Hi Chantelle
I have worked out a detailed family tree, which I can message you privately if you want – it is too complicated and long to post here. Thomas Easterby is an ancestor of my wife.
Basically, his parents were William and Elizabeth (nee Kay according to IGI batch sources), and his g/parents Christopher and Phoebe (nee Rivas). He was christened in 1813. Siblings were Bessie, James (a shoemaker), and Richard (a whitesmith) who married Mary Leng. Richard and Mary almost certainly died in the mid-1850s. Their daughter, another Mary Ann must have died young, as she does not appear in the 1851 census when she would have been 4. Their son Christopher appears in the 1861 census as a cabinet maker living in Pickering with his wife Elizabeth.
Thomas married Mary Ann Holroyd and had four children (born between 1834 and 1844), Elizabeth, Ann, Mary, and Phoebe. Mary Ann seems to have survived until at least 1861, and to have conceived two more children, David and Francis (possibly twins as their births were registered together) without Thomas who must have been imprisoned on the Warrior since 1847, after which he was sent on the Fairlie to Tasmania in 1852.
The Elizabeth with three children living next to Mary Holroyd, Mary Ann’s mother, in the 1861 census is almost certainly the eldest daughter of Thomas and Mary Ann, and the baby Mary living with Mary Ann, who is clearly not a “widow” is the daughter of her daughter Mary, who had a live-in job as dairymaid at the “Dog & Duck” pub in Hutton-le-Hole. Mary later had two more children, Margaret Hannah and John William who was my wife’s ancestor. She later had further children after marrying George Thompson, an ironstone miner.
I believeThomas married Bridget Stanton in Hobart in 1854, and moved to Gunning NSW where he farmed until his death in 1890.
It seems to me that both Thomas and Mary separately decided to start new lives, with Mary describing herself as a widow, and Thomas marrying again in Tasmania.
Incidentally, in the 1841 census, Mary Holroyd is described as a farmer, and is living with Mary Ann, Thomas and their first three children. By 1851, she has become an ag lab, suggesting she sold land to raise money, or couldn’t afford to rent it any more. Her late husband, David, had been a blacksmith.
Cousin Jack
