Baptismal relationships among single mothers in nineteenth-century Hobart

Nicholas Dean Brodie

On 6 October 1851, which was a fraction over nine months after Bridget Stankard was punished for what her convict conduct record styled ‘Living in a disorderly house’, she was ‘Delivered of an Illegitimate child (Jane)’.¹ This was Bridget’s second child born during her sentence as a transported convict in Van Diemen’s Land. A boy, William, had been born on 17 December 1848, some seven months after Bridget had been punished with ‘5 days [in the] cells’ for ‘Feigning sickness &c’. One of the other infractions attributed to Bridget in this same rich source occurred on the same day as the death of William on 21 August 1850, when Bridget apparently was ‘Absent from her authorised place of residence and leading an idle and disorderly life’. She was subsequently given three months of hard labour as punishment.

Bridget had been transported for perjury from her home county of Leitrim, Ireland. She later admitted to being ‘drunk at the time’ when she falsely accused two men of breaking into a church. If drawn solely from traditional secular sources like her convict records, Bridget’s story appears to be a deeply melancholy one. Fleeting newspaper reports serve only to further this public image of a life occasionally in trouble, hinting at underlying dysfunction. A few years later, for instance, while describing a case of her allegedly disturbing the peace of Hobart’s Bathurst Street in 1855, the Tasmanian Colonist characterised Bridget as ‘a stout, raw-boned damsel, with a peculiarly rubicund physiognomy, and a phrenological development in which the organs of combativeness and destructiveness were peculiarly prominent’.² On another occasion, charged with disturbing the peace through drunken brawling, she was labelled ‘one of the worst characters in Hobart Town’.³

Jane Stankard’s entry into the world therefore seems framed by her mother’s institutionalised life, interspersed as it was by minor criminal misadventures. Even Jane’s government birth registration has her named as one of seven children born to convict women, placed as a distinct block of officially fatherless children among the free folk of the district of Hobart.⁴ Another type of source, however, helps reveal a different aspect in the story of Jane and Bridget Stankard. This is Jane’s baptismal registration in the Catholic Church of St Joseph in Hobart.⁵ It records that, on the day of her birth, Jane was baptised by Fr Alfred Maguire. Like the equivalent state record, Jane’s mother was named as the sole parent. As required by the sacrament, a sponsor—commonly called a godparent—was also present. Her name was Jane Woods, another Irish woman under sentence of transportation in Hobart.⁶

This baptismal record offers the tantalising, if unprovable, possibility that Bridget Stankard named her daughter after her friend Jane Woods.⁷ When seen as part of a bigger picture, the prospect becomes less a singular case of coincidence and more a striking historical phenomenon. Elsewhere in that baptismal register of St Joseph’s, which records Catholic baptisms in southern Van Diemen’s Land between 1836 and 1856, there are an additional 27 cases of single women having girls baptised whose names also match those of their sponsors.⁸ This means that during this period, over 22 per cent—meaning more than one in five—of the children in my sample were potentially named after a female baptismal sponsor.

As Tanya Evans has argued, ‘the conception of bastard children was a complex and varied phenomenon that can not be explained by single causes’.⁹ Nevertheless, in this sample of women, there are clearly some contextual commonalities. As a group, these women were disproportionately either convicts or former convicts, transportees or migrants, and, more likely than not, either Irish by birth or family origin. Meanwhile, Van Diemen’s Land was disproportionately masculine, populated with more men than women. The social makeup of the island colony was changing, with the cessation of transportation and the renaming to Tasmania both occurring in the final years covered by this article, yet systems of institutional control were still in place for managing that still considerable proportion of the populace who were imprisoned. Many of the children whose baptisms provide the window into the lives of these women being discussed here were born in institutional settings that were part of, or closely related to, the convict establishment.

Whether convict or free, however, and regardless of the individual stories that let to this movement, what ultimately links these women are the fact of single motherhood and the Catholic rite of baptism. However, I argue that, through such mutual connection, we can see more than just circumstantial parallels. A close examination of the St Jospeh’s baptismal register reveals that among the single Catholic mothers of Hobart there were, it seems, overlapping micro-communities of single mothers, even if only for a few moments in their longer life stories. In what follows, I seek both to explore a very particular set of historical social connections and to highlight the methodological potentiality that baptismal records provide for attentive practitioners of life writing.

Historiographical trends regarding baptismal registration

The register in which Jane Stankard’s baptism is recorded is broadly of a type that emerged in late medieval and early modern Europe. Only with the state’s increasing centralism in the sixteenth century was there a significant increase in the survival of such records, typified by the case of England, where in 1538 the central government required baptismal registers to be kept by every parish.¹⁰ This admittedly has a somewhat distant relationship with a Catholic baptismal register used in Van Diemen’s Land three centuries later. More immediately relevant was the passing of the Australian colonies’ first civil registration Act in 1838, although the registration of baptisms in notebooks and formal registers was already common practice.¹¹ Now preserved in the Archdiocese of Hobart Archives, the register that is the subject of this article is a large, handwritten, hide-bound and good copy volume that, in some instances, duplicates records that also still survive in those priests’ notebooks, colloquially known as ‘saddleback registers’. Other broadly contemporary registers also survive for Launceston and other regions of Tasmania, although they have not been included in this exploratory study the sake of manageability.

Here it is worth remembering that, irrespective of secular requirements, the fundamental import of such baptismal registers was principally ecclesial, even while most of the research they have informed has tended to be genealogical or demographic in focus. Baptismal registers have long been used to chart individual family histories and analyse wider population trends, for instance.¹² In Australia, my prior use of baptismal registers for research has mainly been framed by such generally longitudinal concerns and approaches.¹³ Other academic work using Australian church registers has also tended thus far to follow social historical approaches, especially for the study of the Irish diaspora.¹⁴ Yet because research of a kind that is grounded in the ‘churchiness’ of baptismal records remains undeveloped in the Australian historiographical scene, in this article I am approaching my sources differently. I am wanting to explore the role of godparenthood in forming and fostering ‘fictive, ritual or spiritual kin’ by asking whether these baptismal registers might reveal such things in the case of single mothers.¹⁵ I am aiming to take such ‘a common human act of fundamental significance’ as the naming of a child and ask how this might help illuminate a societal ‘microcosm’ regarding the experiences of colonial single motherhood.¹⁶ And I am wondering what both godparenthood and naming practices can show us about the ‘bonds between community members’ in a colony marked by social and cultural divisions.¹⁷ I am therefore seeking to use the St Joseph’s baptismal register in way that is technically mechanical but also sensitive to the social and spiritual context. While aiming to complement work on Irish Catholic convicts in nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and contribute to the body of research on single motherhood in colonial Australia, my overarching intention is mainly to explore the potential of baptismal registers as a means for exploring complex webs of social and religious interconnection.¹⁸ While the sample happens to be Catholic and located in Tasmania, what follows is a methodological journey that will hopefully encourage more regular usage of parish registers, not only for the extraction of demographic and genealogical data, but also for the rich social and cultural information they might preserve.

Methodological considerations

My methodology could best be described as the deliberative following of human connections within the confines of a single baptismal register. This produced a sample of 127 children, 101 single mothers and 105 sponsors. How I gathered this sample of individuals is best explained by reference to the serendipitous observation that inspired it. Conducting a genealogical enquiry on someone else’s behalf, I noticed that two girls who were baptised on 27 July 1855, Ellen Ryan and Mary Cotter, were both born of single women, named Mary Ryan and Ellen Cotter, respectively.¹⁹ Noticing how Mary had named her daughter Ellen and Ellen had named her daughter Mary, I suspected this might have been more than coincidental. Wondering whether there were other cases where single mothers might have named their daughters for fellow single mothers, I began to search the register further for similarly suggestive connections, identifying single mothers and widening the search to include the sponsors recorded in single mother baptisms.

By using the Archdiocese of Hobart Archives’ database to facilitate searching, I soon found that Eliza Reardon, the sponsor of Mary Cotter, had twice been a single mother to children whose baptisms were recorded in the same register.²⁰ The second of these children, Eliza, had been baptised a little over two months before Mary Cotter, suggesting that the pregnancies overlapped. Young Eliza’s sponsor was Mary Flanigan, who, on two other occasions, acted as baptismal sponsor for children of single mothers and was herself once a single mother.²¹ While Mary Flanigan’s child John was not obviously named for a sponsor, Mary Connell, baptised the same day to the seemingly single Margaret Connell, may well have been named for Mary Flanigan.²²

The 25 February 1853 baptism of Eliza Reardon’s older daughter, Joanna, provided yet another instance of multiple children of single mothers being baptised on the same day. While none of the women involved in baptisms that day were named Joanna, one of the other children was Eliza Leahy. She may have been named for Eliza Reardon, but it seems more probable that the name derived from her sponsor, Eliza Maguire, another single mother, whose own child, Elizabeth Maguire, was baptised on 26 June 1852 and sponsored by her possible namesake, Elizabeth Todd.²³

Continuing this iterative method resulted in the identification of a sample of 127 baptisms. Every woman identified from one baptism as either mother or sponsor was searched for elsewhere in the St Joseph’s register, seeking further baptisms in which their name appeared either as mother or sponsor. Rather than arbitrarily sampling the single mothers, all the subjects of this study were thus identified by virtue of a presupposed connection. Ultimately, subject to some educated guesswork, they are all connected.

There are some limitations to this approach, especially concerning identification. The most tendentious example in the sample is Mary Ann Sullivan, sponsor in 1844 to the baptism of John Emonds.²⁴ There is no other Mary Ann Sullivan in the sample, but there is an Ann Sullivan and at least one Mary Sullivan, so the possibility of her being one or more of those others was thought sufficient to warrant her inclusion.²⁵ Similarly, an inclusive approach to spelling variations in names and surnames has been adopted. Where matches seemed likely, they were treated as such for the purposes of quantitative analysis. Analytically speaking, the number of potentially false connections are so few as to be of no real statistical importance. Overall, the sampling took an intentionally inclusive approach, aiming to follow and therefore capture the most likely connections, because an object of my interest is this phenomenon of interconnectedness.

Trickier than the issue of false connections is the matter of disambiguation. The curious case of the two Georges illustrates this well.²⁶ The register contains two entries for the baptism of George Sullivan on 14 October 1853, child of Mary Sullivan, recorded on adjacent pages with differing dates of birth and different sponsors. This appears not to be a case of transcriber error, given that the state records of births also attests to two Mary Sullivans giving birth to a George each on 5 and 12 October 1853, respectively.²⁷ While the stuff of genealogical nightmare, with disambiguation practically impossible through registration documentation alone, there are no descendants for the case to bother because both Georges died within a matter of months.²⁸ Nonetheless, the case of the two Marys having the two Georges highlights that, even when there are identical names, this does not mean identical persons. Thanks to the survival of relevant details in convict conduct records, which Mary and George belonged to each other can be ascertained, but whether either of them or yet another Mary Sullivan was the mother of Mary Sullivan, baptised on 4 February 1856, remains unclear.²⁹ Also uncertain are those two instances where a Mary Sullivan acted as baptismal sponsor, and whether these were the one individual, two Marys, or perhaps (an)other Mary(s) entirely. It is worth noting that, in at least one case, the proximity to one of the Georges suggests strongly another pregnancy overlap, hinting that even where the names do not provide firm proof of connectivity, the wider context nonetheless helps suggest it.³⁰ A similar issue with the overlap of pregnancies occurs with the Margarets Dwyer, who gave birth to Frederick and William in October and December 1850, respectively, strongly suggesting that these are two separate women.³¹ State records name the second of these Margarets Dwyer as ‘Mary’, thereby affirming that they are different people, but the case further highlights that, even without corresponding records, attention to pregnancy timelines can help resolve some identification issues.³² However, without trying to resolve every such instance where names may capture multiple individuals, the Marys Sullivan and Margarets Dwyer and their like are offered as a methodological caveat—a reminder that the data discussed below are more indicative that absolute.

A final methodological consideration concerns gender. Women are overrepresented in the sample, mainly because of the nature of the sampling method, but also partly because of historical circumstances. This therefore skews analysis in a reductive fashion. The obvious fact of no fathers being recorded goes a considerable way towards answering this, as does the phenomenon of many of the women being convicts who clearly turn to fellow female convicts to serve as sponsors. Only five men appear as sponsors, all as part of five sponsorship pairs, three of whom shared their surname with their female co-sponsor.³³ One additional sponsor appears only as an initial and surname and is therefore potentially male.³⁴ Three baptisms have no recorded sponsor. All other sponsors are female. Among the baptised children, girls again outnumber boys, comprising 66 children or 52 per cent of the whole. While the mothers and sponsors are explicable by nature of the sample being gathered, and the female children reflects demographic norms, this feminine dominance does have an impact on the overall demonstrability of connectivity because, as already seen, the names of female children can be potentially matched with a greater proportion of the whole. It means that the overall measures of connectivity discussed below are likely greater than the figures presented.

Before moving into specifics, it is worth noting that the connectivity contained within any given baptism itself is, by its very nature, relatively self-evident. All recorded participants, whether the baptismal candidate, parent, sponsor or priest, necessarily have functional roles. That the event is indicative of familial and social connectivity is, therefore, entirely unsurprising and fully to be expected. But while such connectivity might be safely assumed, it has been little studied as a phenomenon, especially in a colonial Australian context. Work, such as that by Clodagh Tait on late medieval and early modern Irish baptismal records, for example, which highlights the social relations between parents and godparents and naming conventions, appears to have no colonial Australian equivalent.³⁵ Yet clearly these things mattered a lot to the societies that recorded them. ‘The naming of children at baptism’, Tait argues, ‘worked to create metaphorical, but often strongly conceptualized, connections between individuals and generations’ that, when examined, ‘gives us an insight into the complex dynamics of society more generally’.³⁶ As such, the following discussion offers some conceptual signposts for exploring baptismal connectivity by using a single colonial register as a case study.

Intra-baptismal connectivity

As noted above, over one in five of the children recorded in this sample plausibly appear to have been named after their sponsor. These instances are similar to that mentioned earlier involving Jane Stankard, daughter of Bridget, who was seemingly named after her sponsor Jane Woods. They include Maria Daley, sponsored by Maria Wilkinson; Bridget Byrnes, sponsored by Bridget McCabe; and Johanna Dwyer, sponsored by Johanna Burns.³⁷ Each of these were single instances of these names having such a straightforward sponsor correspondence. Other names proved more common. Margarets Cook, Sullivan, Barnes, Grant, Burns, McCabe and Feeny, for instance, were sponsored by Margarets Sweeny, Lynch, Finnerly, Savage, Madegan, Kane and Millar, respectively.

While it could be suggested that such correspondences may be merely coincidental, a product of the societal circulation of relatively common names, various mitigating factors point in the direction of deliberateness. One point in favour is deep habit. Traditions of children being named after godparents have ancient roots, with the practice having become relatively evident in Anglo-Saxon times and clearly quite common by the early modern period of European history, even if there are signs that the phenomenon was on the decline closer to the period covered by this case study.³⁸ Nonetheless, these colonial baptisms have long cultural traditions operative in the background. Within this present sample, the clearest instance of intention is probably the case of Ann McAndrew’s child Mary Ann Esther, sponsored by a Mary McAndrew, a likely candidate to be the mother’s sister or sister-in-law.³⁹

While boys are excluded from much of the quantitative analysis, because my primary focus is on women and there are insufficient men to warrant inclusion, it is nonetheless noteworthy that two of the five boys with a male sponsor also share a first name with that sponsor.⁴⁰ This serves as a useful reminder that the overall figures are decidedly minimal. Nearly half of the children are male, yet almost all have female sponsors, a phenomenon that dramatically skews the gross quantitative appearance of connectivity. When male children are taken out of the analysis it becomes apparent that 42 per cent of these girls shared their first name with their sponsor. Nine of the children bear their mother’s name exactly, perhaps indicative of intergenerational family conventions. When those nine are excluded, the proportion of women plausibly choosing to name their daughter after a female sponsor rises to 54 per cent. Very likely other names were chosen for parents, siblings, grandparents and so on, so I hesitate to say these are definitive proportions. Nevertheless, irrespective of the fact that there are many uncertain variables at play, the data strongly suggest that perhaps roughly half of the female children in this sample were named after their mother’s chosen sponsor.

Unsurprisingly, given the historical and geographical context, many of these mothers and sponsors were transported convicts. On the basis of cross-referencing these baptismal records with corresponding state birth registrations and individual convict records, 88 of the baptised children, comprising 69 per cent of the sample, can definitely be identified or strongly inferred as having been born to convicts still under sentence. Tellingly, 18 per cent of these convict mothers seem likely to have named their child for a sponsor, a proportion that broadly matches the overall picture. When males are excluded, the proportion is closer to 33 per cent, again nearing the wider trend, although lower that the overall rate. What all this points to is the fact that the choice to name a child for a sponsor was not an exclusively convict phenomenon. A substantial minority of women named their child after a chosen sponsor, irrespective of whether they were convict or free. This analysis therefore supports the idea that ancient naming practices were transported successfully into another century and a different hemisphere, regardless of how the women concerned had arrived in situ.

What these specific data also firmly highlight are some aspects of female relationships among interconnected and relatively under-documented cohorts of women. Among the convict women in the sample, this phenomenon can most effectively be described through reference to those women with sufficiently unique names to be readily cross-checked with convict records. A good example is Margaret Maddigan, whose boy William was baptised on 25 February 1853.⁴¹ That this is the same woman transported from Ireland in 1850 is made clear by a conduct note that, on 24 February 1853, she was ‘Delivered of an Illegitimate Child (William) at the Cascade Factory’.⁴² William’s sponsor was Alice Griffin, almost certainly a transcriptional variant of the Alice Griffith transported from Ireland in 1852 whose own conduct record places her at the Cascades Female Factory at the same time as Margaret.⁴³

Other cases are more suggestive than definitive, such as the baptism on 1 May 1838 of three children.⁴⁴ Here, the record shows that Margaret Cook shared a name with her sponsor, Margaret Sweeny, who was in turn the mother of a boy, Richard Sweeny. Meanwhile, Margaret’s mother Mary was the sponsor for another boy, Thomas Gordon. Here the names of the three mothers, Mary Cook, Ann Gordon and Margaret Sweeny, along with Richard’s sponsor, Ann Sullivan, all correspond with convicts whose conduct records show various connections with the Female Factory, but do not actually record their children’s births or other details at or around the time of birth.⁴⁵ The triple baptism, however, presents a seemingly very clear case of two convict women acting as sponsors for fellow convict mothers, one of whom may have adopted the sponsor’s name for their child. That Margaret Sweeny chose a fourth individual, Ann Sullivan, as sponsor for her child rather than fellow mother Ann Gordon is almost certainly a direct result of close friendship, Sweeny and Sullivan sharing not only the fact of being convicts but also a history as former shipmates as transportees on the Hydery in 1832. When Ann Sullivan herself gives birth a few years later as a single mother, her choice of name could have been for the sponsor, Margaret Lynch, although it could also point back to Margaret Sweeny.⁴⁶

What this triple baptism shows most clearly is that the phenomenon of baptismal interconnectedness was not merely narrowly lateral, between child, mother and sponsor, but potentially has more broadly lateral elements. Like the instance of the two mothers Mary Ryan and Ellen Cotter mentioned earlier, who appear to have named their children for each other, the sacrament of baptism provides historians with the means of charting a wide spectrum of potential connections.

Inter-baptismal connectivity

As some cases already mentioned above illustrate, instances of baptisms occurring on the same day provide a good starting point for assessing the phenomenon of inter-baptismal connectivity. Certainly, the proximity of events and participants increases the confidence that the same names do in fact point to the same people. The cases of Nathan Gaffney and Mary Jane Woods, for instances, born to Ann Gaffney and Margaret Woods, respectively, are indicative of physical as well as temporal proximity. Both mothers were convicts whose conduct records document the birth of these children at the Female Factory in Hobart.⁴⁷ Similarly, the son and daughter of Margaret Logan and Margaret Wallace, respectively, were both baptised on 17 March 1853 and both women had the birth of these children noted in their respective conduct records.⁴⁸ The 13 September 1853 baptism of Sarah Walsh and Catherine Lynch, both daughters of convict women, provides another instance of children of convicts being baptised on the same day, which would make practical sense given that the Female Factory was sited at some remove from the church and the clergy.⁴⁹

Such cases make it seem more likely than not that Ann Leahy was the convict woman of the same name whose conduct record documents no child but whose daughter Eliza was baptised on the same day as two other children of convict women.⁵⁰ Paralleling this, the baptism of Maria Farrell on 13 August 1851 to the convict woman Ellen Farrell, whose record affirms and situates Maria’s birth, therefore makes it seem probable that the Catherine Smith baptised on the same day might have been a child of one of the numerous convict Marys Smith.⁵¹ While not all baptisms on any given day necessarily mean convict mothers, when multiple baptisms involve single women it certainly suggests the high probability, which points again to situational connectivity.

Twins provide an even more specific structure that helps to affirm our confidence that documentary interconnectivity reflects historical actuality. Ann Byrnes (or Birnes) was a widowed mother when she arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in July 1849 with three of her children on board the Maria with her.⁵² The sponsor of twins Bridget and John, born in the Female Factory in Hobart on 15 December and baptised three days later, was Bridget McCabe, almost certainly one of two co-religionist Irish convict contenders arriving around the same time.⁵³ One was also a widowed mother of children transported with Ann on the same voyage of the Maria, although the other was from the same county and was undergoing punishment in Hobart at the right time, so disambiguation is difficult. Either way, Bridget McCabe—whoever she was—seems again to reaffirm the principle that baptismal sponsorship likely went deeper than incidental association. These women were more likely friends than not, certainly close enough to act as sponsor and likely to be the source of the female child’s name.

Of course, what twins also highlight is the fact that mothers could be mothers more than once. Yet, while there are 19 recurring names of mothers within the sample, and while instances of repeat single motherhood are of potential interest, the likelihood of multiple individuals sharing the same name makes assessing and clearly identifying such repeat mothers an almost pointlessly difficult endeavour. Mary Walch, for instance, is unlikely to be the same individual who gave birth to a Henry eight months before twins John and William, although one could plausibly be the mother of Hannah baptised in October 1852.⁵⁴ That there were multiple convict Marys Welch, and the civil registrations of Henry and Hannah use ‘Welsh’ and ‘Walsh’, respectively, only complicates the issue.⁵⁵ Similarly, while it is fairly clear by context and state records that Frederick and William Dwyer, born and baptised several weeks apart, did not share the same mother, neither of these women seem to have been the mother of Henry Dwyer, born and baptised in 1852.⁵⁶ Even among the 14 mothers’ names that recur only twice, the commonality of names makes disambiguation and cross-referencing so difficult as to make that line of enquiry relatively unfruitful in any way proportionate to the effort required and the certainty promised. Nevertheless, an obverse discovery is telling: about two-thirds of the baptisms recorded in the sample involve mothers who seem only to have been single mothers the once, and the majority of cases of women seeming to name a child after their sponsor fall into this group, comprising about 71 per cent of that cohort. There is a clear overlap between the phenomena of one-off single motherhood and the potential naming of children after sponsors. Such women seem most likely to have engaged in the practice of naming a child after a sponsor.

The 105 recorded sponsors themselves are also of interest in their own right. Of these, 21 sponsor names recur over multiple baptisms, the majority (17) being for no more than two baptisms. While disambiguation and clear identification remains as problematic as for mothers—in fact more so given that state records do not provide any explicit cross-referencing opportunities for baptismal sponsorship—these proportions align relatively well with that of single motherhood itself. Around 38 per cent of baptisms involved a sponsor who was potentially a repeat sponsor, while up to approximately 35 per cent of baptisms involved a mother who was potentially a recurring mother. Again, over 60 per cent of baptisms therefore involved either a one-time single mother or a one-time sponsor for a single mother’s child.

Interrelationships between mothers and sponsors is an area in which this iterative methodology perhaps offers the most novel picture of historical connectivity. It is clear that there is significant overlap between single mothers and the sponsorship of the children of fellow single mothers. Assessed by name recurrence alone, 53 women were likely both single mothers and the sponsors of the child of single mothers. Across the baptisms themselves, 102 of the 127 involved a mother or sponsor who was plausibly involved in another baptism in the other role of either sponsor or mother. This means that 80 per cent—or four out of every five—of these baptisms might have involved a single mother who was at one point also the sponsor of a single mother’s child.

While some allowance needs to be made for identification, there is a reasonably high degree of confidence in this indicator of interconnectivity because of the high degree of proximity between most such cases. The Mary Brown who sponsored Catharine Callaghan on 3 December 1849 was almost certainly the same Mary Brown whose son John was baptised on 4 December 1850.⁵⁷ The Mary Mulcahy who sponsored that John Brown was almost certainly the mother of Margaret Mulcahy baptised just over a week later.⁵⁸ The Mary Ann Price whose twins Charles and Mary Ann were baptised on 8 July 1853 was very likely the sponsor of Bridget Scanlon’s child that September, with Bridget Scanlon herself seeming to be a sponsor in October for one of the Georges Sullivan already discussed.⁵⁹ Examples could be multiplied, but the point need not be laboured. Single mothers clearly often became sponsors to the children of fellow single mothers, often with obvious signs of their pregnancies having overlapped.

In some instances, the pregnancy overlap was minimal, perhaps even unknown to those involved. The eight months between the baptism of Ellen Hart’s child in August 1853 and her own appearance as a sponsor in April 1854 highlights that these need not be seen as ‘confinement’ arrangements.⁶⁰ Nonetheless, the fact remains that this high correspondence is unlikely to be a merely accidental phenomenon. What emerges from this sample is a clear signal that single women were choosing other single women to be sponsors for their children. Perhaps the circumstances of convictism greatly limited their options in many of these cases, but this remains nevertheless a fascinating insight into the networks of relationships formed among women in a colonial setting.

Concluding remarks

Much of what this article has outlined remains very contingent on historical circumstances, surviving source material, and the current breadth of the method’s application. Needless to say, widening the scope to include additional baptismal registers would shift some of the findings outlined above. The case of Ellen Cotter, transported for arson and later exhibiting ‘Meritorious Conduct on the occasion of a fire at the Brickfields’ nursery establishment, is instructive in this regard. Ellen has already been mentioned as having been one of the pair of women having their children baptised on the same day who seem to have named their children for each other, inspiring this whole project.⁶¹ That Ellen Cotter and Mary Ryan were both transported from Ireland for arson might have helped them form a friendship, but I suggest that the baptism of their children helps provide evidence of it.⁶²

However, despite helping to trigger this iterative methodology, Ellen was also a relatively anomalous exemplar. Ellen had named her child for a fellow mother rather than the sponsor. Moreover, while her child’s sponsor was a recent single mother, as far as the above discussion is concerned Ellen herself was not a sponsor. Except that she was, eventually. On the second page of the subsequent baptismal register for St Joseph’s in Hobart, Ellen is recorded as the sponsor of a child named Ellen Regan, born of a single mother named Johanna Regan.⁶³ This Joanna was in all probability the same woman sentenced to transportation in the same session as Ellen Cotter in County Cork on 30 November 1849 and transported with Ellen to Van Diemen’s Land on the same ship.⁶⁴ She was also likely the Joanna Regan who had sponsored the child of another single mother some two years earlier.⁶⁵ Once again, the baptismal event seems to affirm a deeper friendship. This particular instance also reminds us that so far we have mostly been talking about a single register. Once a broader net is cast, the breadth of single mother interconnectivity in colonial contexts would very likely increase.

For now, the results of this methodological experiment are relatively clear. We can confidently affirm that an iterative following of connections among single mothers recorded within the baptismal records of St Joseph’s Church in Hobart indicates a high likelihood that there were strong networks of mutual support between such single mothers, evidenced by the common naming of children for sponsors or other single mothers, and underlined further by an apparently very high rate of mutual sponsorship of each other’s children. But, in a sense, we already knew this, because we followed the connections to begin with. This is not so much a statistical sample of women as a self-evident evidentiary trail. Beyond the big social and cultural historical picture and methodological experimentation, this study also helps add important insights into individual life stories and some contextual findings that will hopefully benefit future researchers and writers.

The aptly named Susannah Friday Foundling, bearing a surname suggestive of a family history of paternal and maternal opaqueness, provides a good closing example. Her extensive convict records strongly suggest the possibility of prostitution in Liverpool prior to her being transported for larceny, and contain a familiar and institutional litany of infractions and punishments.⁶⁶ While recording that she was also known as Mary Susannah Williams, Susannah’s conduct record makes no explicit mention of the child Randolph she had baptised in September 1855; it does not mention that in October that year she acted as sponsor to Charles Finley, the child of Bridget Finley; nor does it mention her sponsorship of Eliza Jane Green, child of Mary Green, in April 1856, only a few weeks before Susannah’s own marriage in St Joseph’s Church to a sawyer named James Murphy.⁶⁷ While hard won, the baptismal records help present a fuller picture of the individual concerned, bringing out a sense of community connections and religious faithfulness. That is true for each of the women in this sample, revealing signs of a network of support over which they had some agency, whatever their circumstances.

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1. 1 CON41/1/8 image 128, Tasmanian Archives (TA).

2. 2 Tasmanian Colonist, 8 January 1855, 2.

3. 3 Hobart Town Daily Mercury, 11 October 1859, 2.

4. 4 RDG33/1/4 no. 790[-796], TA.

5. 5 STJ2, 149, Archdiocese of Hobart Archives (AHA).

6. 6 STJ2, 149, AHA.

7. 7 CON15/1/3 image 257, TA. Bridget’s convict records at least offer no likelihood that this is a female relative’s name.

8. 8 STJ2, 14, 45, 102, 105, 108, 110, 111, 122, 128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 149, 160, 169, 186, 188, 206, 216, 279, 281, 289, 316, AHA.

9. 9 Tanya Evans, ‘Unfortunate Objects’: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4, doi.org/10.1057/9780230509856.

10. 10 John Charles Cox, The Parish Registers of England (Methuen & Co., 1910), 1–11; Richard Wall, ‘English Population Statistics before 1800’, History of the Family 9, no. 1 (2004): 83–9, doi.org/10.1016/j.hisfam.2001.10.003.

11. 11 An Act for Registering Births, Deaths and Marriages in the Island of Van Diemen’s Land and its Dependencies (2 Victoria no. 8 [1838]). For more on civil registration, see: Rebecca Kippen, ‘An Indispensable Duty of Government: Civil Registration in Nineteenth-Century Tasmania’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 8, no. 1 (2002): 42–58.

12. 12 For one of the most influential such works in English history, see: E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Edward Arnold, 1981).

13. 13 Nick Brodie, Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation (Hardie Grant, 2016). See also: Nicholas Dean Brodie, ‘The Extended Ken of Kin: A National Family History’, in Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown (Routledge, 2021), 40–52, doi.org/10.4324/9780429355899-4; Nicholas Dean Brodie, ‘Beggary, Vagabondage, and Poor Relief: English Statutes in the Urban Context, 1495–1572’ (PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 2010), 48–54.

14. 14 D. J. Gleeson, ‘Researching 19th Century NSW Irish Migrants through Church Registers’, Descent 31, no. 2 (2001): 74–80.

15. 15 Will Coster, Family and Kinship in England 1450–1800 (Routledge, 2013), 40.

16. 16 Scott Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England 1538–1700 (Oxford University Press, 1997), 1, 26, doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206637.001.0001.

17. 17 Clodagh Tait, ‘Namesakes and Nicknames: Naming Practices in Early Modern Ireland, 1540–1700’, Continuity and Change 21, no. 2 (2006): 321, doi.org/10.1017/S0268416006005935.

18. 18 John Williams, ‘Irish Female Convicts and Tasmania’, Labour History 44 (1983): 1–17; Nicholas Dean Brodie, Kristyn Evelyn Harman and Victoria M. Nagy, ‘Free Women and Short Hair: Cropping, Convictism, and Reform in Van Diemen’s Land’, in Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Victoria M. Nagy and Georgina Rychner (Routledge, 2024), 15–32, doi.org/10.4324/9781003232315-2; Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe, Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Tina Picton Phillips, ‘Family Matters: Bastards, Orphans and Baptisms—New South Wales, 1810–1825’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 90, no. 2 (2004): 122–135.

19. 19 STJ2, 277, AHA.

20. 20 STJ2, 188, 270, AHA.

21. 21 STJ2, 234, 245, 270, 282, AHA.

22. 22 STJ2, 245, AHA.

23. 23 STJ2, 169, AHA.

24. 24 STJ2, 3, AHA.

25. 25 STJ2, –14, 3, 45, 179, 206, 208, 298, AHA.

26. 26 STJ2, 208, AHA.

27. 27 RGD33/1/5 nos. 221 and 225, TA.

28. 28 RGD35/1/4 nos. 734 and 1418, TA.

29. 29 CON41/1/22 no. 857; CON41/1/27 no. 939, TA.

30. 30 STJ2, 179, 206, AHA.

31. 31 STJ2, 125, 128, AHA.

32. 32 RGD33/1/4 no. 22, TA.

33. 33 STJ2, 114, 133, 310, AHA.

34. 34 STJ2, 219, AHA.

35. 35 Clodagh Tait, ‘Spiritual Bonds, Social Bonds: Baptism and Godparenthood in Ireland, 1530–1690’, Cultural and Social History 2 (2015): 301–27, doi.org/10.1191/1478003805cs049oa. See pp. 303 and 322 for comments on godparental–parental relations and associated naming conventions.

36. 36 Clodagh Tait, ‘Namesakes and Nicknames’, 34–5.

37. 37 STJ2, 102, 128, 139, AHA.

38. 38 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997), 161; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (Yale University Press, 2001), 37–8; Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns, 35–44; Clodagh Tait, ‘Namesakes and Nicknames’, 321.

39. 39 STJ2, 108, AHA.

40. 40 STJ2, 133, 310, AHA.

41. 41 STJ2, 188, AHA.

42. 42 CON41/1/28, 120, TA.

43. 43 CON41/1/35, 88, TA.

44. 44 STJ2, –14, AHA.

45. 45 CON40/1/1 no. 263; CON40/1/3 no. 96; CON40/1/9 nos. 221, 226, TA.

46. 46 STJ2, 45, AHA.

47. 47 CON41/1/16, no. 730; CON41/1/24 no. 520, TA.

48. 48 CON41/1/30, no. 892, TA.

49. 49 STJ2, 206–7, AHA; RGD33/1/5, nos. 110, 111, TA.

50. 50 STJ2, 188, AHA; CON41/1/18, no. 405; RGD33/1/4, nos. 2015, 2016, TA.

51. 51 CON41/1/20, no. 401; CON41/1/25, no. 455, TA.

52. 52 CON41/1/22, no. 976, TA.

53. 53 CON41/1/20, no. 962; CON41/1/22, no. 989, TA.

54. 54 STJ2, 119, 133, 176, AHA.

55. 55 RGD33/1/3 no. 2564, RGD33/1/4 no 1820, TA.

56. 56 CON41/1/20, 59, no. 633, TA.

57. 57 STJ2, 105, 110, AHA.

58. 58 STJ2, 110, AHA.

59. 59 STJ2, 201, 206, 208, AHA.

60. 60 STJ2, 206, 229, AHA.

61. 61 CON41/1/28 no. 1104, TA.

62. 62 CON41/1/28 no. 1104, CON41/1/26 no. 530, TA.

63. 63 STJ3, 2, AHA.

64. 64 CON41/1/28 no. 1104, CON41/1//28 no. 550, TA.

65. 65 STJ2, 257, 277, AHA.

66. 66 CON41/1/37 no. 539, TA.

67. 67 STJ2, 282, 285, 305, AHA; RGD37/1/15 no. 470, TA.