Saturday, January 12, 2013

The more I dig the more confused I become

Uncle D. owned a couple of acres of land at Bowral in New South Wales called Burn Brae;  his sister A., whom from all reports he had little contact with owned a house at Crafers in the Mt Lofty Ranges in South Australia, also called Burn Brae.  Since their father was Cornish and their mother was first generation Australian I googled the name to see if there was a connection anywhere; there wasn't ... so I turned to the archived newspapers yet again.

Burn Brae the house, far from being left to Great Aunt A. in her father's will as I had always been told, was owned by her sister-in-law J. M.  who put it on the market, along with two other houses, in 1936  -  there must have been some sort of financial crisis.  However, when her daughter, my cousin P. married in 1939 the house was still owned by Aunt J.. Just when Aunt A. took posession of it I don't know.

She, her mother M. B., and her brother Great Uncle R. previously lived at The Pines,  Plympton and I have a small snippet of memory of it  -  in  the tower room and finding child-sized cricket bats there.

The M. boys grew up at The Pines and yet, when the widowed M. M., née Tucker, married H. S. B. in 1891who was an executor of her late husband, John M.'s estate, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper on 19th February 1892 with a view to auctioning the whole contents of The Pines (including the horses) and putting the house out to rent; after which the B. couple,  the five M. children and a nurse, moved to England where my half-great uncle C. B. was born.

I had always assumed that The Pines belonged to my great grandmother M. B. but if so when and where did my Aunt A. get the money to buy the house at Crafers from her sister-in-law, my Aunt J..

It needs a search of the title deeds to sort it out and from Western Australia it will be difficult and expensive so I'll probably never find out

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