From Stirling to California and Back Again: Grief and Emigration.

How far do you have to travel to escape a broken heart?

A third and final (for the time being) return to the dead centre of Stirling, with two tales from the Valley Cemetery: the Victorian extension to the crowded medieval burial ground. Our story concerns two sets of grieving parents who left Stirling for the other side of the world after the death of a child, surely the worst thing to ever happen to a parent. Any trip round the older bits of any cemetery will reveal a litany of infant deaths, child birth is very dangerous but was even more so before modern medicine. There was an ever present risk that disease would take your child and so sometimes infants were not always named. The pain however, was always the same.

but before that I missed a lecture….

The Hathaways

Inevitably any story recovered from gravestones involves some supposition in the absence of far more detailed research of records that might not even survive. This simple gravestone records three deaths: a son named Samuel who died aged 12 in 1881, while bathing (an accident). Then Samuel’s father in 1910 aged 67 and finally Jane who died 14 years later at 89 in Oakland California but who is interred in Stirling. Here is my interpretation, the grieving family left for a new life in California, hopefully with a new family, but after nearly 40 years and the death of a husband (who is commemorated but not buried here?) all Jane wanted was to be reunited with her lost son and so she left funding and instructions to be returned to Stirling to re-join her boy.

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Grace and Janet Marquis

This is the grave of two young girls Grace and Janet and the details of this story are mostly from Stirling’s Talking Stones and an excellent wikipedia page as well as a detailed biography by one his descendants. Daniel Marquis (1830-1879) was a photographer based in first Barton Street and then King Street until 1864. Their eldest child, six-year-old Janet, died in 1858. A second son, James Murray Marquis, was born in 1859, and in 1862 a third daughter, Grace Campbell Marquis, was born in 1862 and died three months later. It is thought that following the death of the children Daniel’s wife Grace became unwell. In late 1864 the family left for a new life in Australia. They sailed from London to Moreton Bay as fare-paying passengers in the clipper ship Flying Cloud. The household — Daniel (35 years old), his wife Grace (33), their children Isabella (9), John (7), and James (5), and Grace’s sister Margaret Murray (23) — arrived in Brisbane in March 1865. His many pictures are often part of the local and national collections.

Janet and Grace’s gravestone in the Valley Cemetery.

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In addition to early views of Brisbane (some of which were presented to Prince Albert) and local high society Daniel often photographed indigenous people and their beliefs prefer to avoid sharing images of the dead. I understand that an exception has been made for the following images. The images of these unnamed people were collected across the world.

This image is dated from 1872 and is available from the State Library of Queensland and there are others here.

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I don’t have a conclusion, I just hope I won’t have to bury my children or you yours. Daniel died at 49 and his wife Grace suffered numerous bouts of mental illness and was in several asylums in Scotland and Australia over her lifetime, eventually dying in the Woogaroo asylum in 1882.