The family of David Murdoch (1835–1879): a journey from Scotland to the New World

This is the story of a 19th century couple, David Murdoch and Harriett Parkes. Born in the 1830s into modest backgrounds, both had brothers who were more successful than they were. Married in 1859, they had nine children: one died as a baby and another died in her twenties. David had a short career as a minor civil servant but eventually went off the rails, abandoning his family and emigrating to Australia in 1873 where he died from drink in Sydney in 1879. Harriett, left behind in Britain unable to support her growing children, shipped off her five boys as “orphans” to Canada from where they later travelled south to the United States and established their own families. The two surviving girls both married in England and had children, some of whom also went to America. Harriett died in Manchester in 1911.

David’s father, John Murdoch (1788-1841) was born (like his father John before him) on the remote Lynemore Farm in the parish of Ardclach , Nairnshire between Nairn and Grantown-on-Spey in the Scottish highlands. David’s mother, Mary MacPherson (1790-?) was born in Corrybrough, a large house in Raigbeg a few miles west of Ardclach over the mountains in the parish of Moy & Dalarossie, Inverness-shire. The couple married at Ardlach in March 1815 when John was 27: Mary was 24, living in the parish of Calder, W of Glasgow, but their eldest child Elizabeth had already been baptised in Ardlach.

David’s brother John, who was to become a national figure in Scotland, was second born in 1818 at Lynemore where John senior farmed for the first 6 years of their marriage. They moved briefly to Culloden, a few miles west where George was born, and then the family went to stay for 6 years at Bonskeid House near the town of Pitlochry [Perth & Kinross] where Mary Ann and Charles were born. In 1827 the family moved to the remote Isle of Islay in Argyllshire and lived at Claggan farm a few miles from Islay House at Bridgend where father John Murdoch was the gamekeeper. Four more children (Walter, Alexander and twins Jessie and Janet) were born there, then David the ninth and last on 23 September 1834. Three of them (Alexander, Janet and David) were baptised together on 15 May 1835.

David was brought up in Claggan where the children helped on the farm. His brother John, 16 years older, left home to become an exciseman in 1838 when David was four. In 1840 or 1841 their father John died after a shooting accident, and in June 1841 the census shows widowed Mary with six children living at Claggan farm. In 1844 Mary was forced to leave the farm with her daughter Janet (known as Jessie) aged 11 and her son David aged 10. They were taken in by brother John who had been posted to Shuttleworth near Bury in Lancashire after he had worked for a period in Ireland. However, the very next year (1845) John was posted back to Bowmore on Islay so David and his mother and sister moved back too though they did not return to the farm at Claggan.

After two years there, John was posted in 1847 to nearby Campbeltown in Kintyre where the four lived for at least 5 years, including a 6-month residence in the village of Muasdale 14 miles further up the coast. At the census in 1851, David was a schoolboy of 15 living in Askinal Walk , Campbeltown, with his mother and elder brother John. Janet/Jessie was lodging in Edinburgh while completing her schooling. Soon afterwards their mother went to live with Jessie [Janet] who had become a school-mistress in Penycuik, Midlothian, south of Edinburgh. In 1853, when John was posted back to Ireland, David (19) may have joined his mother and sister.

By the time he is 20, David has had 6 weeks training in Edinburgh and qualified in April 1855 as an exciseman for the Inland Revenue, following in the footsteps of his elder brother. He worked in the Edinburgh “Collection” for 18 months before being posted to Orkney in December 1856. He remained there only 6 months as an “Expectant” until he was posted down to England in May 1857 as the assistant in Worcester, where a senior officer (before his death in 1854) had been one Frederick Parkes. It was another 2 years before David, who had been born and brought up in Scotland, married Fred’s daughter Harriett Jemima Parkes.

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Frederick Parkes’ father Joseph had been born in Stoke Bardolph near Nottingham in 1788. He inherited £500 from an uncle and went to live in London where his father William kept a coffee-house. He married an Elizabeth and they had six children, all born in London. The eldest was Frederick, born August 16 1808 and baptised at St James. Frederick appears to have moved to Cambridgeshire and worked as a clerk, and in June 1834 he married Mary Ann Butler in the village of Barnwell on the edge of Cambridge. Their first daughter, Harriett Jemima was born in November 1835.

In September1837 when he was 29, Frederick became an excise officer in Cambridge. He was posted first to Oxford and then to Newtown, in the county of Powis in Wales where he appears in the 1841 census with his wife and now has three children. His moves took the family to Rhayader, and then to Lichfield, and finally, in May 1850, to Worcester where he appears in the census of 1851 with his wife and two small children, including a 3-year-old son Frederick, but not Amelia who had died in 1845 at the age of 6 or Louisa (14) who was an assistant to an embroiderer and living with her employer in Worcester. Harriett at 15 was living elsewhere at this time and has not been seen in UK census records: we do not know her training or occupation. In 1854, Fred “died of liver disease and dropsy”, leaving his widow Mary and four surviving children, the youngest being Frederick Charles (7) and the eldest Harriet who was 19. Harriet must have re-visited the family home in Worcester over the years, and got to know David Murdoch when he arrived to work there in 1857.

The couple were married in St Clements Church in Worcester on July 9 1859 when David was 25 and Harriett 24. Around that time David was posted to Nenagh in the county of Tipperary in central Ireland , and in the September of the following year (1860) he was posted to the market town of Bingham in Nottinghamshire where the family appears in the 1861 census in Church Street. Their eldest son, Roderick MacQueen, is shown as having been born in Ireland, presumably in Nenagh, before April 1860. The family later moved to nearby Fisher Lane in Bingham .

David’s place of work as excise officer was just across the road from their house in the Chesterfield Arms, the commercial inn where the county court was also held. Five children were born to the couple in their 6 year stay in Bingham, and all except the eldest of these were baptised in the parish church of St Michael’s and All Angels.

# Murdoch children’s first names Date of birth Place of birth
1 Roderick MacQueen April 9 1860 Nenagh, Ireland
2 Marian (Amy) Louisa April 18 1861 Bingham, Notts
3 Jessie Sept 22 1862 Bingham, Notts
4 Frederick Alexander June 25 1864 Bingham, Notts
5 Walter Douglas Sept 26 1865 Bingham, Notts
6 Colin Campbell Oct 10 1866 Bingham, Notts
7 Charles April 15 1868 Wakefield, Yorks
8 David Oct 17 1870 Liverpool, Lancs
9 Lucy Bradbury Aug 11 1872 Monmouth, Wales

Harriett’s mother may have stayed with them in Bingham as there is a record of a commercial farming transaction by a Mrs Parkes in December 1860. At Christmas-time in 1863, David’s brother John (at this time still an excise officer himself) visited the family in Bingham (where his own family were already staying) while he was on his way from Ireland via Crewe and Nottingham to London to be interviewed for a new post in Shetland.

At the end of 1866, David was posted to the small town of Wirksworth in Derbyshire (about 40 miles away) “having incurred the displeasure of the Board .” This is the first hint of a problem in David’s life and was perhaps a hint as to what would later befall. His whole career seems to have been a series of rather short postings: 9 in 17 years, by far the longest being his 6 years in Bingham. Their seventh child Charles was born in 1868 in Wakefield in Yorkshire where Harriett’s mother Mary was recorded (in the census of 1871) as living in her widowhood. The eighth child, David, was born in Liverpool in 1870 but died 2 days later. At the census in 1871, David (still a Revenue Officer) and Harriett were living in Bromsgrove with five children (Roderick, Jessie, Frederick, Walter and Colin) while Marion Louisa aged 12 (10?) seems to have been lodging at a dancing school in Coventry Road, Birmingham. Finally, Lucy Bradbury was born in August 1872 in Monmouth in South Wales , not far from where her grandfather Fred had been employed in 1841. David and Harriett’s married life together had been spent entirely in England except for a short period after their marriage in central Ireland.

It was in Monmouth at around the time of Lucy’s birth in 1872 that the Murdoch family life came to an untimely end. David was dismissed from his post as Excise officer for drunkenness and deserted his wife. He sailed to Australia and obtained a post as a Customs House Officer in Sydney. But he survived only six years and his death certificate gave intemperance as the cause of death. His affairs were taken care of there by his brother-in-law Frederick Parkes who was an established businessman in Sydney. So Harriett in her mid-thirties was left in Britain to struggle with at least six children, the eldest being 12, while her widowed mother Mary was 57 and living 200 miles away in Wakefield, Yorkshire.

Unable to care for the children on her own resources, Harriett had to make a most difficult decision. She entrusted five of them to Annie MacPherson-Marchmont organisation in London, who took them to Canada where they were placed first in Marchmont House in Quebec and then with families in the area where they were cared for and helped to learn a trade. The younger boys were sent first in 1872-3 at the ages of only six and seven. It may be that the older ones were kept back at first as being of some economic benefit to the home, but Roderick and Marion were sent over in 1873-4, when they were 13 years old. Soon after, in May 1875, Harriett herself sailed to Quebec to visit them, taking the three youngest (Jessie, Charles and Lucy) and they returned to Liverpool the same year bringing Marion back with them. Charles travelled independently to NY in 1888.

Birth order David & Harriett's family DoB Order Date of leaving Date arriving Ship Age
4 Frederick Alexander Murdoch 25/9/1864 1 8/8/1872 17/8/1872 Sarmatian 7
5 Walter MacIntosh Murdoch 25/9/1865 2 5/6/1873 18/6/1873 Moravian 7
6 Colin Douglas Murdoch 10/10/1866 5/6/1873 18/6/1873 Moravian 6
1 Roderick MacQueen Murdoch 9/4/1860 3 21/8/1873 31/8/1873 Prussian 13
2 Marion Louisa Murdoch 18/4/1861 4 21/5/1874 1/6/1874 Scandinavian 13
M Harriett Jemima Murdoch 1/11/1835 18/5/1875 Moravian 39
7 Charles Murdoch 15/4/1868 5 18/5/1875 7
9 Lucy Bradbury Murdoch 11/8/1872 2
3 Jessie Murdoch 22/9/1862 12


On their return from Canada, Harriett moved to Longsight, an area of Manchester a mile from the city centre. She begins to support herself doing needlework, but later sets herself up as a lodging-house keeper in Blackpool, Lancashire (then called Layton-with-Warbreck) . In 1891, Harriet is back in Manchester, living at 21 Everton Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock . Lucy is still at home with her, working as a mantle (dress-) maker, and so is her older daughter Jessie with her husband Frederick T Hazell (a grocery traveller) and their daughter Wilhelmina (aged 1, born there). Lucy became a piano teacher and by 1899, Lucy and Harriett have moved to nearby Wilson Street.

After Lucy had married at the local St Saviour’s church in Chorlton in 1899 and moved to Wybunbury in Cheshire, Harriett (now 65) went to lodge at 6 Chorlton Terrace nearby. Later she moved in with Jessie and the Hazell family at 289 Upper Brook Street, Chorlton were she died in June 1911. She is presumably buried in St Saviour’s churchyard which has survived the demolition of the church building.

Marian (?Marion; also known as Minnie or Amy Louisa ) went into training as a nurse in Manchester, but is thought to have died at 26 after an attempted abortion. She was not married.

Jessie, the second daughter, was a Salvation Army officer and at some stage a CMS missionary in Jerusalem. She married Frederick T Hazell, a grocery traveller, in c.1885 , in Chorlton-in-Medlock. In 1891 they lived in Chorlton with their first child, Wilhelmina M (aged 1 yr). In 1901 the family were in Ardwick, the next suburb of Manchester , with the first three of their four children: Wilhelmina Myra (11), Rudolph (8) and John (7).

Wilhelmina Myra, born in Q1 1890 in Chorlton where she was brought up, lived at the Beeches, Wistaston for a time while she was a student at the Reaseheath Agricultural College in NW Nantwich. She was musical like her aunt Lucy. She returned to Manchester as a telephonist, but died unmarried at the age of 36 in1928 leaving her estate to her brother John Murdoch Hazell . Rudolph Pung Hazell, born Q3 1892 in Chorlton, married Mary Ella Knight and had 5 children on Teeside. They became cut off from their relatives through the influence of the ‘Exclusive Brethren’ in the 1960s . John Murdoch married Ruth Topping and lived in Penwortham, SW of Preston, Lancs: they also belonged to the Brethren Church. Frederick, born in Chorlton in Q3 1904, is said to have had 2 wives, one named Daisy and the other Alice. He had 4 children, one of whom was named Myra after her aunt.

Lucy, Harriett’s youngest daughter, married Francis Joseph Wainwright (aged 25) at St Saviour's Parish Church in Chorlton-in-Medlock In October1899, when she was 27. They went to live near Nantwich in Cheshire, and had five children between 1900 and 1916: Eric Francis, Dorothy, Harold, Marjorie and Barbara. Eric enlisted in the army during WW1, and in 1921 went to India in some sort of disgrace, returning in 1925. In 1927 he went to Canada, married, but had no children. Dorothy trained as a nurse and served a year as a missionary in Nigeria in 1930. She married Willoughby Lambert and had twin daughters. Harold went to Canada in the twenties and became established in the automotive industry in Chicago. He married and had two children. Marjorie was also a nurse and married Leonard Patrick in 1939 and had four sons. Barbara, also a nurse, went to Meriden Connecticut to help care for her uncle Fred's wife in her last years. She married Fred Carter and they had four children all living in eastern US.

So of the eight children born of David and Harriett Murdoch, six produced 18 children between them. Their boys’ families are all in North America and so are the families of two of Lucy’s grandchildren. Jessie’s descendents are in the UK and so are the families of two of Lucy’s daughters. There are still at least 9 members of the family in each generation bearing the name Murdoch. It is good that so many of us are able to gather in California this month, to share our experiences and begin to re-unite our Murdoch tribe that was scattered because of the actions of David Murdoch, our great-grandfather.