This is my great grandmother, Cecelia Sedgwick (nee Morley) (animated by AI from My Heritage!).
She was born in Red Hill, near Ballindine, County Mayo in Ireland in 1864. Her family (father Thomas, mother Bridget) lived on a farm on Lot 7b (land and house) at Redhill, owned by John Nolan Ferrall.
There is an 1856 map of the region, which clearly shows Redhill, approximately between Ballyhaunis and Ballandine (which explains why both are found on various documentation) which was entirely owned by John Ferrall, and he also owned several nearby farms.
If we zoom in a bit, we can clearly see Lot 7, but it's not clear where a and b might be and which house they would have lived in.
You can go onto Google maps now, and actually travel around virtually, via Google Streetview! This house is the northern bit near the current road, looking south over Lot 7. It's hard to know if this was their house, but you can imagine where Thomas and Bridget lived, with their 7 children, including Cecelia and her sister Catherine (Kate).
Ireland suffered the Great Famine or Great Hunger/Starvation, due to potato disease, from 1845 to 1852, a decade before Cecelia was born, where 2.1 million Irish people emigrated to other countries (mostly America. The potato blight returned in 1879, but this time, tenants were protected from eviction by "notorious landlords" in the Land Wars, reducing homelessness and deaths.Cecelia's older sister Catherine (Kate) left Ireland and arrived in Australia in 1874 on the Indus, aged 20 years old.
She married Gaspar Sigovich from Austria current-day Croatia and who anglicised his name to a much more English-sounding surname Sedgwick in 1882.
In 1880 (arriving in 1881), Kate sponsored her brother Denis (21, labourer) and sister Bridget (22, domestic servant) to come out and join her in Australia on the Glamis.
Then, in 1884, she sponsored an 18-year-old Cecelia (Cecily), and her two brothers, Thomas (25, a labourer) and Luke (20, also a labourer) and her mother Bridget on the SS Abergeldie (who said she was 33, which I think was a bit of a lie!) to travel out.
We have this as a family photo, which we think is a photo of Gaspar, Catherine and Cecelia (but could also be Gasper, son of Gaspar):
The next record I have for Cecelia is living on Oxford St, Sydney in 1889 (NSW Government Gazette):
In January 1894, Catherine died and just over two years later, in May 1896, aged 31 (which would have been quite old to get married then), Cecelia married Gaspar, who had been left with six children (Jacob, Maria, Delia, John, Catherine and Gasper) - one child, Thomas, died as a baby. Family verbal stories say that they had to get special dispensation from the Catholic Church to get married because they were sisters, but I have not been able to locate any records of this, despite contacting the Newtown parish.
Cecelia and Gaspar went on to have another five children, including my grandfather, Joseph, and then Thomas, Jacomena, Anthony, and Ann Cecelia (Celie). We have some studio photos of her with Gaspar and Celie:
And less formal ones in the backyard (that's her on the left, with Celie on the far right):
She lived with Gaspar in Australia St, Newtown until his death in 1920. She lived another 12 years, still at Australia St, until her death due to breast cancer and secondary cancer of the lungs:
It's obvious the Catholic church played a large role in her life, but apart from raising a lot of children, and being a wife, it's difficult to find out much more about her. This seems to be the way for many women, who had no career/job records. I can only imagine that leaving Ireland and moving half a world away, to marry her older sister's widow seemed to offer a better life. I hope that it did. She looks like a strong and formidable matriarch from her photos - I like to think maybe I got some of those genes :-)
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