Women's work

It's been many years now since I began, albeit in fits and starts, to be interested in genealogy, but over the years I have amassed a collection of ancestors going back, in one case, to the late 17th century, including a full set of 16 great-great-grandparents.

There was a breakthrough a couple of years ago when I discovered that New South Wales had put its births, deaths and marriages records online, thereby opening up research into my mother's side of the family. Using that and several other sources, cross-checking and back-tracking and triple-cross-checking, I traced my maternal grandfather's line back to one Sophia Chipp, born in Sydney in 1803.

Hello, I thought. If she was born in Sydney as early as that, when did her parents arrive? Sure enough, there they were: Marine Private Thomas Chipp and convict Jane Langley, arrived on different ships in the First Fleet, married on Norfolk Island in 1791. There is some doubt about Jane's guilt; the witnesses at her trial seem to be largely on her side.

Thomas Chipp had been a baker, and may have been press-ganged like the Irish marine in Thomas Keneally's Bring Larks and Heroes, possibly in the first instance as cannon-fodder for the American War of Independence; records show he was in the Marines by 1775. Jane had been an embroiderer. (My mother was a really exceptional craftswoman, an imaginative perfectionist, particularly in cooking and sewing.)

In the course of this research I'd found the Jane Langley Descendants Association, which I joined, and today I got their latest newsletter in the mail. In it a member of the Association reports that she has been in London researching apprenticeship records hoping to find some indenture papers for Jane Langley but has been unable to do so. 'However,' she says,

a story I was told by a lace maker may be of interest. As candlelight was almost impossible to sew by in the evening, what needleworkers would do was to place a large bowl of water on the table and surround it with candles -- the reflection of the candlelight thrown from the water created a brighter light by which to sew. The lady who told me the story said she had tried it and was very surprised at the amount and quality of the light.