Eliza McIntosh

Eliza was the eldest of Robert and Eleanor’s children, born around 1807 or 1808 — very early in their marriage — and came out with the family in 1814, recorded as "came free" aboard the Windham. On 3 January 1827 she was granted permission to marry Joseph Barnes, a convict still under a fourteen-year bond, and they married on 16 January at St Peters, Campbelltown, before Robert & Eleanor’s Bull’s Head lease of that same year had even been signed.

Joseph had been convicted of horse theft at the Essex Assizes in 1824 — originally sentenced to death, reprieved to fourteen years’ transportation — and transported on the Asia, arriving in April 1825. He was assigned on arrival to the surveyor John Oxley, and by the 1828 census had earned a Ticket of Leave, working as a coachman on Sussex Street, Sydney.

Eliza died at Parramatta on 22 March 1835, aged 27, not long after the birth of her last child — the local sequence of events (recently confined, unfavourable symptoms, doctors sent for too late) is exactly what her death record and the parish burial register both point to; she is recorded there simply as "Coachman’s Wife." Joseph did not stay single long: a son, James, was born to him and a woman named Elizabeth in May 1836, over a decade before his formal second marriage — to an Elizabeth Beasley — was registered in 1851. Joseph and Elizabeth went on to have twelve children together before his own death in 1862, a separate family with no McIntosh blood in it at all.