Mary Jane Jones was born in Rhymney in 1876 and emigrated to Australia when she was just 2 years of age. Being so young it isn’t clear whether she was fluent in Welsh when she arrived, but clearly English was her first language for the rest of her life.
She was known by my brothers and sisters (and cousins) as ‘Grandma Wilmott’; Dad called her “Gran”.
Mary Jane was, by all accounts, a very intelligent and competent woman. Dad referred to his Gran as “a very modern woman”. Unfortunately, I never really pressed him on what he meant by that but what I think is that she was a very forward-looking and enterprising person who was actively involved in her community.
She lived all but 2 years of her life in Australia, her mother died when she was only 12, and her father and younger siblings went back to Wales. Along with her brother Evan and possibly John (whose life history is yet to be uncovered), she was the only member of her family in the new country. She would have needed to be very self-sufficient; becoming her own person and working out her own solutions to life’s challenges.
On the 31st May 1894 (at around the age of 18), Mary Jane gave birth to my grandmother Mary Ann and the birth was registered as “illegitimate” on the 9th July 1894.
A year later, on the 30th June 1895, she married Stephen Laurance Wilmott (known by his family as “Steve” and by my immediate family as “Goll”) at the local Catholic Church, St. Joseph’s, at The Junction.
Now, recall that Mary Jane had been baptised in Church of England. The Wilmott family was Catholic, so this means that she may have been required to become a Catholic prior to the marriage being conducted at St. Joseph’s. I am doing further research to determine whether this was the case. The other members of her family who came to Australia remained members of the C. of E. throughout their lives.
In 1902 the NSW Parliament passed “An Act to amend the law by making provision for the Legitimation of Children born before marriage on the subsequent marriage of their parents”, known as the ‘Legitimisation Act’. Subsequently Grandma’s birth was re-registered as “legitimate” on 23rd January 1904.
In order to have this new birth certificate issued, Goll would have had to sign a statutory declaration that he was Grandma’s natural father. What might have been the reason for the delay in the marriage? Was the difference in the religion a factor? I wonder how long it took back in the 1890s to become a Catholic as an adult? It’s a pity that we will probably never know.
The fact that Grandma was born “out of wedlock” (as they used to say) remained a source of embarrassment for her throughout her life. She was always reluctant to talk about her age and would play down her birthday and her age. I am sure that at the time of her birth there was a great deal of stigma associated with being a single parent (even though it was very common, the fact was usually hidden). I wonder to what extent my great grandmother experienced such stigma, and whether she had fostered Grandma’s tendency to avoid the subject of her birth. How was she initially accepted by the Wilmotts? I got the impression growing up (I lived with her for a couple of years) that Grandma did not have a lot to do with the Wilmott side of the family.