the daughters had almost certainly never met their maternal grandfather, they could be mistaken.

We know quite a lot about some of the children and their descendants but not others.  So far we have no other reports relating to her death or that of husband Thomas.

However, a really interesting piece was found in an old Perth newspaper.  It is a request from a British newspaper for information about the fate of both Thomas and Margaret in 1902.

Ex Sunday Times (Perth, West Aust) 5th October 1902, page 2

The article was captioned “Missing Friends’ and started –

Below we give a list of the missing in Australia, compiled from the latest English, Irish and Scottish journals. Any person who can give information concerning those wanted is kindly requested to send particulars to the Editor of THE SUNDAY TIMES, Perth. The intelligence will then be forwarded to the paper in which the enquiry first appeared. ….

HANNON.—The relatives of Margaret Hannon, a native of County Wicklow, who went to Australia prior to 1853. Her mother married second time. Second husband named White. Of this union there were two sons.

The associated 1902 information about Thomas said he came out over 45 years ago and named his brothers but gives no indication that they knew of his marriage, except that the Hannon request was in the same newspaper article. This may be pure coincidence but I suspect not.

Other information that we have about Margaret comes from the children’s birth registrations.  They sometimes vary the parent’s ages a little bit but, in one case, the certificate says that Margaret was from Baltinglass which is more specific than Co Wicklow.  Indications are that Margaret was only 18 when she married, not 21 as declared on the marriage certificate. This would make her year of birth probably 1835.

We have no other information about Margaret despite many searches of online newspapers, Irish records, shipping records etc.  There seem to be many Hannon’s from Killahuller parish which is not very far from Baltinglass and Matthew Hannon is named as holding property there by Griffiths in the early 1850s. Hence our request to this parish.

We also seek information about the second family of Elizabeth Maquire/Hannon and of her first husband’s death.  Griffiths Valuations provide some possible information about the Hannons of Killahurler but we lack real confirmation. We also seek baptismal or birth information about Margaret Hannon to confirm her lineage and anything else about her parent’s marriage and any other siblings.