I Haven't been Idle

As the digitised newspaper issues edge further and further into the 20th Century, I have been picking up bits and pieces of information about the Queensland Townsend families. A marriage here, a death or birth there, some useful snippets in obituaries.

For example, Jessie Jane Sinclair Townsend had been a journalist before her marriage and her mother had been the adopted daughter of the man who started the first newspaper in the Colony of Queensland.

Edwin Louis Townsend, who died tragically of a fracture skull in 1913, had two years earlier been sentenced to 6 months imprisonment for horse stealing, although the evidence was, by today's standards, very weak and circumstantial. Then again, it did also seem that he had tried to legitimise his ownership of the horse by forging a receipt for its purchase and he was lucky not to be charged with perjury as well.

His father, Victor Louis Townsend, had been declared insolvent in the 1890s, but by 1916 he had been appointed Bailiff for Beenleigh, and was himself seizing the assets of bankrupts and auctioning them off. It seems that Victor Louis' great claim to fame was his prize-winning poultry.

I also came across the report of the funeral of Dr Shirley, Victor's father-in-law. The list of attendees includes many of the rich and powerful of the day.