Thomas Tobin and Maria (Marie) Christie

Thomas Tobin	Born	March 8th 1863 in Birr, King’s County (now Offaly), Ireland.
	Died	July 6th 1953 in East Camberwell, Victoria, Australia.
Maria (Marie) Christie	Born	c.1863 in Rostrevor Co. Down Ireland
	Died	February 10th, 1897 in Fremantle Western Australia of ‘mitral obstruction, diarrhoea debility’ in late pregnancy. She was 34.
	Married	July 3rd 1889 in Church of St Andrew, Dublin. Maria and Thomas sailed for Melbourne, Australia from Tilbury, London, on July 5th, 1889.
	Children of Union	Ellen Maria (1890 – 1891, infant death), Winifred (Winnie) Agnes (1892 – 1961), John Michael (1894 – 1973) and a stillborn female.

Historical Facts

Thomas Tobin was born in Birr, King’s County (now Offaly) Ireland in 1863, the youngest son of John and Ellen Tobin. He was educated at school in Roscrea and grew up strong in his Catholic faith. He was an avid reader and could write a good hand.

As a young man he moved to Dublin and according to his notebook diary, gained employment at the Dundrum Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Presumably it was in Dublin that he met Maria Christie. According to her children’s birth certificates and her death certificate, Maria Christie was born in County Down, Ireland.

Thomas and Maria married on July 3, 1889 at the Church of St Andrew, Westland Row Dublin and set sail for Australia from Tilbury, London two days later. With the station for the train line to Kingston (Dun Laoghaire) close by the Church, they would have taken the Irish Mail Route train to the ferry across the Irish Sea to Holyhead in Wales; and then train again to Euston before changing for Tilbury.

Thomas Tobin recorded their voyage on the S.S.Orient to Melbourne in his notebook telling of the ports of call at Plymouth, Gibraltar, Naples, Port Said, Aden, Columbo, Albany and finally, arriving at Williamstown on August 16, 1889. They were both 26 years old.

Thomas and Maria travelled as unassisted emigrants, so one presumes that they had some savings to start their new life. According to the Argus newspaper of Friday August 16 1889, the cost of passage from Melbourne to London 3rd class was 22 pounds per person for a two berth and 20 pounds for a four berth cabin. Steerage was 17 guineas per person in open berths.

A significant event in Thomas’s life in those early years in Melbourne, was meeting and befriending the O’Dowd Family in Toorak. Interestingly, on his Dublin Marriage Certificate (see left), the witnesses are not family members but a John O’Dowd and Margaret Tucker. We presume that John O’Dowd was a relation of Thomas O’Dowd in Melbourne Australia. Sometime after they arrived in 1889, the Tobins called on the O’Dowd family at Canterbury Road Toorak. It is feasible to assume that the two families formed a good friendship during the Tobins’ early years in Melbourne.

Settling in South Melbourne and gaining work as a labourer and builder, Thomas and Maria started a family. Sadly, they lost their first baby Ellen of four weeks on January 6th, 1891. Winifred was born in 1892 and John in 1894. The two girls were born at different addresses in South Melbourne and John in Port Melbourne.

The first few years in Melbourne were extremely difficult, but significant in the lives of Thomas and Maria. By the time Winnie was born, ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as it was known was suffering a crippling Depression, putting thousands out of work and ruining scores of business people, many of whom had been caught up in the excitement of land speculating. Banks and building societies closed their doors and government ministers resigned. Thousands of people abandoned Melbourne and headed to the West lured by the promise of riches on the goldfields there.

Thomas also went bankrupt and sometime before 1896, he uprooted his family and they too sailed to the West where they settled in Fremantle for a few years.

Tragedy struck Thomas on February 10th, 1897 when Maria died in late pregnancy in Fremantle, Western Australia. Her baby girl was stillborn. According to her death certificate she died of ‘mitral obstruction, diarrhoea debility’.

Maria (Christie) Tobin – Fiction and Surmises

Despite research by Libby Tobin and professional genealogist searches in Ireland, no facts have emerged to shed some light on Thomas Tobin’s first wife. For dramatisation purposes, I’ve made Maria a convert and the child of a Spanish (or similar) mother who died at the time of Maria’s birth.

Similarly without a known profession or occupation for her father John Christie, in my story he is a retired soldier. Maria’s Death Certificate states that her father was John Christie, her mother’s maiden name is unknown, likewise his occupation. So in The Undertakers’ Mother her parents’ story and her life in Ireland, prior to her marriage, are complete fiction.

It’s through Winnie’s desire to connect with her Irish roots that we discover Maria came from Rostrevor, Co. Down. In Tullamore, her uncle John R. Tobin, saw the advertisement, dated Janurary 17th, 1920 and wrote:

‘I beg to state that I am brother of the above (Thomas Tobin who married Marie Christie from Rostrevor, Co. Down) and did not hear from him since January 14th 1896 he wrote from Canning River, West Australia. We advertised for him in all the Irish Papers and some after, English ones and got no account till I see yours in the Irish Independent. I hope you will answer my letter as I am most anxious to know if he is alive. I am thinking he must be dead, account of not hearing from him for such a long time, the last time I saw him is now over 30 years…’

It’s interesting to note that Thomas’s brother John states – ‘We advertised for him in all the Irish Papers and some after, English ones’ although he had heard from Thomas when he was in Western Australia in 1896. At that point in time, had his family reason to believe that Thomas might return home at some time from the Antipodes? If John Tobin had advertised in Australian newspapers, he may have located his ‘missing’ brother.

Why didn’t Thomas write home earlier? Did Maria write home to her father? We presume there was no contact between the Tobins in Brosna with John Christie in Rostrevor or Dublin because they would have exchanged news about Thomas and Maria.

It also begs the question whether Thomas wrote to John Christie to tell him of the untimely death of his daughter. We can only presume that her mother was already dead as her maiden name is unknown on Maria’s Death Certificate. This fits in with her not being a local King’s County girl because her family would have been known to the Tobins of Brosna.

When he returned to Melbourne, Thomas left behind a first wife buried in the Skinner St. Cemetery, Fremantle. On the death and burial of Alice, he commented to his sons that the gravestone in Melbourne General Cemetery was not as grand as Maria’s gravestone. It’s possible that he may not have known that for a cost, Maria’s grave could have been relocated to the New Fremantle cemetery in 1925. Graves not relocated were covered with grass for an army camp during WW2 and are now part of the playing fields of the John Curtain College.