John McIntosh

John was born around 1812 in Scotland, so before the family sailed for New South Wales in 1814 — the only one of Robert and Eleanor’s children definitely born on the other side of the world from all the rest. He married Mary Jane Spencer, daughter of Francis Spencer and Jane Smith, on 25 June 1832 at St John’s, Launceston, Tasmania; the couple moved to Sydney the following year, arriving from Launceston on the schooner Ann.

John became a flour, corn and hay dealer, and by the time of his death the family had also acquired a substantial property at Hunter’s Hill — Rose Hill Cottage, a stone-built residence on about four acres of garden, orchard and vineyard on the Parramatta River, later described in the auction notice as adjoining the properties of the Archbishop, Major Darvall and W. Blaxland, "admitted to be the prettiest spot on Hunter’s Hill." John died on 14 May 1860, at his residence on the corner of Pitt and Hay Streets. His youngest child, Mary, not yet two, died in the same household just over two months later.

His sister Ellen (Bawn) also died in 1860. The following year her widower, George Bawn, married John’s widow, Mary Jane — so George Bawn ended up married in succession to two McIntosh siblings. Mary Jane Bawn died 2 June 1898 at Sydney, aged 84, and was buried at Rookwood. John and Mary Jane’s nine children — among them John Francis Charles, who settled at Dubbo, and Sydney Ryde, whose own life took in a gaol term and an insolvency — are a generation of their own, still to be added to this chapter in full.