A Family History · New South Wales
The Kidd Family
and the lives that made it
Five generations across the Australian frontier — saddlers and soldiers, wanderers and home-keepers — told not in dates alone, but in the stories behind the names.
Kept against forgetting
Every family is a library of lives that would otherwise be lost — a saddler who went blind at his bench, a mother who walked a thousand miles, a girl who stood beside her great-grandfather for a photograph and lived to ninety-six. This is where those lives are gathered and kept.
Chapter One · Now available
Stephen & Sarah Robens
From Sussex to the Sydney City Mission
A boy who carried mortar for threepence a day became the first missionary of the Sydney City Mission — and for one desperate year, its only one. This is where the family lands in Australia.
- 1839
- The Neptune lands at Sydney
- 13
- Years as the Mission’s first missionary
- 43
- High Holborn Street — the house that held them
- 54
- Grandchildren living at Sarah’s death
The Branches of the Family
The Chapters
The history unfolds in parts — each a branch of the tree, each a world of its own. Begin wherever the name pulls you.
Samuel & Anne Jeffries
Polperro to the Layton
Samuel Jeffries, a Cornish carpenter, married Anne Rayment at Northam in Devon in 1815, raised nine children at Polperro and Clifton, brought them all out to New South Wales on the Layton in 1838, and had at least two more after the family landed. Anne outlived him and died at Adelaide in 1885, aged eighty-nine.
Read the chapterJohn & Mary Mills
Upholsterer, Ferryman, Schoolmaster
John Mills, a London-born convict transported for life in 1812, and Mary Manning, born in the colony, married at Sydney in 1824 and raised twelve children between the Nepean and the Hawkesbury. He worked the government ferry at Emu, kept an inn at Penrith, and ended as schoolmaster of the Roman Catholic school at Richmond, dying there in 1859. Their eldest daughter, Mary Jane, married Archibald Joseph Jeffries in 1852.
Read the chapterStephen & Sarah Robens
From Sussex to the Sydney City Mission
Stephen Robens and Sarah Ann Catt sailed from London aboard the Neptune in 1839, built a house in Surry Hills that held the family for sixty years, and gave thirteen years to the Sydney City Mission.
Read the chapterThomas & Mary Rebecca Robens
A Saddler in the Inner West
Thomas Robens, eldest son of the city missionary, married Mary Rebecca Jane Jeffries at Bathurst in 1871. All twelve of their children were born in Sydney’s inner west between 1872 and 1896.
Read the chapterRobert McIntosh & Eleanor Dudgeon
Glenalbert to Pittwater
Robert McIntosh, born at Glenalbert on the Tay in 1781, married Eleanor (Helen) Dudgeon in Dublin in 1807, and brought her and three small children to Sydney in 1814 as bandmaster of the 46th Regiment. He built a life as a constable, publican and Pittwater farmer, was convicted of theft in 1820, and died in 1829 leaving eight children — among them Ellen, whose marriage to George Bawn carries this line into the Bawn chapter that follows. His estate was still being fought over in 1851, and again in 1917.
Read the chapterGeorge Bawn & Ellen McIntosh
The Waterman of Circular Quay
George Bawn, transported from London in 1833 for picking pockets, became a Sydney waterman and married Ellen McIntosh in 1840. They had eight children — among them Frances Elizabeth, whose marriage to Alfred Baldock carries this line into the chapter that follows. Ellen died in 1860; George remarried her own widowed sister-in-law, Mary Jane McIntosh, and died in 1883.
Read the chapterAlfred & Frances Baldock
The Coachbuilder of Durham Street
Alfred Baldock, a coachbuilder, married Frances Elizabeth Bawn at the Scots Church, Sydney, on 1 January 1863. They raised twelve children between Bathurst, Darlington and Newtown; Frances died in 1905, Alfred in 1916, and their fifth child, Ada Ellen, married Archibald Thomas Robens — the marriage that opens Chapter Three.
Read the chapterArchibald & Ada Robens
The Postmaster of North Ryde
Archibald Thomas Robens and Ada Ellen Baldock married at Newtown in 1895 and raised five children above the shop on Cox’s Road, North Ryde, where Archibald held the Postmaster-General’s contract from 1935.
Read the chapterJohn & Mary Mitchell
A Glasgow Smith and the Ship Kate
John Mitchell, a smith, and Mary Kellar, a weaver’s daughter, married at Calton, Glasgow, on 25 December 1818. In September 1849, both in their fifties, they arrived at Sydney on the assisted-emigrant ship Kate with six of their nine children; a daughter, Isabella, was already there, and their son Robert followed in 1857, his passage partly paid by his father. John called himself a ‘practical engineer’ and named his farm near Canterbury after the Glasgow street the family had left. Mary died there in March 1866, and John three months later, at Robert’s forge in Parramatta Street. Their daughter Christina married William Thomas Cadden in 1852.
Read the chapterWilliam & Christina Cadden
A Lancashire Runaway on the Goldfields
William Thomas Cadden, born at Ormskirk, Lancashire, in 1826, ran away to sea, reached the 1849 California gold rush, and followed the Australian goldfields — Rockhampton, Dalmorton, Glen Innes — for the rest of his working life, trying his hand along the way as mariner, farmer, tobacconist, upholsterer and miner. He married Christina Mitchell, a sixteen-year-old Glasgow immigrant, at Sydney in 1852, and the couple raised seven children. Their daughter Frances Helen married William Frederick Poole in 1873 — the marriage at the heart of the next chapter. William died at Glen Innes in 1898, not long after an obituary recorded a life that had taken in the Eureka Stockade, the Lambing Flat riots and a near miss at the Mount Morgan mine; Christina outlived him until 1907.
Read the chapterWilliam & Frances Poole
The Warden’s Clerk of Dalmorton
William Frederick Poole, an Irish-born storekeeper, married sixteen-year-old Frances Helen Cadden at Grafton in 1873 and raised at least eleven children, ten of them at the mining township of Dalmorton, on the Clarence River. He became Warden’s Clerk, Mining Registrar and postmaster there, was convicted of perjury in 1893 after a Royal Commission found he had secretly held an interest in a gold mine, and served part of a three-year sentence at Bathurst Gaol before an early release. He died at Balmain about 1900; Frances outlived him by nearly three decades, dying at Ashfield in 1928.
Read the chapterAlexander & Anna Maria Cook
The Surgeon of the Fever Ship
Alexander Currie Cook was born about 1810 at Kilmory on the Isle of Arran, the son of John Cook and Mary Currie. In September 1837, newly married to Jane Campbell of Saltcoats, he sailed from Greenock as surgeon of the bounty ship Minerva, taking his whole family with him. Typhus broke out on board: his father, mother, sister Mary and young wife all died before the ship reached Port Jackson, and he arrived dangerously ill himself, to ten weeks in quarantine at Spring Cove. Recovered, he practised as a surgeon and druggist at Windsor and Brickfield Hill, married Anna Maria Rainy in 1839, sold his shop to his brother Finlay, and in 1843 was sued, nonsuited and held for debt. He went to sea as a ship’s surgeon and died at Whampoa, China, in August 1851. Anna Maria died in Sydney two years later, leaving five children, the second of whom, James, carries the line on.
Read the chapterJames & Frances Cook
Balmain North to Ryde
Frances Helen Poole, second of William and Frances Poole’s eleven children, married the Sydney-born James Alexander Cook at Balmain North in 1899. They raised four children between 1900 and 1909 as the family moved out from the harbourside suburbs to Ryde, where both eventually died — Frances in 1952, James sixteen years later, in 1968. Their second child, William James Cook, married Ethel Ida Violet Robens in 1926: the marriage at the heart of Chapter Four.
Read the chapterEthel & William Cook
Bridge Road, Ryde
Ethel Ida Violet Robens, born at Newtown on 4 February 1898, married the boxmaker William James Cook at Ryde in 1926 and made a home on Bridge Road. She lived ninety-six years.
In the writingThe Cook Generation
Frederick, Bruce & their own
The Cook children of Bridge Road, Ryde — the generation that steps out of the archive and into living memory.
In the writingThe Kidd Family
Into Living Memory
The threads of Robens, Jeffries and Cook gather into the Kidd family of today.
In the writing