The Baldock Family · Alfred & Frances Baldock

Eliza Baldock

1828–1915

William and Louisa’s second daughter — twice married, mother to a public servant and to a bride who outlived her by a quarter-century, and finally traced to her own grave at Rookwood in 1915.

Born: 17 November 1828 · Tunbridge Wells, Kent
Died: 21 June 1915 · Rookwood

Eliza was baptised at Frant’s Wesleyan chapel in December 1828, and was nine years old when the family emigrated in 1838.¹

In 1848 she married Frederick Freeman at Sydney, and the couple had at least two children: Eliza Preston, born 1850, and Frederick Charles, born 1851.² By the time she remarried, in April 1869, Frederick had died and the marriage register recorded her as a widow with one child living and one already dead — a detail hard to square with the two children traced above, both of whom lived into old age, and which points to a third, otherwise untraced infant loss.³

That year she remarried Joseph Farnell Welspring Wakely, an innkeeper of Newtown, at St Stephen’s Church, Camperdown, the register again naming her parents as William and Louisa Baldock.⁴ Wakely had a colourful history of his own: born at Poplar, near London, about 1827, he had worked as a miner and wine dealer on the Victorian goldfields before becoming a licensed victualler in New South Wales, and had already been married once before, in 1854, to a Sydney widow, Anne Gough. That marriage ended in a Victorian Supreme Court divorce suit alleging Anne’s adultery with a Melbourne bacon-curer — though by the time he married Eliza fifteen years later, he was recorded, perhaps euphemistically, as a widower rather than a divorced man.⁵

Eliza died on 21 June 1915 and was buried at Rookwood General Cemetery under her second married name, Wackley — resolving what had long been an untraced death.⁶ Her two children by Frederick Freeman both outlived her comfortably. Eliza Preston Freeman married Julius Joseph Leonard Daniel Garras and died at Randwick in 1941, in her nineties, buried in Rookwood’s Catholic section. Frederick Charles Freeman built a long career in the NSW Post and Telegraph Department — a record clerk who rose to Post and Telegraph Master at Summer Hill by 1895 — and died at Granville in 1917.⁷

For Context

St Stephen’s Church, Newtown

The church Eliza remarried in was newly built when this photograph was taken, around 1875 — designed by the colonial architect Edmund Blacket and completed in 1874, the second St Stephen’s on the site after an 1845 predecessor proved too small for the growing parish. It stands within Camperdown Cemetery, on Church Street, Newtown, ground that had already been receiving burials for three decades by the time the new building went up.

Family records call it by both names, “St Stephen’s, Newtown” and “St Stephen’s, Camperdown” — the same church and the same churchyard, the parish simply straddling the older cemetery name and the newer suburb. With so many of the family living close by on Hordern Street across three generations, it became something like the family’s own church: at least two dozen Baldocks, Freemans, Loises and Funnells were baptised, married or buried here between 1869 and the 1920s, William and Louisa Baldock themselves among the dead in its churchyard.

Eliza Preston and Frederick Charles

Eliza Preston Freeman

1850–1941

m. Julius Joseph Leonard Daniel Garras

Born 1850. Married Julius Joseph Leonard Daniel Garras; died at Randwick on 8 April 1941, aged about ninety, and was buried in the Catholic section of Rookwood.⁷

Frederick Charles Freeman

1851–1917

NSW Post and Telegraph Department

Born 1851. A record clerk in the Electric Telegraphs branch of the NSW civil service, he was appointed Post and Telegraph Master at Summer Hill in 1895. Died at Granville on 16 February 1917 and was buried at Rookwood General Cemetery.⁷

The Record

Sources & References

1
Baptism of Eliza Baldock, 1828

Frant parish baptism register (Wesleyan chapel, Tunbridge Wells), entry No. 244: “Eliza the Daughter of William Baldock of Tunbridge Wells in the Parish of Frant in the County of Sussex, Brewer, and of Louisa his wife, who was the daughter of James and Mary Coleman, was born on the seventeenth day of November in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and twenty eight, and was solemnly baptized … on the twenty eighth day of December” (also independently indexed, FamilySearch, FHL film 0597069, RG4/1191).
2
Marriage of Eliza Baldock and Frederick Freeman, 1848, and their children

NSW BDM marriage index, 1848, Sydney: Frederick Freeman to Eliza Baldock. Two children traced by NSW BDM birth index: Eliza P. Freeman, registration 2062/1850; Frederick C. Freeman, registration 1/1851 — both district “CA,” parents Frederick and Eliza. (A second, coincidentally identically-numbered entry — 2062/1850, district “38A”/“MJ,” also parents Frederick and Eliza — belongs to a different district register; pre-1856 NSW registration numbers restarted per district each year, so the same number recurring elsewhere is chance, not duplication. Every other trace of this family — the 1848 Sydney marriage, the 1869 remarriage at Camperdown, and both children’s later lives at Summer Hill/Granville and Randwick — places them in Sydney throughout, supporting district “CA” as theirs.)
3
Marriage of Eliza (Baldock) Freeman, 1869

NSW Register of Marriages, St Stephen’s Church, Camperdown, 24 April 1869 (entry 67): Joseph Farnell Welspring Wakely, widower, innkeeper, aged 42, and Eliza Freeman, widow, aged 42, of Sydney, recorded with one child living and one dead by her former marriage; her parents given as William Baldock and Louisa (late Coleman), her father’s rank or profession “general business.”
4
Marriage of Eliza (Baldock) Freeman and Joseph Wakely, 1869

As reference 3 above — Joseph Farnell Welspring Wakely, innkeeper of Newtown, and Eliza Freeman, widow, married at St Stephen’s Church, Camperdown, 24 April 1869, NSW marriage registration 1314/1869.
5
Joseph Wakely’s first marriage and divorce suit

Supreme Court of Victoria, Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Jurisdiction, affidavit of Joseph Farnell Wellspring Wakely, of Melbourne, miner: sworn that he married Anne Wakely, then Anne Gough, a widow of John Gough (an attorney’s clerk of Sydney) and formerly Anne Aiton, spinster, on 17 August 1854 at St James’ Church, Sydney; he was born at Poplar, near London, aged 27 at his marriage, and had worked as a miner and wine dealer in Victoria before becoming a licensed victualler in New South Wales. The suit, brought against Anne and William Carey, a Melbourne bacon-curer, alleged her adultery. No decree or date of judgment survives on the traced page.
6
Death of Eliza (Baldock) Wakely, 1915

Cemetery/monumental index, Rookwood General Cemetery: Eliza Wackley, died 21 June 1915 — consistent in age and married surname with Eliza Baldock’s 1869 marriage to Joseph Wakely.
7
Eliza and Frederick Freeman’s children in later life

Eliza Preston Freeman: family-tree aggregation and cemetery index give her married name as Garras (spouse Julius Joseph Leonard Daniel Garras), died Randwick, 8 April 1941, buried Rookwood Catholic Cemeteries and Crematoria. Frederick Charles Freeman: New South Wales Civil Service List, General Division Class V, entry “Freeman, Frederick Charles … Record Clerk, Electric Telegraphs”; New South Wales Government Gazette, 21 June 1895, notice of appointment, “Mr. Frederick Charles Freeman, Clerk in the Head Office, to be Post and Telegraph Master at Summer Hill”; NSW BDM death index and Rookwood General Cemetery monumental index, Frederick Freeman, died 16 February 1917, Granville, registration 2354/1917, parents Frederick and Eliza.