And finally Ellen has revealed herself!

It has been many years of on again, off again work, but I am delighted to share with everyone, that with the help and guidance of many people along the way, Ellen has finally been found!
To be fair and honest it was never Ellen that was lost -- she always maintained that her native place was Hogganfield, Scotland and even though I could not ever locate her there, it turns out she was speaking the truth all along! Locating Ellen has required much patience and lots of leaps of faith and suppositions -- but these conjectures have proven their worth in the long term and I am so happy for everyone in the family to meet Ellen, who has been lost for a while and is finally found!

Ellen McQuillan told us, in the birth entries of two of her children -- Alfred Edward b 1881 and Robert Walter b 1883 -- that her "native place" was Hogganfield, Scotland. A letter from Auntie Sybil from way back in the late 1980's told me that Ellen McQuillan was from Glasgow, so that must have been information she had gleaned from family stories.

What the family did not know, well at least not Auntie Sybil, for whom the revelation was an interesting one, was that Henry William Baron did not marry Ellen until she was pregnant with their third child. The birth entries of  the first two children, Jane b 1865 and Henry b 1867, were recorded as "illegitimate" and then overwritten on 10th January 1895 as "legitimated" as a result of an Act of Parliament called the 1894 Legitimation Act.

This Act made provision for the registration of the birth of any child born out of wedlock where the parents had subsequently married. In such cases the father of the child was required register the birth and make a declaration that at the time of the birth there was no legal impediment to his marriage to the mother. What this meant was that Henry Baron registered these two births when his children were well into adulthood and declared that about thirty years earlier there had been no reason for him not to have married Ellen ie. neither he nor Ellen had been married to someone else at the time of the births of both Jane and Henry. They were married in a Registry Office ceremony in Dunedin on 21 April 1868 and their third child, Annie, was born in Tuturau, Mataura, Southland on 14 November of that same year.

Some time ago I was able to locate an Ellen McQuillan who arrived in Timaru on 24 December, 1862 aboard the immigrant ship "Echunga". She was listed as being a 20 year old dairymaid from Lanarkshire. Given that Henry Baron had Crown grant land in Timaru, it is highly likely that a dairymaid was someone of great use to him in the young colony. Also, given that the barracks, for the 121 people who disembarked at Timaru, had not yet been completed, it is possible that Henry recruited Ellen down at the port area and took her back to his land to begin work, almost immediately, as a dairy maid on his farm. What we do not have to assume is that just 27 months later Ellen was giving birth, in Dunedin, to Henry and Ellen's first child, Jane.

Extensive reading of contemporary newspapers in and around Hogganfield, where Ellen tells us she was from, revealed not even a whisper of the name McQuillan, and I could find no record in the 1841 Hogganfield census of a McQuillan family.

Where to next?? The question that begs itself is why, in Victorian times in the colonial outposts of southern New Zealand, did Henry and Ellen not marry at the first sign that a baby was on the way? They were clearly enamoured of each other on some level as they were producing offspring on a regular basis, yet Henry had not "made an honest woman of her" until she was already well aligned with him and expecting a third child? Given what I know of the more modern Barons, I decided that I needed to explore much wider than the baptism records of Hogganfield or Lanarkshire Church of Scotland records, where Ellen was nowhere to be found.

It was time to consider the potential reasons that the last child of the Anglican Vicar of Walsall in England, and grandson and great-grandson of a long line of Prescot religious figures, would not marry the mother of his children in colonial New Zealand. It was time to consider the concept that perhaps Henry had married a Roman Catholic!
 It certainly did not take too much time to find a "Helen McQuillan", the daughter of one Charles McQuillan and Helen Doran, who was baptised at St Andrew's Catholic Church, Glasgow on 31 October 1841 having been born on 23 October, just a week earlier. The two "sponsors" or godparents for the young Helen were named as Michael Rush and Sarah Campbell. When our Ellen boarded the "Echunga", for the more than three month journey to New Zealand, on September 10, 1862 she would have been 20 years old which matches perfectly with the Ellen from Lanarkshire who arrived in Timaru. She would have had her 21st birthday on board the immigrant ship. Also worthy of note is the fact that Ellen's son, Henry, recorded his mother's birth date, in some papers relating to the Will of her late husband in 1915 in Mossman, Sydney, as being 31 October. Surely this is much more than a coincidence?

Slowly but surely Ellen was revealing herself to us! A look at the Census records for Lanarkshire proved to be a real challenge as the spelling and/or transcription of the name was different for every Census.
Because Ellen was not born for the 1841 Census I searched first for the McQuillans in 1851.

And I found a Charles McQuille with his wife Eleanor and children James, Helen, Charles, Elisabeth and Eleanor in Garnkirk in the parish of Cadder - just up the road from Hogganfield! Charles was working as a limestone miner and his birth place and that of his wife and son James was given as Ireland. 

By the time of the 1861 Census a search for the family reveals that Helen/Ellen has left home so needs to be located somewhere else! Is this her living and working in Glasgow as a . . . dairy servant?

Hard to believe this is the same name but there is a Helen McIlquham living with Donald and Agnes Black in Brown Street, Glasgow and she is listed as a dairy servant. Her age is give as 18 but given the way this name is spelled maybe they got the age wrong by a couple of years as well?  The most important detail here after her occupation, which makes her eminently employable in colonial New Zealand, and her place of birth, Hogganfield, is that there is another servant living in the house and working as a dairy servant and her name is Isabella Campbell. Remember the sponsor at Ellen's baptism was one Sarah Campbell -- maybe they are related? 

By 1871 one Ellen McQuillan has given birth to four children, and is married to Henry William Baron in the South Island of New Zealand, so the Census records can tell us nothing more about this person Helen/Ellen in the northern hemisphere.

So, a look at the 1841 Census was an important step in the search for the origins of this family. It was so hard to locate this entry because, as you will see, the name is recorded as McQuaken!!  

The census of 1841 took place on 7 June and the baby Helen was born on October 23 and baptised just 8 days later at St Andrew's in Glasgow. 

This census detail reveals that one Charles McQuillan is working as a day labourer in Millerston. He is living not just with his wife Hellen and a son James but also with an Edward and Sarah Campbell and, perhaps, their children Jean and Thomas. It is highly likely that this Sarah Campbell is the same Sarah Campbell who is the godmother of Helen McQuillan four short months later. The final piece of significant detail to be gleaned is that all but one of the household were recorded as having been born in Ireland. 

So, somewhere between the birth of one year old James in either late 1839 or early 1840 and the census of June 1841 the McQuillan family moved from Ireland to Millerston near Glasgow. Given that there is a clay works that was situated in Millerston at this time, one might draw a conclusion that Charles was able to find work in this mine, for his occupation in 1851 at Garnkirk is as a limestone miner. 

And then look what we learn about exactly where Millerston is!!  Right there on the edge of Hogganfield Loch and 3 miles NE of Glasgow!  

All along Ellen had maintained that she was from Hogganfield but because I was not looking for an Irish Catholic girl I could not find her! 

There is much more to tell, for many of Ellen's siblings and her mother emigrated to Ohio after Charles' death in 1876, but that is a story for another time! 

For now it is enough to say that we have found Ellen. . . now we just need to follow the leads back into Ireland to find where her roots in Ireland are. I have some hints in a birth entry for one of her siblings (this is apparently the marriage date for Charles McQuillan and Helen Doran). . . . and the McQuillans tend to tell the truth about where they are from!