We think that William Browne was born on 22 August 1853 in Skibbereen, Ireland to parents "Robert" Courtney Browne and Margaret Moore, who were protestants.[1] The date of birth and parents are based on one MyHeritage site without a verifiable source, but there are several lines of supporting evidence:
David has DNA matches at around the 4th cousin level with four descendants of this Browne family from Cork, Ireland - Michael Bate, Daniel Greenwood, and Nikole Wills who are descendants of William's supposed grandfather Courtney William Browne, and Carol Evans who is a descendant of Jane Browne who appears to have been Courtney's sister. Rafi has matches with Elizabeth Hays and her sister Janet Bate, Janet's children Michael and Chanelle and their cousin Daniel Bungard, as well as Nikole Wills. [2]
Ruth Leah said that the Browne family came from Skibbereen.
This William Browne is of the right age to marry in Australia in 1881 and didn't have a known future in the original source.[3] His sibling Hastings Browne shows up in the Irish census with the same age as given on the MyHeritage site and was a baker. The site's claim that his brother Stephen was in the 1901 census was correct and his marriage date was corroborated by the 1911 census.[4]
The protestant Irish background matches David's LivingDNA ethnicity breakdown that includes SW Scotland and Northern Ireland.
We found a William Browne who arrived in Sydney in November 1877 on the Star of India who was 23 years old (the age he would have been at the start of the voyage), came from Cork, and was a protestant. On the other hand, the record says that his calling was "farm labourer".
Most convincingly, his middle name, Moore, on his daughter Gertrude's marriage certificate matches his mother's maiden name.
On the other hand, we haven't been able to find William Browne's death certificate in the New South Wales records, which would usually include his parents' names. Certainly, no William Browne is recorded as dying in New South Wales in the relevant period with these parents' names. Unfortunately, his marriage certificate gives neither the names of his parents nor his place of birth.
William married Emily Ruth Woodward on 21 November 1881 in Young, NSW where they both lived, at the residence or manse of the Presbyterian minister. According to their marriage certificate and also his daughter Gertrude and grand-daughter Norah's marriage certificates, [5] William was a baker, although according to that of his son Sydney he was a miner. According to the passenger list of the Star of India he was a farm labourer. It's a bit odd that he married under the Presbyterian Church and his wife continued that tradition at her death. However, his putative family in Ireland were all protestants, mostly Church of Ireland, and his family ultimately came from Scotland (as well as Wales and maybe England).
Their first child, Gertrude, was born in Young in 1882. They moved to Forbes where eight more children were born: Annie (1883), Robert (1885), William and Walter (1886), Frederick (1888), Sydney (1889), Stephen (1891), and Hilda (1893). Robert, Walter, and Frederick died in childhood.
Emily Ruth Browne died in Marrickville (Sydney), NSW on 7th February 1922. She was buried at Rookwood in the Presbyterian section. Her grave does not have a formal tombstone. In the photo above, it is marked by the flowers. We also know that if William and Emily raised Norah, he must have been alive when she was born in 1902. He must have died before his son Sydney's wedding on 3 January 1923, as he is listed as deceased on the marriage certificate. He appears to be alive in 1915 when Gertrude was married and this is the only time that a middle name is listed, which appears to be "Moore". As Emily was buried at Rookwood, it would seem likely that William was too. Indeed, a William Browne was buried on 9 October 1917 at Rookwood in the Presbyterian section and was stated to be 77 years old. This seems to be the only William Browne buried in the Presbyterian section in this period.[6] However, we ordered his death certificate, which states that he had no children and was a labourer among other things, and so this isn't our William Browne. We ordered death certificates for two more William Brownes that were not ruled out by known facts and neither of those was married either. One was only 30 years old.
Gertrude had three children by unknown father(s): Clive, Winifred, and Esme Browne. We know the most about Esme who married John Henry Munro in Queensland. Gertrude went on to marry Ernest Allum, a widower (though we have found no record of his first wife) and immigrant from Berkshire, England, and have two more children: Inez and Maurice.
Annie went on to marry Andrew Caldwell and have two more children. We don't know what happened to William. He doesn't even have an NSW death record. In 1932, Stephen married a widow, Lottie Napier, born Wolfe in Tasmania, when they were both in their 40s.
Hilda married Albert de Plevitz who was also born in Forbes. They had two children, Arnold and Albert, but Arnold died the year he was born, Albert senior died in 1917, and then Albert junior died in 1921. Hilda then married Albert Hosking in 1928. They had a child, Albert, who also didn't live long.
Sydney was a tramdriver in Sydney. He didn't like the unconventional spelling of his name and often wrote "Sidney" or Sid. His first marriage was to Georgina Lutherborough, known also as "Ena", who it seems was the former wife of Thomas Lutherborough, with whom she had two children, and of William Dowding, who died the year they married. Her son Thomas died in the First World War. Her first husband deserted her and the children in 1897, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He died in 1902. She didn't change her name from Lutherborough. Ena was 13 years older than Sydney and died in 1930.
The next year on 17 March in Annandale, Sydney married Ivy Ambrose who had recently divorced Wallace Mann. She had three children with Wallace: Richard, Muriel, and Joyce, known as Joy. According to Ruth Leah, at first she grew up not knowing she had half-siblings - her mother had abandoned them to an orphanage. At some point, they came and introduced themselves. Muriel and Richard would later visit Ruth Leah and her family in England and Joy corresponded with Ruth Leah. Joy helped her mother, Ivy, when she suffered from dementia despite resenting her earlier treatment.
Florence (Ruth Leah) was the only child of Sydney and Ivy's marriage and was born on 1 December 1931 in Glebe (Sydney). They lived in Glebe and Stanmore among other places.[7] Sydney worked up to manage the tram station in Annandale. When Sydney retired, the couple moved to Nambucca Heads on the New South Wales North Coast. Sydney died on 26 December 1965 after suffering from a burst artery while out fishing a couple of days earlier. Around 1971, Ivy visited her daughter and family in London. Eventually, Ivy moved into an old age home on Short Street in Macksville and died on 12 June 1986.
Florence studied at Sydney Girls High School where she was an outstanding student receiving a state first in Latin. She went on to gain a scholarship to study at Women's College of the University of Sydney where she completed a BA in classics. One of her friends there was Marie Bashir who became the governor of New South Wales. Following this, she studied nursing at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.
While in school, she had became close to a lot of Jewish friends and together with them attended classes with Rabbi Israel Porush of the Sydney Great Synagogue. In 1954 she converted to Judaism. Around this time, she boarded with several Jewish families with whom she became close - in particular Len and Debbie Black - and the Heimlich's - a family of Satmar Hasidim.[8] On her conversion Florence took a new name - Ruth Leah, though she preferred to go by the name Leah alone. In 1962 she left Australia by boat to Athens via Fremantle, Colombo, Aden, and the Suez Canal and from there overland to England. Her original plan was to immigrate to Israel after travelling around Europe.
She boarded with a Jewish family (the Colmans) in Golders Green, London, and it was there that she met Günther Stern (15 years her senior) who also boarded there. They married on 16th February 1964. They moved to Streatham in South London where they lived for a year or two, then to Sutton also in South London where they lived for thirty years. They had two children - David who was born on 1 December 1964 and Ralph (Rafi) who was born on 13 February 1967. Günther worked as an electrical engineer at a company called Londex and Ruth Leah worked as a medical and school laboratory technician as well as taking blood samples at a couple of local hospitals. In November 1995, they moved to Israel following their son Rafi and settled in Beit Shemesh where he lived.
While still in England, Günther started suffering from Parkinson's disease. In 2001 his condition worsened and after repeated hospitalizations, he died on 1 June 2002 at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem. He had mentioned that his family donated to the founding of the hospital, and after he died Ruth Leah also made a donation in his memory. He was buried in the Beit Shemesh municipal cemetery.
Ruth Leah made one trip back to Australia in 2008 for David's wedding. During the trip she and Rafi met with Marie Bashir at the governor's office. Ruth Leah started exhibiting symptoms of dementia several years later. She continued to live at home with a carer (Bernadette Malaya from Baguio City, Philippines), and died at home on 21 February 2018. She was buried alongside Günther in Beit Shemesh. Her son, Rafi, read the following eulogy, or hesped, at her funeral.
William's grandfather was Lieut. Courtney William Browne, a professional soldier, who lived at Seafort House, southwest of Schull, County Cork. "Robert" Courtney Browne, William's father, was his eldest son. There is evidence that Jane Browne, who appears to have been his sister, was descended from Captain John Evans and Lady Ellen Erskine. The name of one (among others) of William's supposed cousins, Harry Marshall Erskine Evans, mayor of Calgary, shows that the family had a tradition of descent from the Erskine Family. However, it's unclear who Ellen Erskine's parents were.[9]
Marie Elmes was an Irish businesswoman and aid worker credited with saving the lives of at least 200 Jewish children during the Holocaust, by hiding them in the boot of her car. In 2015, she became the first and only Irish person honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel, in recognition of her work in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was Ruth Leah's fifth cousin. Their common ancestors were Lady Ellen Erskine and Captain John Evans.Read more about her on Wikipedia
Links
Endnotes
[1] Both contributors to FamilySearch and some MyHeritage sites believe that his parents were James and Mary Browne who were a Catholic family who moved from Sydney to Forbes. This would mean that he was born in 1850 in Sydney. However, William lived in Young prior to his marriage rather than Forbes, and William and Emily married according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church there. We think it is entirely a coincidence that there was another Browne family living in Forbes when William and Emily moved there.
[2] WATO analysis finds it four times more likely that William Browne was a son of Robert Courtney's brother Frederick Hastings Browne than a son of Robert Courtney Browne and 16 times more likely than a son of Robert's brother Stephen (There were two further brothers with no documented children, George who moved to California, and Jeremiah who probably died young). However, no-one has documented a son of Frederick called William and William's middle name Moore suggests that Margaret Moore was his mother. In the image below, each "Hypothesis" is the possible location of David and Rafi Stern:
[3] The website manager has subsequently added William Browne's death date using information from our site. David talked with her on the phone but she couldn't remember what the source was.
[4] His supposed brother Stephen married in the Church of Ireland. He was an accountant. His older brother Hastings was also a baker and a Methodist. At the 1901 Census, he lived with his sisters Anne, 43, and Lizzie, 50. Lizzie was listed as head of household and both sisters were listed as Church of Ireland.
[5] When Norah Browne married John Hart in 1927, she stated that her parents were William and Emily Ruth Browne and that she was 25 years old. But, in the official NSW records, Nora Browne was born to Annie Browne in Forbes in 1902 with no father given. We presume that her grandparents raised her as their own daughter. If so, William must have died after 1902 but before 1927, as he is stated as deceased on the marriage certificate (though Emily is not). We have further narrowed down the period in which he could have died. Ruth Leah also remembered that he was a baker and that he was involved in a brawl in Forbes.
[6] There is a funeral notice on 10th January 1917 in the Sydney Daily Telegraph announcing the funeral of "William Brown of Forbes" at the C of E Cemetery at Rookwood. Turns out that there is a notice in the Forbes Advocate that William Browne of Orange Road, Forbes died on 25 December 1916 at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. As no William Brown was buried then at Rookwood and cremation wasn't allowed in NSW till 1925 when the crematorium was built at Rookwood, they must have taken the body for burial in Forbes unless he is one of the unknown people listed as buried there.
[7] Florence Browne was born at a private hospital at 22 Wigram Rd., Glebe. They lived at the following addresses that we know of: 229 Bridge Rd., Glebe (1931) and 52 Corunna Rd., Stanmore (1933). She told us that during the Second World War they lived near Bondi but moved west again because they were afraid of Japanese submarines.
[8] Addresses that we know she lived at are 9 O'Brien St., Bondi and apt. 10 at 46 Birriga Rd., Bellevue Hill.
[9] Identification of Ellen as a daughter of James Erskine, Lord Grange and Rachel Chiesley (e.g. on FamilySearch) appears to be incorrect, given available lists of their children. We could speculatively identify Lady Ellen Evans with Helen Erskine,[8] born 1720 in Edinburgh, daughter of Charles Erskine, Lord Tinwald. But the problem with this is she was born too late to give birth to the children Peter Murphy attributes to her.
Last updated on 28 March 2024
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