by Bettye Ross
Just over two years ago an article appeared in the St. George & Sutherland Shire Leader titled “The Grave Mystery of Will and Eliza’s Death”.
I thought it was a pretty eye-catching headline and on reading through it, found that a headstone had been found in bushes in a backyard in Como which is the next suburb to Oyster Bay where I live. Now the headstone had been thrown over the fence of this property some years before, presumably as a party piece, and had ended up in the bushes. New occupants clearing the block had found it and wondered where it came from, why and whose was it?
Its inscription read:
“William Jonathon Johnson
Died, October 3, 1866, aged 55
This sweet remembrance of the
just shall flourish when he
sleeps in dust. Psm CXII.6″
underneath in smaller letters a smaller tribute stated:
“Eliza Harris who died on December 8, 1878, aged 65”
Eliza’s name and tribute had a pretty insignificant tone about it compared to William’s. Was Harris her surname? The Leader asked this as well as wondering whether the pair were sister and brother or “star-crossed lovers who thwarted convention by not marrying more than a century ago?”
This threw me into a mood of this has got to be solvable so I set to looking up newspapers of the time and found a nice long obituary to William and other notices of his occupations and abilities in various other articles, but so little about Eliza it amounted to nothing. But was she Eliza Harris or was she Eliza Johnson or was she Eliza the de facto of William Johnson or had she remarried after her husband William Johnson died? It didn’t matter what or where I looked she was not there. So if she wasn’t there, when and where had she come from? I was fairly certain of one thing – she had been “lying in state” wherever that headstone had originally stood – I hoped! There was not even a birth registration for an Eliza Harris or Johnson if she’d been related before marriage to William Johnson. There was only a marriage for a William Johnson to an Eliza Tompson. No way you wrote Harris could it look like Tompson!
There were two deaths registered who possibly could have been her, so I sent for both certificates, one didn’t fit because it was a death of an Eliza Johnson before the above date, but the other one did have a possibility although it was for a burial for 2 January 1879 – 25 days after she died! Not only that but between Eliza and Johnson was an H.! That certainly could stand for Harris. Naturally this death certificate didn’t have any more helpful details than that – no date of death, she was a female and she had been buried 2.1.1879 at Camperdown by Mrs. Kinsela & Sons of Sydney and witnesses were Henry Kinsela and William O’Dwyer. No date of death as I said, no age, no birthplace, no husband and no children!
Well I swung into research action – I eventually found where Kinsela’s burial registers were but they were scant and some years missing, but Eliza Johnson was there no date but round about 1879-80, no more details than I had. So I started looking around the date of burial instead of death, nothing. I was starting to get to know Eliza – she appeared in my mind as a pathetically lonely lady, living on her own, her children gone or estranged from her, alone since her husband’s death! Perhaps she’d fallen, lay injured on the floor with no one to hear her cries, no one to come and comfort or cover her emaciated body. Perhaps she’d died of thirst, exposure and loneliness! I knew she was emaciated because I’d now worked out how pathetic were her circumstances! If it wasn’t 120 years ago I’d probably have considered going and forcing her door open to find her!
I didn’t though – I went back to the old registers looking for more clues and decided to follow all the indexes of William Johnson marriages. The one that fitted was Eliza Tompson because the groom had the second initial of J. When hooked it up they had married 21 July 1838 at St. Philip’s, Sydney, her name given as Eliza Harris Tompson and the groom as William Jonathon Johnson. The witnesses were Charles Tompson, Richard Johnson, James Johnson, Jane Ann Armytage and Mary Ann Johnson.
A lot of Johnson’s to say the least and who was Jane Ann Armytage, was she a relation?
This took me back to the 1828 Census and I found Charles Tompson aged 44 who had arrived Free on the “Coromandel” in 1804, his wife Jane aged 34 and children Charles Jnr. 21, Frederick 14, Eliza H. 11, Edwin 9, Alfred 7, Emma 5, Ferdinand 3, and another Eliza H. aged 18 months, but how could wife Jane aged 34 years have a son aged 21? All except Charles Snr. had been born in the Colony.
Then when I looked under the Census for Armytage I found it stated Charles aged 12, George 9 and Jane Ann aged 10 months were the children of Mrs. C. Tompson and in the appendix it states “Children of Jane Morris by former husband”.
I now had two Eliza H.’s, two Charles’ and a Jane Ann Armytage – back to the drawing board and after a few more delvings into archives I came up with Eliza Harris Tompson daughter of Charles Tompson and Jane Armytage (nee Morris) marrying William Jonathon Johnson. I’d solved it!
My findings were sent off to the Leader a couple of months later and it was inserted under the heading “Mystery of Como Tombstone Known” BUT, wait till next week to find out how I fell on my face, and the stories and twists this riddle took me into!
This article was first published in the May 2002 edition of our magazine.
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