Fun With Publicly Available Data

[highlyeccentric]

Get you a date who takes you to cemeteries, folks, and you too might find such fascinating headstones as this, in St John's Anglican churchyard, Ashfield. Granite; an older base with the paterfamilias' name on it, and a more recent (but not enormously new) refurbished top to it, showing the names Moseley Moss Cohen, Caroline Cohen, and Alfred Cohen. What, I wondered, were an apparently prosperous Jewish family doing in an Anglican cemetery?

And then I forgot about it for four months. But now I have done some research! The answer appears to be a. 'mixed-religion marriages faciliated by Presbyterian ministers' and b. 'mystery??' (especially 'why not a presbyterian cemetery then?').

From what I can find online without an ancestry login, Moseley Moss Cohen emigrated from Liverpool to Sydney as an ‘unassisted’ immigrant in 1832. He may have come with his siblings - certainly his brother Baron Burnett Cohen ended up in Australia. Baron was born in Manchester, so odds on Moseley was also a Mancunian. I can’t find any clear link to the well known Australian Jewish clan, the Moss Solomon family, but there may be one.

Both Moseley and Baron were married at St Andrews Presbyterian in Sydney. Mosley married Caroline Pendray in November 1832 - a mere six months after disembarking in Australia! The ceremony was presided over by the Rev Dr John Dunmore Lang himself.

Caroline’s father was a former convict, William Pendray, and her mother, Mary Ann Stranger, had married William in Cornwall prior to his conviction. Caroline travelled with her mother and siblings as free immigrants, although I can’t determine when. By 1825, William had obtained a conditional pardon, and was working as a tailor. The 1828 census gives his place of business as George Street, and the NLA holds a nice business card from 1838.

By 1858, Moseley Moss owned a house and shop in Bourke Ward (which covered the area from the harbour to Hyde Park, north to south, and Sydney Cove to Woolloomooloo along the coast). The shop doesn’t seem to have been run by Moseley, as the rates records for that year list Baron B. Cohen as the person ‘rated’. 1858 was also the year Baron married Ellen Selina Drew, also at St Andrews Presbyterian.

This was Ellen’s second marriage, and Baron seems to have assumed paternal responsibility for her children. The Queanbeyan Golden Age on 1 Dec 1860, in its ‘Metropolitan’ column, reports that Jessie Selina Newton, step-daughter of Baron Burnett Cohen, was caught up in a bigamy scandal. Rev Dr James Fullerton presided over the marriage, at Baron’s house (presumably the house and shop?) of Jessie and Mr William Walker, ‘storekeeper and auctioneer’ of Goulburn. The couple had already attempted to elope twice. It appears to have rapidly come to Baron’s attention that a previous Mrs Walker was still living in Goulburn; he ‘posted away’ and fetched Mrs Walker (1) to Sydney, but she refused to testify against her husband. Walker raised in his own defence that he was drunk at the time of the second marriage. Jessie seems to have later married a William Aston, and presumably emigrated with him to New Zealand. Rev Dr Fullerton was later Moderator of the Synod of Australia, but at this point in his career seems to have had a reputation for no-questions-asked marriage ceremonies, and had in 1851 been charged with performing an ‘illegal’ solemnisation.

Perhaps the shop did not do well as a business: by the 1870s Baron seems to have gone west; Ellen died in 1874, and he married again in Parkes in 1876. His second wife was one Mrs Sarah Jenkins, also previously married. Sarah went on to marry again after Baron’s death, lived to a ripe old age, and earned a fulsome obituary, from which it can be gleaned that Baron kept the Cambridge Hotel in Parkes. Baron had one daughter with Sarah, whose name is given in Sarah’s obituary only as ‘Mrs Lincoln’. The Forbes Advocate in 1923 records the death of one Albert Cohen, son of Baron Cohen: possibly (but not conclusively) a son from his marriage to Ellen, who had followed him to Parkes.

What became of Moseley, however, is difficult to trace. His death notice lists him as a ‘process worker’, and he died intestate; neither suggest a particularly prosperous career. Yet he owned a substanial house, “Mossworth”, listed as his place of death. His only son (listed on the gravestone here) predeceased him. After Caroline’s death, the “Mossworth Estate”, near Strathfield station, was subdivided and sold off: there’s a rather fancy looking poster here. (Confusingly, some sources say Mossworth was near Burwood station) Moseley St, which runs perpendicular to Parramatta Road, takes its name from him.

Presumably Caroline oversaw Moseley's interment; the plot may have been purchased when their son died. Who oversaw the refurbishment of the headstone, I can't figure out, nor why the family did not elect for a Presbyterian burial as they had marriage (nor Rookwood cemetery, which would have been easily accessible from Strathfield by rail). Caroline's father appears to have died insolvent in the 1840s; a William John and a Christopher Fredrick Pendray are buried in Bathurst - these may be her brothers William and Frederick, or they may not (neither Mary Pendray buried in Bathurst is Caroline's mother, who died in Sydney in 1853). If it is her brothers in Bathurst, both predeceased Caroline. Caroline's sister Louisa seems to have been the most prosperous sibling, marrying a Captain Anderson in 1839; she, too, predeceased Caroline. Baron Cohen's second wife Sarah seems to be the only one of the lot of them to warrant a decent obituary.

Comments

[coriana]

I'm rather riduculously entertained by the sentence "Walker raised in his own defence that he was drunk at the time of the second marriage."

Bravo you for digging up this whole delightfully complex family story!

[highlyeccentric]

MORE TO COME. My bff who has professional access to Ancestry.com's databases has done a little legwork!

[chochiyo_sama]

History of regular people is so interesting. Think how valuable all of these on-line journals will be for future historians. At least those who enjoy seeing how the average person thinks, lives, eats, and communicates.

There is a nearly unreadable stone in the Geneva Cemetery where most of my relatives are buried that lists several members of one family who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic. They all died within a week of each other. The mother was first, then each of the children, and finally the father. How sad that was!

There are quite a few stones in the cemetery that mark the passing of people who died during the Spanish Flu epidemic. A lot of them were low quality very soft stone which has lost most of the information due to weathering. Also, the small town has done little to preserve the history. When one of those tall stones toppled over, rather than reinforce and salvage it, the cemetery caretaker just hauled them to the edge of the cemetery which borders farm fields and tosses them in the ditch. Pretty sad.

[0dense]

wow!! that's really cool, and you could find it all! it's always so interesting to find that sort of local history :D

[samskeyti]

I had a patient named Moss (as a first name) Cohen in the eastern suburbs years ago, probably born in the late teens or the twenties. Some more distant branch of the family remains!

My local cemetery is St Stephens, Newtown, home of Miss Hannigan, victims of the shipwrecked Dunbar & many sad families with kids. Most of it predates the Spanish flu, but I will have a further look at the stones lining the walls on my next dog walk.

[highlyeccentric]

A Moss Cohen could be a descendent of this family (my bff K has found, with her superior genealogy skills, some more descendents), but could *also* be a result of one of the branches of the Moss Samuel family marrying any one of the numerous unrelated Cohens (as a great many of them did).