Robert McIntosh (the younger)

Robert was born 4 February 1809, and baptised the same month at St Laurence, near Canterbury, Kent — three independent sources now agree on the place. His birth predates his father’s enlistment by four years, so whatever took the family to Canterbury in 1809 wasn’t the 46th Regiment, which was based in Devon at the time and whose main battalion was overseas at the invasion of Martinique; it fits better with Robert senior’s stated occupation of "musician" in a garrison town.

He married Jane Pymble in Sydney in 1830. Jane was born in 1810 in Herefordshire, England, and died 28 June 1882 at Botany; Robert died 30 June 1889 in Sydney. Both are buried at St John’s Anglican Church, Gordon. Their children were Robert Edward, George, William Henry, Hannah, Lavinia, Edwin Archibold, Sarah Emily (married name Forster), Alfred, Frederick and Sydney James.

As administrator of his father’s estate from 1829, Robert spent the next two decades quietly building on it — the George Street lease, cattle bonds, and further Pittwater land, much of it in the name of settling his father’s unfinished business with the Crown. In 1842 five of his siblings sued him over it, and the dispute over whether he was truly their father’s son at all is told in full above, in Robert’s own account.