A Bible Hunt
In the years before Ancestry and the internet, there was the Genealogical Research Directory (GRD). The GRD was first published in 1981 and was an invaluable resource for any family historian. Published annually in Australia, each edition contained tens of thousands of family names being researched in Australia and New Zealand and the names and addresses of the people researching them.[1] Much of my early progress came from the fellow researchers I contacted via the GRD, and I am still in touch with a few of them today.
One of the first people I reached out to was a gentleman named Gavin McEwin. Gavin had done an extraordinary amount of research into the McEwin family, and although I did not realise it at the time, he was my third cousin twice removed (3C2R). In 1992, he self-published his research under the title McEwins in the Antipodes. He died in 1999, aged 84.
Gavin was very generous with his time and sharing his research, and one of the documents he shared with me was a photocopy of a transcript of the McEwin Family Bible. The names and dates of births, deaths, and marriages of the McEwin, Daniel, and Nash families from as early as 1793 had been transcribed by Christina Mawdesley sometime in the 1940s, and this scrappy photocopy became a document I returned to time and time again over the years. More than anything, I wanted to see that Bible!
Christina’s transcript included the note “these notes copied from family Bible of Mrs John McEwin (Hester Daniel) buried in Heidelberg Cemetery, Victoria”.
Margaret Hester Daniel was my 4xG grandmother. In October 1839, she arrived in Melbourne from Scotland aboard the David McIvor with her husband John McEwin and six of their children. Her family's story is fascinating and one I will write about one day.
THIS story is about my search for her Bible.
But where to start?
Seven of Margaret’s children had emigrated to Australia, and she had at least 45 grandchildren, so the notion of tracing and contacting all her descendants seemed a little impractical.
I wrote to all my family history contacts who I knew were researching the McEwin family, asking whether they knew anything about the Family Bible. No one had even heard about it.
I decided to cast my net wide and placed queries in many Australian genealogy society magazines and journals. Did anyone know of the Bible belonging to Mrs John McEwin? I received no responses.
Perhaps narrowing the field would yield some results. If Christina Mawdesley had transcribed the Bible, it must have been in her possession at some point in time, and maybe she had passed it to her children. So who was Christina Mawdesley?
Christina McAskell was born on 8 February 1897 in Silvan in Victoria, Australia, the eldest child of Murdoch McAskell and Sarah Jane McEwin.[2] Murdoch and Sarah had one other child, Bessie, born in 1898.[3] Christina was the great-granddaughter of Margaret Hester Daniel and John McEwin, and my second cousin three times removed (2C3R).
Christina married William Mawdesley on 11 July 1936.[4] She was a poet, publishing two collections, The Corroboree Tree and Twelve Shorter Poems of Melbourne’s Early Days of Settlement (1944) and The Crater Hills (1957), and appears to have felt a deep connection to her pioneering ancestors. The dedication in the Corroboree Tree reads, ‘To the memory of my four grandparents, who came severally from the Outer Hebrides, Inverness-shire, Dumfries and the Orkneys, to take part in the settlement of Early Melbourne’.[5]
She also undertook extensive research into the Scottish ancestry of her father, Murdoch McAskell, and documented a comprehensive family tree.
Christina died on 20 October 1980, and my hopes that she may have passed the Bible to her children were dashed when I learned that she and William had no children.[6]
Perhaps Christina had borrowed the Bible from another family member to transcribe it. I spent many hours at the Public Record Office Victoria, poring over the Wills of as many McEwins as I could find, hoping that someone had bequeathed the Bible to a relative. I found nothing useful.
Finally, I looked at Christina’s Will – she must have left her possessions to someone! The executrix of the Will was a Susanna Henderson, and, after monetary bequests to several people, Christina had left the residue of her estate to Susanna and the three daughters of the late Alexander Roderick MacKinnon.[7] Who were these people?
It took some time to track down Susanna. Born Susanna MacKinnon, she was Christina’s 1C1R – on her father’s side (McAskell), not her mother’s (McEwin). I had assumed the McEwin family was the place to look. I was wrong!
By the time I had found Susanna, she had passed away.[8] Through Ancestry.com – that 21st-century version of the GRD – I managed to track down one of Susanna’s daughters. She, in turn, connected me with one of her aunts – Susanna’s niece and one of the daughters of Alexander Roderick MacKinnon mentioned in Christina’s Will. I had found the people to whom Christina had left her possessions. But did that include the McEwin Family Bible?
Susanna’s niece was incredibly generous with her time and very willing to help me if she could. She remembered old Bibles on the bookshelf from when she was a child, and after contacting her late sister’s husband, she located an old leather-bound Bible. Her brother-in-law agreed to look through the Bible and take some photographs for me.
The wait was almost unbearable. Was I about to finally lay eyes on the McEwin Family Bible?
A few days later, the photographs arrived. They were of a leather-bound volume, “The Holy Bible with a Practical and Explanatory Commentary on The Old Testament”, by the Rev. Robert Jamieson, D.D., Minister of St Paul’s Parish, Glasgow.
Heartbreakingly, there were no handwritten entries in the Bible, although several pages had been torn out. We will never know whether those pages recorded the significant events in a family’s history.
Further research suggested that this particular volume had been published around 1860, a date which would rule out it being the Family Bible that travelled with Margaret Hester McEwin from Scotland to Melbourne in 1839.[9]
I was desperately disappointed. But I reminded myself that genealogy and family history research is a journey, and what a journey it had been!
I learned the life of a distant relative, a notable poet who had written a poem in tribute to Adam Lindsay Gordon.[10]
I was again reminded of the generosity and interest of strangers willing to help me uncover family mysteries.
And I learned a valuable lesson. I had spent years on the trail of the Family Bible, assuming that it had stayed in “my” family” – the McEwin family. But Christina was also a McAskell, and she was as much of “their” family as of “mine”.
Ultimately, my family consists of everyone on my family tree—the ones I know about and the ones I have yet to find.
References
1.https://www.gould.com.au/genealogical-research-directories-set-1994-2007/lahg002/
2. Birth registration index of Ctina McAskell, 1897, Registry of Births, Death & Marriages Victoria, Department of Justice, Victoria, Australia, 4577/1897.
3. Birth registration index of Bessie McAskell, 1898, Registry of Births, Death & Marriages Victoria, Department of Justice, Victoria, Australia, 29794/1898.
4. Christina McAskell and William Mawdesley marriage certificate, 11 July 1936, 10730/1936, Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages.
5. Christina Mawdesley, The corroboree tree and twelve shorter poems of Melbourne's early days of settlement, Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne, 1944.
6. Christina Mawdesley death certificate, 20 October 1980, 24417/1980, Victorian Registry of Births, Death & Marriages.
7. PROV, VA2620 Registrar of Probates Supreme Court, VPRS7591 Wills, 881/125 Christina Mawdesley: Will; Grant of probate, https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/5A558899-F61D-11E9-AE98-31D330AC6749
8. “Funerals,” Riverine Herald, 15 July 2020, p. 14, https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-riverine-herald/20200715/page/15, accessed 11 February 2021.
9. Hull Minster Heritage, “A Practical and Explanatory Commentary of the Old Testament and New Testament,” https://hullminsterheritage.org.uk/catalogue/602, accessed 21 March 2025.
10. Centre for Gold Rush Collections, “Framed portrait photograph of Christina Mawdesley and her poem tribute to A.L Gordon,” https://collections.sovereignhill.com.au/objects/73602/framed-portrait-photograph-of-christina-mawdesley-and-her-poem-tribute-to-al-gordon, accessed 21 March 2025.