The Margaret (Tobin) Barber Family in Australia c.1880
| Margaret | Born | about 1858 in Parcel ? (Parsonstown / Birr) Ireland. |
| Married | George Barber, a Lawyer, June 7th 1881 in Cunnamulla, Queensland. He was born in Tring, Hertfordshire England in 1855 and died ? | |
| Children of Union | Mary (1888 – ?) and Priscilla Henrietta (1892 – 1973). | |
| Died | September 12th 1898 in Croydon, Far North Queensland of ‘asthenia after intensive burning lower extremities’ aged 40 years. |
Finding ancestors is a never-ending process and during the writing of The Undertakers’ Mother in 2011, Libby Tobin ‘tracked down’ Thomas’s sister, Margaret Tobin and obtained her marriage and death certificates.
Over the years, erroneously, it was thought that she had followed her brother to Australia. To date her shipping records have not been found.
Research shows that Margaret and George lived on neighbouring properties, about 600 kilometres west of Toowoomba. The Marriage Certificate states his occupation as Lawyer, but is blank for Margaret. His father was a publican and her father’s profession is stated as a Policeman. (At a similar time in Dublin, her young sister Julia married James Clavin and stated that her father’s occupation was a Road Inspector).
Sadly, as her Death certificate shows, Margaret died when only 40 years old, ‘of burns to the lower extremities of her body’ – during the years that Thomas was living in Western Australia.
Margaret and George Barber had 2 daughters – Mary born in 1888 and Priscilla Henrietta (1892 – 1973).
Priscilla married Robert Cecil Cairns (1889 – 1981) in 1915 in Queensland and had 3 children – Leah (1918 – 1999) who married John Robert Stewart Taylor in 1918, Robert Cecil (1922 – ?) and Moreen Barbara (1926 – 2009).
Margaret’s widowed husband George married Selina Hoey Herdsman (1867 – 1940) on December 11th, 1903. They had a daughter Edna in January 1904 and she died in November 1904 (Unrelated to Thomas Tobin).