James & Frances Cook

Frances Helen Poole — named for her mother — was born in 1876, her birth registered in the Grafton district, William and Frances Poole’s second known child.¹ In 1899, at Balmain North, she married James Alexander Cook — a Sydney-born man a few years her senior, born in 1872, the son of James and Emily Cook.¹ His father James was the second son of Alexander Currie Cook, the Arran-born surgeon of the fever ship Minerva, and Anna Maria Rainy — whose story is told in the chapter ‘Alexander & Anna Maria Cook’. His mother Emily’s family, the Deddens, remain to be researched.

Four children have been traced so far, all born in Sydney’s northern suburbs between 1900 and 1909: Helen E. (1900, Mosman), William J. (1903, Sydney), Isabel I. (1907, Ryde) and Ernest C. (1909, Ryde).² The shift in registration district, from Mosman and Sydney to Ryde, marks the family’s move out to the district where both parents would spend the rest of their lives — and where, half a century later, their son William would build a home of his own on Bridge Road. It is William James Cook, the second of the four, who carries this family’s own line onward: his 1926 marriage to Ethel Ida Violet Robens, at Ryde, is the subject of Chapter Four.

Frances Helen Cook died on 17 August 1952; James Alexander Cook outlived her by almost sixteen years, dying on 26 January 1968. Both were cremated at the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium, North Ryde — the same district several of their children had been born in, half a century before.³