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 Two · Now available
The Robens Lineage
Anchorage in Bathurst
While other branches scattered across the continent, this line drove its roots deep into the soil, the civic institutions, and the community life of Bathurst — and held.
- 1871
- The founding marriage, in Bathurst
- 12
- Children carried the line onward
- 89
- Years — Mary Rebecca Jane’s long life
- 100
- Lilian, the family’s centenarian
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.
The Jeffries Line
Saddlery, Gold & Civic Life
Archibald Joseph Jeffries and Mary Jane Mills cross the Blue Mountains to build a saddlery and a name in booming Bathurst.
In the writingThe Robens Lineage
Anchorage in Bathurst
The marriage of Mary Rebecca Jane Jeffries and Thomas Robens in 1871 founded one of the most resilient branches of the family — twelve children whose lives ran from steady city trades to a thousand-mile walk across a continent.
Read the chapterEthel’s Generation
The Children in the Portrait
Ethel, Alfred, Pearl, Muriel and Lilian — the generation photographed beside their blind great-grandfather, carrying the line into the twentieth century.
In the writingThe Kidd Family
Into Living Memory
The threads of Jeffries and Robens gather into the Kidd family of today.
In the writing