the first draft

The Life and Times of Martha Wiggins

18 September 2023

Act 1 - Discovering Martha

When I found that the parents of my great-great-grandmother Julia TILLEY, were George TILLEY and Martha WIGGINS from Tasmania, it was easy to find information about George, as there were newspaper reports when both he and his father Edward died in separate accidents at sea.

Originally I was confused about who “my Martha Wiggins” was because there were two girls of that name in Tasmania in the right time frame. At first it seemed that Martha born in 1825 to Thomas Wiggins & Susanna Welch must be the correct one as she would have been about 20 years old when the 22 year old George Tilley married in 1845. However, further evidence on certificates, and newspaper reports of George’s death in a whaling accident confirmed that his father-in-law was James Wiggins. James’s daughter was the other Martha Wiggins born 1829 in England, so she was only 16 years old when she married George.

After George Tilley’s death I lost track of Martha as there was no record of the death of a Martha Tilley in Tasmanian records.

I continued to follow the trail of their youngest daughter Julia Mary Ann TILLEY, who married my great great grandfather Ormond BUTLER in Tasmania about 1872 and had 2 sons, born in Hobart. Some time after the birth of their 2nd child, Francis, in February 1875, Ormond and Julia came to Melbourne where their first son Walter died in September of that year.

They went on to have a daughter and three more sons in Melbourne, and when Ormond died at the age of 32, in 1884, 30 year old Julia was left to bring up 5 children between two and 10 years old. The youngest child, Arthur Ormond, was my grandfather’s dad, who died at the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916.

Tracing Julia and Ormond’s grave at the Melbourne Cemetery in Carlton I discovered that they were buried with their 2nd son Francis and a woman named Martha FOSTER. No Fosters in our family as far as I knew at that time, so who was this mysterious lady? After about half an hour of searching through records of other relatives of Julia - sisters, aunts, cousins - for someone named Martha, I suddenly realised it must be Julia’s mother the elusive Martha Wiggins. Further checking revealed that Martha had also died in 1916, at the age of 87, just 2 months after the death of her grandson Arthur. So 1916 wasn’t a good year for Julia.

Although Julia had two more husbands in later life it was probably Martha who helped her bring up the children in the 11 years after Ormond’s death and before she remarried for the first time.

Act 2 - Marriages and Mayhem in old Hobart Town

Martha was born in Sussex, England in 1829. Her father James Barter Wiggins was transported to Tasmania in 1831 on the convict ship “Argyle”, and in 1834 his wife Mary Ann Bishop joined him there with their four young children, Jane, James, Robert & Martha. After James was freed, he and Mary Ann had another two children, Hannah & John. He gave up his former life of petty crime and settled down to become a "respectable" citizens of Hobart Town, and became Licensee of a Pub.

At the age of 16 Martha was married to George Tilley a local mariner and they had five children. Then in 1855 when their youngest daughter Julia was less than a year old, George was killed in an incident with a whale of the coast of Tasmania. In an odd coincidence his father Edward Tilley had been drowned in the D’Entrecasteux channed off Hobart in 1831, when the ship he captained capsized in a storm.

The following year Martha married James Claridge, who had arrived in Tasmania under the Immigration Bounty Scheme

James probably met Martha’s father as part of his sales job getting orders from publicans for his employer’s supplies. Unfortunately within a year James was convicted of embezzling about 900 pounds from his employer, Mr Carter. His yearly wage was 100 pounds, but his main defence was: “the large expenses he was obliged to incur in soliciting orders from the publicans, customers to Mr. Carter”. Apparently the “salesman’s business lunch” was a thing in the 1850s too.

With her husband in gaol and five children to support, young Martha decided to take up with Jacob Foster and proceeded to have 2 more daughters, Alice in May 1858 and Selina in April 1860. (Father described as Sailmaker/Mariner). Both babies were registered by Martha without given names and recorded by the registrar as male (the default for an un-named child?). Alice was baptised in October of 1858 at holy Trinity Church, but I can find no baptism for Selina, perhaps because Jacob Foster died in 1860 a month after Selina was born.

Another daughter Caroline born in 1863 is described on her birth registration as daughter of Margaret Foster (formerly Wiggins) and John Foster (Blacksmith). A fourth daughter, Ada Esther, born in 1865 is registered as the child of Martha Foster and John Bank (Blacksmith), could he also be the father of Caroline? The informant on Ada's registration was the baby's half-sister Eliza Tilley, who at 17, was perhaps less inclined than her mother to obfuscate the facts on official certificates.

James Claridge died in 1867 from the DTs, so seems to have taken up his old drinking habits after his release from gaol. He is described in a brief notice in the Hobart Mercury Newspaper as the postmaster at Latrobe in northern Tasmania (near Launceston). There is no indication that he and Martha got back together again.

There is no further record of Martha for a few years until 1870 when she married again, to 28 year old blacksmith William Waterhouse Hutchinson. By this time Martha was about 41 years old and had 4 children under 12 dependent on her, although she appears to have neglected to tell her new husband the full details of her childrens’ paternity. Not surprisingly things didn’t go well with this marriage, especially when William found out that Martha was receiving support payments from the father of the youngest 2 children.

In October 1871 Martha appeared in court to petition for Hutchinson to be “bound over to keep the peace”. A few months later Hutchinson was in court again charged with assaulting Martha’s father James. Both court cases make interesting reading with claims and counter claims of threatening behaviour, drunkeness and neglect on all sides. They also indicate that by July of 1872 Martha had gone to Melbourne to live with the reputed father of her youngest children.

Act 3 - Secrets Taken to the Grave
What we Know we Don’t Know... and What we Don’t Know we Don’t Know...

As official record keeping became more regulated people seemed to become better at fudging the truth to cover their indiscretions and moving to a different city always provided a chance for a new start. Martha called herself Mrs Foster for the rest of her life after coming to Melbourne, so how long did she live with Banks if he was in fact the man she came to Melbourne to live with? The 2 oldest girls, Alice and Selina, at 14 & 12, must have known he wasn’t their father unless he used the name Foster too. They would also have been old enough to be aware of her legal marriage to William Hutchinson just two years before, although they could have been living with their grandparents, James and Mary Wiggins, or one of their older half-sisters during the time Martha was with William.

The youngest of the girls, Ada died in 1875, at the age of 10 (interestingly Martha used the name William for Ada's father on the child's death certificate), but the other 3 girls would presumably have had contact with their half-sister Julia after she and Ormond arrived in Melbourne in 1875, so they might have gained some knowledge of the past from her.

At the time of her death Martha was living with her daughter Selina, who had married John Newton. This death notice was probably inserted in the Hobart Mercury by Martha’s youngest sister, and only surviving sibling, Hannah who married her 2nd husband Thomas Gordon in Tasmania in 1875.

Martha’s death certificate Shows only 2 marriages, her first to George Tilley, listing the 5 eldest children, and a 2nd to Jacob Foster, with the 4 younger girls listed as his children. The information on the certificate was probably provided by Selina or Julia, and contains a fair bit of guesswork and/or covering up. Her age at first marriage is given as 19 rather than 16 - probably a guess based on the ages of her eldest children. Her age at second marriage is given as 28, about the time she married James Claridge and just before the birth of Alice Foster. Whether they were guessing about the supposed marriage to Foster or knew it never happened but “covered over the cracks” as many families had in the past, we may never know.