Annie McDermaid (1868-1971)
What inspired me to research my maternal grandmother’s family was a hazy yearning to fill a void I didn’t necessarily know I had. My mother had passed away and there was no one left with reliable knowledge about my McDermaid heritage. The internet – even Ancestry – was silent.
And so ensued an exhilarating quest to document the McDermaids – and what turned out to be the family of John McDermaid and Janet Ross who married in Nigg, Ross & Cromarty, Scotland in October 1853 and migrated to Victoria, Australia three months later.
As I closed in on populating the ‘tree’ of my great-grandfather Thomas McDermaid, I turned my attention to his siblings – the eight other children of John and Janet. While Thomas left a document trail that is relatively straightforward to follow, the same cannot be said about his brothers and sisters! It has been challenging but infinitely rewarding to trace the families of each of them (a journey that, in one case, remains unresolved). Perhaps none exemplifies the pleasures of family history research more than the story of ‘finding’ Annie.
I had identified a possible pathway to the fate of the third McDermaid offspring, Catherine, who had married a Mr Tout and relocated to Fremantle, Western Australia. The records about Catherine were seemingly devoid of anything to unequivocally determine that she was Catherine Tout, nee McDermaid. My attention turned to possible clues in old newspapers… and there it was. In Catherine’s death notice published in The West Australian newspaper on 29 Jan 1935: “… and fond sister of Annie (Mrs Swarr, Cottesloe)”. Was it possible that two McDermaid sisters had moved to the Perth area? Had I verified the fate of two of Thomas’ sisters with one innocuous reference?
Confirming Annie’s details proved more definitive. Unlike Catherine, her death record makes reference to her parents as John and Janet. However, it was a minor scandal reported in the Perth newspapers in 1905 that not only identified Annie Swar of Cottesloe, Western Australia as the former “Annie McDermid” of Victoria, but described allegations of a bigamous ‘marriage’ to Mr Swar. It transpired that Annie was an unwitting ‘victim’ in the affair and, while it’s not entirely clear whether the allegations against Mr Swar were upheld, the wide reporting in the Perth dailies would have caused her much embarrassment and shame.
With an interest piqued by this new-found information, I determined to try and locate a living descendant of Annie to learn more about her and the curious turn of events that befell her. She was, after all, my mother’s grand-aunt so any of her grandchildren would be closer-than-third cousins. It is here that I can vouch for the value of White Pages as a genealogy resource – I soon tracked down Ken Goodes who was just as keen as I was to augment his knowledge of his grandmother (in Ken’s case understanding of Annie’s origins was limited to “we knew she had come from over east”). I have shared several telephone conversations with Ken and, more recently, visited him at home in Perth, but it was a call shortly after I’d sent him a bunch of the 1905 newspaper clippings that so profoundly encapsulates what sharing family history means to me. Ken, economical but insightful with words, simply said “Darren, I’m reading these articles and feeling my grandmother’s pain”.
My interactions with Ken have been warm and gratifying. He has been very generous with sharing family documents and photographs (such as the image used to derive our logo, taken by a local newspaper on the occasion of Annie’s 100th birthday in 1968). It’s humbling to contribute to the strengthening of family bonds across generations, such as the affection and respect Ken Goodes has for his grandmother, Annie McDermaid.
– Darren O’Shanassy (Founder of Finding Annie)
