4/52 Curious: Mary Amelia Guy

 4/52

Curious

Mary Amelia Guy 1819 - 1896

Mary and Charlotte arrived in Adelaide in 1839 on the Java. Mary married John Godlee and her older sister, Charlotte Guy, was a witness. Their brother Joseph also came to Australia, but when? Was he also at the wedding? 

Did Mary know John Godlee already? They had both come from Lewes, he the year before. Were they sweethearts in Sussex? Had they had a falling out? Perhaps he had asked her to marry him and she had knocked him back. Heart broken, perhaps, he fled to Adelaide and then she had regrets and followed him out? Or perhaps he had not asked her to marry him but she chased him to Adelaide? Or perhaps it was all arranged: he came out to Adelaide to get settled before she joined him. John was a Quaker but by marrying Mary, an Anglican, he was disowned by the Quakers. Did they migrate to Australia to avoid all the unpleasantness that involved? 

Or perhaps they did not know each other in Lewes. Mary, Charlotte and Joseph came out to Adelaide to make a new life. Their parents were dead. There was no work in Sussex and it wasn’t fair on Sarah to expect her to support them all. They had heard that there were opportunities in Adelaide. Once here she met John Godlee and they learned they both came from Lewes. What a small world! He had grown up in the Cliffe and she at Southover. So close and yet they had never met! 

Mary , Charlotte and Joseph Guy left behind two sisters: Sarah Ann Guy and Elizabeth Guy. Sarah and Elizabeth supported themselves by dress making, growing old in the narrow lanes of Lewes, the green South-downs in sight between the buildings. 

In 1867 John Godlee’s oldest sister, also Mary, wrote to her sister-in-law in Australia, sent 25 yards of fabric in a ‘pretty genteel pattern’. There was enough for two dresses, one for Mary,  one for ‘thy sister Charlotte’ and also enough for one for the little girl, Charlotte Lucy. 

Mary and John had seven children: Mary Rickman, (Polly),  Arthur John, Charles Burwood, Frederick, Alfred, Charlotte Lucy (Lottie), and Theodore. They lived in the hills at first, working for the Quaker John Barton Hack; ran hotels, lived in town;  were declared insolvent, three times; lived in Thebarton, working as a pound keeper. And then had a pub in Tungkillo, a mining town. They lived there for 7 years and were prominent citizens. Then they lived in Clare for another 7 years and at last back in Adelaide where John worked as an engineer for the railways. 

John died in 1891 and Mary in 1896. Their youngest daughter, Lottie, had never left home. Arthur and Charles had lived in the bush but Alfred lived nearby. Fred had been killed at work in the outback, working on the Overland Telegraph. Polly had four children under 7 when and her husband was killed in a workplace accident. Lottie and her parents had supported them. Theodore lived close with his growing brood, three children and one on the way. Lottie went to live with Theo after her mother’s death. 

After Mary died Lottie used part of her inheritance to travel back to Lewes to meet her Auntie Lizzie, Elizabeth Guy, who had been only 13 when her older two sisters and brother left Lewes, nearly 60 years ago. How excited Auntie Lizzie would have been to meet her colonial niece! 

When I first started creating a family tree I knew Sarah Ann, Charlotte, Joseph and Elizabeth Guy were Mary’s siblings. I had the 1867 letter mentioning ‘thy sister Charlotte’, I had another letter about Lottie visiting ‘Auntie Lizzie’ in Lewes in 1897. I had a newspaper article about Joseph Guy dying at the home of his brother in law, John Godlee. And most of all, I had an actual sampler embroidered by Sarah Ann Guy, aged 9 years, passed down to me from my own great aunts, perhaps brought home to Australia after Lottie’s visit to Elizabeth Guy in Lewes in 1897. 

But curiously, on all the Ancestry family trees, none of them included Mary Amelia as one of the family. At first I thought that was because she had migrated to Australia. But then I didn’t know that Charlotte and Joseph had too. I contacted the people who had made those family trees and asked them about the omission of my great, great grandmother. They said she hadn’t been baptised but all the others had, so she certainly wasn’t one of them. I have thoroughly searched for Mary Amelia Guy’s Baptism certificate, specifically at the Keep, the East Sussex Records office. It isn’t there. 

How can that be explained? Was she someone else’s illegitimate child? Where had she come from and why was she raised as a member of this family? Or was there another explanation for the absence of a Baptism certificate? 

As far as Sarah, Charlotte, Mary, Joseph and Lizzie were concerned she was a Guy sister. No question. 

But I have a lot of questions. I am curious. 

 

This is the only picture I have of Mary Amelia Guy and John Godlee. They are old. They are in front of their St Peters house. In the front is Dorothy Godlee, the oldest child of their youngest child, Theodore. She was their 20th grandchild to be born, out of altogether 34. On the far right, standing behind a bush is their youngest daughter, Charlotte Lucy (Lottie), who lived at home with them until they died.