The Kidd Family A Family History

The Jeffries Emigrants

Samuel & Anne Jeffries

Polperro to the Layton

1815 – 1885 Polperro · Clifton · Surry Hills · Adelaide 9 min read

The family’s first ship reached Sydney a year before the Robens’ — the barque Layton, out of Bristol, with measles in her steerage and seventy children dead on the passage. This is where the Jeffries side lands in Australia.

Photograph to come
No likeness of Samuel or Anne Jeffries is known to survive.
1815
Married at Northam, Devon, 12 November
11+
Children — nine on the Layton, at least two born in the colony
70
Emigrant children lost to measles on the passage
89
Anne’s age at her death, at Adelaide, 1885

Samuel Jeffries was a carpenter and joiner from Polperro, on the south coast of Cornwall, where his own father farmed.2 Anne Rayment was a tailoress from the north Devon coast, a mariner’s daughter.2 They married in 1815, raised their family first at Polperro and then across the water at Clifton, on the Bristol edge, and in 1837 put the whole household aboard an emigrant ship for New South Wales — nine children, the eldest of them already a married man with a wife and baby of his own.2 It is the earliest of the family’s Australian arrivals: the Jeffries were ashore at Sydney a full year before Stephen and Sarah Robens, whose ship reached the colony in 1839 and whose chapter opens the direct line.5

Their son Archibald Joseph Jeffries became the blind master saddler of Bathurst, whose daughter Mary Rebecca Jane married Thomas Robens; his own account is Chapter Two. This companion chapter is for his parents, and for the ten brothers and sisters — the eight who came out on the ship with him, and two more born after the family landed.

Polperro, the Cornish fishing village Samuel Jeffries came out of — a working port since the twelfth century, long a byword for smuggling, its harbour still ringed by the old fishermen’s cottages. A present-day photograph, worked up in watercolour tones.
Northam, 1815

A carpenter and a mariner’s daughter

The surname is spelled a dozen ways across Samuel’s life, and it begins as “Jeffers.” Samuel Jeffers married Anne Rayment on 12 November 1815 in the parish church of Northam — the seafaring parish at the mouth of the Torridge, next to Bideford.1 The banns had been called on the three Sundays before: 22 and 29 October, and 5 November.1 Both were “of this parish,” and both signed the register in their own hands, which not every couple in that book could do; the witnesses were Edward Lethbridge and Robert Taylor.1

What the marriage does not give, the emigration papers later would. The register of 1815 recorded no parents. But the bounty lists of 1838 set down Anne as a daughter of Joseph Rayment, a Bideford mariner, and Samuel as a son of Samuel Jeffries, who farmed at Polperro — the same “native place” that both Samuel and his eldest son would claim on their own immigration cards.2

Polperro & Clifton

Five children christened in a morning

The eldest child, another Samuel, was born at Polperro in November 1816, a year after the wedding, and David followed in 1819.3 By 1821 the family had crossed to Bristol — they were at Limekiln Lane, in the parish of St Augustine, when Ann Douglas was baptised there that October — and Ruth (1823) and Ebenezer George (1826) were born on the Bristol side too.3 The household then settled at Clifton, the fashionable parish soon to be swallowed into the city itself, and there, on one day in the spring of 1827, Samuel and Anne had all five of their elder children christened together at the parish church of St Andrew: Samuel (born 1816), David (1819), Ann Douglas (1821), Ruth (1823) and Ebenezer George (1826).3

Three more children were born at Clifton over the following decade — Mary Jane in 1828, Archibald in 1831, and the youngest boy, Jabez, about 1833 — with a last baby, Elizabeth, about 1836.267 Each was christened at the parish church in turn: Mary Jane on 28 December 1828, from Hotwell Road; Archibald in January 1832, from Gibbins Court; Jabez on 8 December 1833, from Avon Square.6712

The names carry their own hint. Ebenezer and Jabez are chapel names, not parish ones, and Archibald was a Methodist all his Bathurst life. A Nonconformist household bringing a whole brood to the parish font in a single morning is most simply read as a family putting its record in order — for the papers that were about to matter.3

The English ground of the family. Samuel came from Polperro, on the south Cornish coast; Anne from Bideford and Northam, on the north Devon shore of the Bristol Channel. They married at Northam in 1815, and by about 1821 the whole household had moved up to Bristol — Clifton and the Hotwells — from where the Layton sailed for New South Wales in 1837.
The Layton, 1837

Measles in the Channel

The papers were for an assisted passage. A Clifton clergyman, the Rev. William Hurst, curate of Trinity Church, testified to Samuel’s character; the immigration board at Sydney set him down as a house carpenter and joiner, forty-two years old, a native of Polperro, engaged at six shillings and eightpence a day — a tradesman worth a settler’s bounty, brought out with a wife, a schoolroom of children, and a grown married son, also Samuel and also a carpenter, with a young Clifton wife and a baby of their own.2

The barque Layton, Captain John Austin, cleared Bristol on 8 September 1837 with something over a hundred emigrants and a hundred and ten children, under the naval surgeon William Rogers.5 Measles broke out among the children within days of the ship leaving the British Channel, and killed about seventy of them on the voyage.5 Two of the dead were Jeffries babies — Elizabeth, eighteen months old, and a granddaughter, Jane, the same age, the child of young Samuel and his wife Mary.2 Both were buried at sea. The Layton came up the coast in the third week of January 1838 and was ordered to lie off Pinchgut Island until six weeks had passed without a fresh case; only then was she let up to the Cove.5

Surry Hills

Crown Street

The family settled in Surry Hills, the close-built quarter on the town’s eastern edge where Stephen and Sarah Robens would also keep house — the two families a few streets apart, thirty years before their grandchildren married.4 The 1842 Sydney directory has “Jeffries S., house, Crown-street, Surry Hills,” a few entries from a “Jesson John” of the same quarter.4

After that the record on Samuel senior runs out. He was in Surry Hills in 1842 and dead by 1885, when Anne is twice named as his widow; where and when he died has not been found.89 It was long thought he might be the “Samuel Jabez Jeffries” whose death was registered at Adelaide in 1867 — but that entry has since been run down, and it belongs to a four-year-old, the son of Jabez and Ellen, not to the grandfather (see “A widow in South Australia,” below).8

At Adelaide … 22nd September, 1885, Ann Jeffries, aged 89 years, relict of the late Samuel Jeffries, and mother of Mr. A. J. Jeffries, saddler, of Bathurst.
Death notice, Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 3 October 1885
Adelaide, 1885

A widow in South Australia

Anne’s last years were spent not in Sydney but in Adelaide, and she was not the first of the family to be there. Her son Jabez had married at Brompton in 1861 and lived between there and Bowden through the 1860s; her Sydney-born daughter Elizabeth Hall married at Adelaide in 1863 and died at Bowden in 1871; her second daughter, Ann Douglas, widowed in Sydney, ended her life at Bowden too; and her Sydney-born son Joshua died in the Adelaide suburbs in 1904.8 For a time the puzzle of Samuel senior seemed to be answered by the same city — a “Samuel Jabez Jeffries” whose death was registered in the Adelaide district in 1867. The full entry, once it was seen, closed that door: the age at death is five, and the father is Jabez. It is Jabez and Ellen’s little boy, dead at Bowden in 1867 — not the grandfather, whose death is still unaccounted for.8 What is clear is that the Jeffries were in South Australia from 1861, and that Anne went there to be among her children. She herself died on 22 September 1885 at Fullarton, in the city’s southern suburbs, her residence given as Bowden across the town; the death was registered in the Hindmarsh district.9

She was recorded as eighty-nine — which would put her birth about 1796, and make her a bride of nineteen in 1815 rather than the thirty-six-year-old the emigration clerk had written down in 1838. Ages on the bounty lists were routinely trimmed to sit under the scheme’s limits; the age at her death is the one the marriage supports.19 It was that death notice, sent back east and printed in the Bathurst paper her son would have read, that fixed for the record what the shipping papers had blurred — that the widow at Adelaide and the saddler at Bathurst were mother and son.9

The Generation

The Children

Nine children were aboard the Layton in 1838, and eight of them landed alive at Sydney; two more — Elizabeth Hall and Joshua — were born in the colony in the years just after. Archibald’s life is told in full in Chapter Two; six of the others — Samuel, Ann Douglas, Ruth, Ebenezer George, Mary Jane and Jabez — have branch pages of their own, which follow this roster. David’s death at sea in 1845, the baby Elizabeth’s on the passage, and the two Sydney-born children are set out here. The colony-born pair both ended their lives in South Australia, as their mother and several of their elder brothers and sisters did; fuller pages for them wait on more record.

Samuel

born 1816

Ship’s carpenter — married before the voyage

Born
Polperro, 30 November 1816

The eldest child, christened at Clifton in 1827 with the next four.3 He sailed on the Layton as a married man of twenty-one, rated a ship’s carpenter, with a wife, Mary Warn, of Clifton; their infant daughter Jane died of measles on the passage and was buried at sea.2 He was dead within four years of landing; his widow married again, and their three surviving children raised a large family in the Macdonald River and Tamworth districts. His own branch follows below.

David

1819–1845

Died at sea in the island trade

Born
Polperro, 10 May 1819
Died
at sea, off the Loyalty Islands, 17 April 1845

The second son, christened at Clifton in March 1827 with the four next children; eighteen years old when the family sailed.3 He had been seven years in the colony when he shipped for the islands. He died at sea on 17 April 1845, off the Loyalty Islands, aboard the brig Portenia, after a severe illness of ten weeks, aged twenty-five, and unmarried; the Sydney press carried the death when the vessel came back that July.10 The Loyalty group, east of New Caledonia, was then being worked by Sydney brigs for sandalwood and bêche-de-mer.

Ann Douglas

1821–1891

Married a painter killed in a quarry

Born
Bristol, 16 September 1821
Died
Bowden, Adelaide, 25 September 1891

The second daughter — baptised as an infant at Bristol in 1821 and again with the four elder children at Clifton in 1827.3 “Douglas,” which she kept for life and gave to a daughter, sits oddly as a given name and may be a surname carried down from an earlier generation. Sixteen on arrival, she married Samuel William (“William”) Wilton, a Sydney painter, in 1840; he was killed in 1858 by a fall into a quarry, leaving her a widow with young children and “nothing for their support,” and she ended her life at Bowden in Adelaide, the same suburb as her mother. Her branch page follows this roster.

Ruth

1823–1857

Married a Sydney compositor

Born
Bristol, 21 December 1823
Died
West Maitland, 20 September 1857

Baptised at the Wesleyan Portland Chapel at Westbury-on-Trym a week after her birth, and again with the four elder children at Clifton in 1827.3 Fourteen on arrival, she married Frederick Hunt, a Sydney compositor, at St Philip’s in 1843 — the second of the family to marry in the colony, after her sister Ann Douglas. Both her daughters died small, and she died herself of a long illness at the Maitland hospital in 1857, thirty-three years old and the last of her line. Her branch page follows this roster.

Ebenezer George

1826–1881

Married late at Bowden, Adelaide

Born
Bristol, 2 December 1826
Died
Bowden, Adelaide, 1 May 1881

The youngest of the five christened together in 1827, and entered on the Layton’s list as “Ebenezer, 12.”3 Untraced for thirty-eight years after the ship, he surfaces at Bowden in Adelaide — the suburb of his mother and of his sister Ann Douglas — where he married Emma Saxton in 1876, worked as a labourer, and died in 1881, leaving three small daughters. His branch page follows this roster.11

Mary Jane

1828–1877

Married John Henry Duke — Sydney

Born
Clifton, 3 November 1828
Died
Gladesville, 25 March 1877

Christened at Clifton on 28 December 1828, from Hotwell Road — not, as long supposed, born too late for the family christening and lost to the record thereafter.12 She was “Mary Jane, 10” on the Layton’s list, and about 1849 married John Henry Duke, a Sydney grocer. His bankruptcy in 1858 began a long collapse: three of their four children died in 1860, one of them in the Benevolent Asylum, and Mary Jane herself died in 1877 at the Gladesville asylum. Her branch page follows this roster.

Archibald Joseph

1831–1903

The saddler of Bathurst — Chapter Two

Born
Clifton, 1831
Died
Bathurst, 19 May 1903

Born at Clifton and christened at St Andrew’s there on 22 January 1832; six years old on the voyage.6 He married Mary Jane Mills, settled at Bathurst about 1853, and worked some fifty years as a saddler and harness-maker — a rifle champion and Oddfellow, blind in his last decade. His daughter Mary Rebecca Jane married Thomas Robens. His full account is Chapter Two.

Jabez Bunting

c. 1833–1924

The saddler who went to the Murray

Born
Clifton, about 1833
Died
the Upper Murray, New South Wales, 1924

Christened “Jabez” — no “Samuel” before it — at St Andrew’s, Clifton, on 8 December 1833, from Avon Square, and entered on the Layton’s list as “Jabez, 4.”7 A saddler, like his brother Archibald. He married Ellen McGlynn at Adelaide in 1861; the marriage collapsed within two years and into the police courts, and their only child died at four — the 1867 death long mistaken in this family for the grandfather’s.8 Jabez then crossed to the New South Wales Upper Murray, raised a second family at Ournie and Glenroy, and died there in 1924, “one of the oldest pioneers of the Tumbarumba district,” about ninety-two. His branch page follows this roster.

Elizabeth

1836–1838

Buried at sea

Born
Clifton, baptised 31 January 1836
Died
at sea, on the passage

The last child born in England, eighteen months old when the Layton sailed. She took the measles with the other children and was buried at sea; the passenger list carries her only as “Elizabeth, 1½, died at sea.”2 Her name was given again to the next daughter, born in the colony within a year or two of the landing — Elizabeth Hall, below.

Elizabeth Hall

c. 1838–1871

Married Stephen Biggs — Bowden, Adelaide

Born
New South Wales, about 1838
Died
Bowden, Adelaide, 12 September 1871

Born in the colony after the Layton landed, and named for the baby lost on the passage — “youngest daughter of Mrs. Ann Jeffries,” as her death notice has it.13 She went to South Australia with her mother, and on 18 May 1863 married Stephen Biggs at Adelaide, a young colonist whose family held land at Brompton and Bowden.13 She died of consumption on 12 September 1871, at her mother’s house at Bowden, thirty-three years old, and was buried at Hindmarsh — the ground that also holds her mother, her sister Ann Douglas and her brother Ebenezer George. Where the middle name “Hall” comes from is not yet known. A fuller account waits on more record.13

Joshua

1841–1904

Born in Sydney; died in Adelaide

Born
Sydney, 1841
Died
Norwood, Adelaide, 1904

The second of the Sydney-born children, registered in 1841 to Samuel and Ann Jeffries — the mother’s name marking him off from the children of his brother Samuel and Mary Warn.14 Unlike the brothers who surface in Adelaide with no colonial marriage traced, Joshua married in Sydney — Susan Brown, in 1864 — and only later followed the family to South Australia, dying in the Norwood district of Adelaide in 1904, about sixty-three.14 His story, too, is only sketched here until more is found.

The Branch Pages

Followed Further

Six of the nine children have now been followed past the passenger list into families of their own. The eldest, Samuel, sailed as a married ship’s carpenter of twenty-one, with a Clifton wife and a baby daughter who did not live to see Sydney; he died four years after landing, and his colony-born children carried the name up to the Macdonald River and Tamworth.

The elder daughter, Ann Douglas, married a Sydney painter in 1840, was widowed by a quarry accident in 1858, and ended her life at Bowden in Adelaide — the same suburb as her mother. Her younger sister Ruth married a Sydney compositor in 1843, followed the printing trade north to the Hunter, buried both her small daughters, and died at the Maitland hospital in 1857, thirty-three years old and the end of her line.

The third son, Ebenezer George, drops out of the record for thirty-eight years after the Layton and then reappears at that same Adelaide suburb, Bowden — marrying at nearly fifty, and dead five years later with three daughters under five. The youngest daughter, Mary Jane, married a Sydney grocer named Duke; his bankruptcy in 1858 opened a decade that put an eight-year-old daughter in the Benevolent Asylum, took three of the four children in a single year, and ended with Mary Jane’s own death in the asylum at Gladesville in 1877.

That leaves Jabez, the youngest of the sons who sailed, whose page is the last to be added. A saddler, he married at Adelaide in 1861; the marriage broke up in the police courts within two years, and the one child of it died at four — the “Samuel Jabez Jeffries” death of 1867 that had long been read in this family as the lost death of the grandfather. Jabez then crossed to the New South Wales side of the Upper Murray, lived out fifty years and a second family there, and died in 1924 at about ninety-two. With his story told, every one of the nine who sailed is now followed to the end of a life. Two more children — Elizabeth Hall and Joshua, both born in Sydney after the landing and both dying in South Australia — have since been added to the roster above, and will have pages of their own once the record fills out.

The Eldest Son

Samuel Jeffries & Mary Warn 1816–1842

The eldest of the nine — a ship’s carpenter who sailed as a married man of twenty-one, lost a baby daughter to measles in the Channel, and was dead himself within four years of landing. His widow married again, and his children carried the name up-country to Tamworth.

Read their story
The Eldest Daughter

Ann Douglas Jeffries & William Wilton 1821–1891

The eldest of the three Jeffries daughters to reach Australia. She married a Sydney painter, lost him to a fall into a quarry in 1858, was left a widow with young children and “nothing for their support,” and ended her life at Bowden in Adelaide — the same suburb as her mother.

Read their story
The Compositor’s Wife

Ruth Jeffries & Frederick Hunt 1823–1857

The middle of the three Jeffries daughters to reach Australia. She married a compositor in the Sydney printing trade, followed his work north to the Hunter, and died of a long illness at the Maitland hospital at thirty-three — having already buried both her small daughters.

Read their story
The Adelaide Son

Ebenezer George Jeffries & Emma Saxton 1826–1881

The third of the sons, and the one the record loses. Nothing is known of him for the thirty-eight years between the emigrant ship and his wedding — and then he is at Bowden in Adelaide, marrying Emma Saxton at nearly fifty, a labourer with a police-court fine to his name, dead five years later and leaving three daughters under five.

Read their story
The Grocer’s Wife

Mary Jane Jeffries & John Henry Duke 1828–1877

The youngest of the three Jeffries daughters to reach Australia — and for a lifetime the one child of the nine the record had lost. She married a Sydney grocer; his bankruptcy in 1858 opened a decade that took three of her four children in a single year and ended with her own death in the asylum at Gladesville.

Read their story
The Youngest Son

Jabez Bunting Jeffries & Ellen McGlynn c. 1833–1924

The youngest of the sons born in England. A saddler whose Adelaide marriage fell apart in the police courts within weeks of the wedding — and who then crossed to the New South Wales side of the Upper Murray, raised a second family under the same name, and died at ninety-two a pioneer of the Tumbarumba country.

Read their story

The Record

Sources & References

  1. 1

    Marriage, Northam, 1815

    Parish register of Northam, Devon — marriage no. 69, Samuel Jeffers, of the parish, and Ann Rayment, of the parish, married by banns on 12 November 1815 by Thomas Mill, vicar; witnesses Edward Lethbridge and Robert Taylor; both parties signed. Banns register, same parish — Samuel Jeffers and Ann Reyment, called 22 October, 29 October and 5 November 1815. Ancestry’s index places the banns at “Bideford,” the registration district in which Northam sits. The post-1813 register records no parents; Anne’s maiden name and both fathers come from the emigration papers (reference 2).

  2. 2

    Emigration — the barque Layton, 1837–38

    State Records NSW, Index to Bounty Immigrants (ship Layton, 1838): Samuel Jefferies, 42, house carpenter & joiner, native of Polperro, Cornwall, son of Samuel Jefferies, farmer; Anne, 36, tailoress, native of Bideford, Devon, daughter of Joseph Rayment, mariner; with David 18, Ann Douglas 16, Ruth 14, Ebenezer 12, Mary Jane 10, Archibald 6, Jabez 4, and Elizabeth 1½ “died at sea”; and, entered separately, married son Samuel jr, 21, ship’s carpenter, with wife Mary, 21, of Clifton, and infant Jane, 1½, also “died at sea.” Two immigration-board “Married Male Immigrant” cards, for Samuel sr and Samuel jr, both give Polperro and the farmer father; Samuel sr’s character was certified by the Rev. William Hurst, curate of Trinity Church, Clifton, and he is marked “reads & writes.” Agent’s list of immigrants per Layton — “Jeffries, Samuel, carpenter,” engaged at 6s 8d a day. The Port Jackson series spells the surname “Jeffreys.”

  3. 3

    Baptisms of the five elder children, Clifton, 1827

    Parish register of St Andrew, Clifton, Gloucestershire, baptisms 1827, entries 604–608 — children of Samuel and Anne “Jefferies,” of Clifton, carpenter, all christened together by James Taylor: Samuel, born 30 November 1816; David, born 10 May 1819; Ann Douglas, born 16 September 1821; Ruth, born 1 December 1823; and Ebenezer George, born 2 December 1826. Ann Douglas had already been baptised once, as an infant, at Portland Chapel in the Bristol parish of Westbury-on-Trym on 7 October 1821, the family then at Limekiln Lane in the parish of St Augustine (Ann Douglas’s branch page, reference 1); so the move from Cornwall to Bristol had happened by 1821, and only Samuel and David are likely to have been Cornish-born.

  4. 4

    The family in Surry Hills, 1842

    The Australian (Sydney), 21 September 1842, alphabetical householders’ list — “Jeffries S. house, Crown-st Surry hills,” a few entries from “Jesson John, house, Surry hills.” The same close quarter in which Stephen and Sarah Robens kept house; see Chapter One. No later trace of Samuel senior has been found.

  5. 5

    The voyage of the Layton, 1837–38

    Ship News, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 20 January 1838, and a second Sydney “Ship News” notice — the barque Layton, Captain John Austin, sailed from Bristol on 8 September 1837 under surgeon-superintendent William Rogers R.N. with about 122 emigrants and 110 children; measles broke out after she left the British Channel and carried off some 70 children; she was held off Pinchgut Island and, no fresh case having occurred for six weeks, was not put under quarantine. The immigration-board card logs her arrival as 18 January 1838; the Gazette gives 20 January. Layton (1814), a Lancaster-built ship that made four convict voyages and two emigrant voyages to Australia, was lost at sea in 1847.

  6. 6

    Baptism of Archibald Joseph, Clifton, 1832

    Parish register of St Andrew, Clifton, baptisms 1832, entry no. 1628 — Archibald Joseph, son of Samuel and Ann Jefferies, abode Gibbins Court, father’s trade “carpenter,” christened 22 January 1832. Cited more fully at Chapter Two, reference 1, where his own life is told.

  7. 7

    Baptism of Jabez, Clifton, 1833

    Parish register of St Andrew, Clifton, Gloucestershire, baptisms — page 251, entry no. 2008: Jabez, son of Samuel and Ann Jeffries, abode Avon Square, father’s trade “carpenter,” baptised 8 December. The pre-printed heading of the page reads 1835, but every dated entry on it falls in November or December 1833, and the entry numbers agree (Archibald was no. 1628 in January 1832); the Layton’s bounty list of 1837 enters him as “Jabez, 4,” which fits an 1833 birth and not an 1835 one. Some indexes carry 1835 from the page heading. The name in the register is “Jabez” alone, with no “Samuel”: he is Jabez Bunting Jeffries — a Wesleyan naming, after the Methodist leader Jabez Bunting — on his 1861 marriage and on every colonial record after it. His life is on his branch page below.

  8. 8

    Death at Adelaide, 1867 — a grandchild, not the grandfather

    South Australian death registration (GenealogySA), district of Adelaide, book/page 26/392, 1867 — Samuel Jabez Jeffries, death age 5, born about 1862, of Bowden, died 15 March 1867; father Jabez Jeffries. This is the son of Jabez Bunting Jeffries and Ellen McGlynn, born at Brompton on 11 June 1862 and registered at birth simply as “Jabez” (book/page 20/388). The entry was for years read as a possible death for Samuel the emigrant father, or for Jabez himself; the age and the father’s name rule out both. Samuel senior’s death remains untraced. Jabez’s own life — South Australia to 1863, then fifty years in the New South Wales Upper Murray, dying in 1924 — is on his branch page below.

  9. 9

    Death of Anne Jeffries, Adelaide, 1885

    South Australian death registration — Ann Jeffries, died 22 September 1885 at Fullarton, residence Bowden, registered Hindmarsh district, vol. 149 p. 39; age 89, birth about 1796. Death notice, Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser — “JEFFRIES.—September 22, at Bowden, Adelaide, Ann, widow of the late Samuel Jeffries, aged 89.” Death notice, Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 3 October 1885 — “At Adelaide … 22nd September, 1885, Ann Jeffries, aged 89 years, relict of the late Samuel Jeffries, and mother of Mr. A. J. Jeffries, saddler, of Bathurst.” The Bathurst notice is the documentary link between this generation and the saddler of Chapter Two.

  10. 10

    Death of David Jeffries at sea, 1845

    Death notice, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 1845 — “DIED. At Sea, on board the brig Portenia, off the Loyalty Islands, on the 17th April last, after a severe illness of ten weeks, Mr. David Jeffries, aged 25 years.” His baptism with the four next children at St Andrew’s, Clifton, on 18 March 1827 (Family History Library film 1595528, item 4 p. 76) gives his birth as 10 May 1819, consistent with the age in the notice and with the Layton bounty list (“David 18”). The Portenia was a Sydney trading brig of about 221 tons, earlier on the Nelson run. The Loyalty Islands, east of New Caledonia, were a station of the Sydney sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trade in the 1840s. No marriage or children are known. His elder brother Samuel had died at Sydney three years before (see the branch page below).

  11. 11

    Ebenezer George Jeffries in South Australia, 1876–1881

    South Australian marriage registration (GenealogySA) — Ebenezer George Jeffries, father Samuel Jeffries, and Emma Saxton, 19 February 1876, at the residence of Mr Jeffries, Bowden; registered Hindmarsh district, book/page 106/424. South Australian death registration — Ebenezer Jeffries, of Bowden, died 1 May 1881, aged 54, registered Hindmarsh 111/154; buried Hindmarsh Cemetery. The father named on the 1876 marriage is what fixes him as the Layton child. His life, his wife Emma Saxton of Launceston, and his three Bowden-born daughters are set out on his branch page below.

  12. 12

    Baptism of Mary Jane, Clifton, 1828

    Parish register of St Andrew, Clifton, Gloucestershire, baptisms 1828, page 119, entry no. 948 — Mary Jane, daughter of Samuel and Ann Jeffries, abode Hotwell Road, father’s trade “carpenter,” born 3 November 1828, baptised 28 December 1828 by R. Allwood. She was born more than a year after the five eldest children were christened together (reference 3), which is why she was not among them; her own life is told on her branch page below.

  13. 13

    Elizabeth Hall Jeffries & Stephen Biggs

    Death notices, September 1871 — South Australian Advertiser, 15 September 1871, page 2: “BIGGS.—On the 12th of September, at her mother’s residence, Bowden, South Australia, of consumption, Elizabeth Hall Biggs, youngest daughter of Mrs. Ann Jeffreys, and sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. H. Franklin, of North Adelaide, aged 33 years” (Trove nla.news-article28604631); South Australian Register, 16 September 1871, page 4, and Evening Journal (Adelaide), 16 September 1871, page 2, both “Elizabeth Hall Biggs, wife of Stephen Biggs … at her mother’s residence, Mrs. Ann Jeffries, Bowden” (nla.news-article39244602; nla.news-article197659758). South Australian marriage registration (GenealogySA), district of Adelaide, book/page 54/33 — Stephen Biggs and Elizabeth Hall Jeffries, married 18 May 1863; her father Samuel Jeffries. South Australian death registration — Elizabeth Hall Biggs, of Bowden, died 12 September 1871, aged 33 (birth about 1838), registered Adelaide, book/page 43/322; buried Hindmarsh Cemetery. A birth about 1838 falls after the Layton reached Sydney in January 1838: the infant Elizabeth of the passenger list (reference 2) had died on the voyage, and this daughter was given the same name. Stephen Biggs — born about 1839; died at Fullarton, 14 May 1880, aged 41, buried Hindmarsh — had a Real Property Act application for Lot 217 of Section 355, Survey B, at Brompton advertised in the South Australian Government Gazette of 2 May 1861 (page 387) and the South Australian Advertiser of 14 May 1861 (page 3), his residence Bowden. His people were the Biggs family that reached Adelaide on the Resource in 1839; “Hall” is also the maiden name of the wife of his brother Edward Biggs, brickmaker of Bowden, and its origin in this family is not established. A fuller page is deferred pending further record.

  14. 14

    Joshua Jeffries & Susan Brown

    NSW BDM birth index — Joshua S. Jeffries, born New South Wales 1841, registered Sydney, V1841 98/54; father Samuel Jeffries, mother Ann Jeffries — the mother’s name distinguishing him from the colony-born children of Samuel jr and Mary Warn. NSW BDM marriage index — Joshua Jeffries and Susan Brown, Sydney, 1864, reg. 1049. South Australian death registration (GenealogySA) — Joshua Jeffries, district of Norwood, 1904, book/page 302/8. The move from Sydney to Adelaide follows the same path as his brothers Ebenezer George and Jabez and his sister Ann Douglas. A fuller page is deferred pending further record.