John & Mary Mitchell

John Mitchell was born on 17 January 1797 in the Barony parish of Glasgow, the fourth child of Robert Mitchell, a smith at Westmuir, and Agnes Reid.¹ Mary Kellar — Killar in the register — was born on 5 December 1796, the ninth child of Alexander Killar, a weaver in Calton, and Mary Ballantine.² On Christmas Day 1818 the Rev. Matthew Graham married ‘John Mitchell, smith in Calton, and Mary Kellar residing there’.³ John was twenty-one, and already following his father’s trade.

Their first child, Mary, was born nine months later, in September 1819, and named for both her grandmothers’ sides: Mary Ballentine. Agnes Reid, named in full for John’s mother, followed in 1821, then Robert in 1823, Isabella in 1826, Margaret Brown in 1828 and Jean in 1831 — the parish clerk counting them off as ‘their 5th child’, ‘their 6th child’.⁴ By then the family was living at Quarrytown, on the north side of the city, and John was still a smith.

Five years later they had moved again, into the streets off Sauchiehall Street, then being built westward across the old Sauchie Hall lands. Hannah was baptised in 1836 at the Cambridge Street United Secession Church — the family were Presbyterian dissenters, outside the Church of Scotland — and the youngest, John Alexander, there in November 1842.⁴ Christina, born about 1833, completes the nine. Long afterwards, in Sydney, John would describe himself in his daughters’ wedding notices as ‘formerly of Sauchiehall-street, Glasgow, practical engineer’.⁵

The ship Kate

Hannah died in 1849, aged about thirteen.⁴ That same year John and Mary, both now about fifty-two, took six of their children aboard the assisted-emigrant ship Kate. They gave their ages as forty-five — assisted passages had age limits — and the two eldest daughters, Mary and Agnes, shaved a year or two off theirs as well.⁶ The Kate came into Port Jackson on Sunday 23 September 1849 with 337 immigrants.⁷

The passenger list sets the family down as no. 25: John, blacksmith; Mary; Mary, Agnes, Margaret, Jane and Christina, all ‘house servants’; and John, seven. Because the entry runs over the foot of one page onto the next, a reader who sees only the second page finds Christina and her younger brother apparently travelling without their parents — a misreading that long stood in this family’s own account.⁶ All five daughters on the ship were single.

Two days later the Immigration Board questioned each family. John gave his parents as ‘Robert & Agnes, both dead’ and Mary hers as ‘Alexander & Mary Kellar, dead’ — exactly as the Glasgow registers have them — and when asked about relations already in the colony, John answered: ‘a daughter, Isabella Mitchell — Sydney’.⁸ Isabella had gone out ahead of them. The remarks column notes that he had paid £7 towards the passages.

Sauchiehall Farm

Within four years five daughters were married. Isabella married William McGraw in 1850. Mary married John Loudoun — a young Busby farm labourer who had come out on the Kate as a single man — at the Scots Church on 19 August 1851, with her father signing the register as witness.⁹ Christina married William Thomas Cadden at the same church in February 1852, Margaret married Edwin Glover of Tasmania there that August, and in August 1853 Jean married Stephen Palmer at her father’s own house in Abercrombie Lane.⁵

Their son Robert, a blacksmith like his father and grandfather, had stayed in Scotland and married. He followed in 1857, arriving on the Washington Irving on 29 September with his wife Mary; the Immigration Board recorded his parents as ‘John & Mary, at Sydney’, his relation in the colony as ‘Father, John Mitchell, Blacksmith, Cooks River’, and his passage as paid in part ‘per John Mitchell’ under the Remittance Regulations.¹⁰

By then John and Mary were farming on the Cooks River, near Canterbury, at a place they called Sauchiehall Farm — after the Glasgow street they had left. Their youngest, John Alexander, was a farmer at Canterbury too when he married Sarah Lees at the Scots Church in December 1866. Mary did not see it: she died at Sauchiehall Farm on 3 March 1866, ‘Mary Killar, the beloved wife of John Mitchell, blacksmith, formerly of Glasgow’.¹¹

John outlived her by three months. He died on 10 June 1866 at Robert’s house and forge, 50 Parramatta Street, Chippendale, and two days later the funeral of ‘the late Mr. John Mitchell, Blacksmith, late of Glasgow’ left there for Camperdown Cemetery.¹² He had made no will. In 1869 the court in London granted administration of his English effects — under £600, a substantial sum — to an attorney acting for ‘Robert Mitchell the Son, and one of the Next of Kin’.¹³