The continuing story of the lives of the Roberts family. Chapter One began here. The first parts of Chapter Two are here and here.

In the last post, Elizabeth Greenwood had gone to work for the widowed Thomas Roberts and his five children as housekeeper, around 1844 or 1845. The story followed the birth of their three children, the death of Elizabeth’s own son Henry, and the death of Thomas himself in 1858.
This last part is about Elizabeth’s life, ‘after Thomas.’

After Thomas

The year 1858 delivered a double blow to Elizabeth. In late May, six weeks after burying Thomas, her mother Mary Ann died.[1] They had been sent together on that convict ship, separated as Mary Ann served her sentence, then reunited. Now the Greenwood matriarch had gone.

But in December that same year, Elizabeth married again, to Richard Rainsden (sometimes spelt Rainsdon), who was about thirteen years her senior.[2] He had arrived in NSW in 1834 on the convict transport Henry Tanner, just two months before the Greenwoods,and served a seven-year sentence for stealing poultry. When he married Elizabeth he was working as a fruiterer, then a rent collector, living in Sydney’s Glebe district, which was then home to a burgeoning population living in small homes on subdivided land from the former church estate of Bishopthorpe.[3] It was a working-class locality where people of modest means could buy or lease property.

Although she’d been left a lifetime interest in ‘Woodbine Cottage’ at South Creek by Thomas, and funds to support their three children until they reached adulthood, she may have felt a need for support and companionship in her middle and later years. She was by then in her late thirties; Richard was fifty.

Had she received notice that her first husband Anthony had died, or was she hoping that he would not re-appear to cause her trouble, when she married again?

Her new groom was one of many ex-convicts who’d left a spouse and child behind in England when he was transported.[4] He described himself as a widower on their marriage certificate. Either his first wife had died, or he was hoping that the previous marriage would go unnoticed. Colonial authorities tended not to bother chasing up people back in Britain. With vast oceans and several months between an emancipated convict and their first spouse, it hardly seemed worth the expense and effort, and only the wealthy could afford to travel to NSW to find an errant partner.

She spent the next thirteen years with Richard in the Glebe district, firstly on Mitchell Street. Their circumstances here were modest after the relative luxury of the Roberts household, but she had known a humbler life before that. The comforts of a smaller home and stable circumstances are sometimes enough, after a tumultuous childhood and youth.

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All three of her children with Thomas had married and left home by the time she died. Amelia married and became Mrs Tucker in 1862; Louisa married Joshua Curby five years later. They both settled in Sydney with their growing families.

Albert, the youngest, reached his majority of twenty-one that same year, which meant he also came into his inheritance of £500 from Thomas. This would have allowed him to establish a small farm or set himself up in a business or trade.

Albert was the one who provided the required information for his mother’s death registration. He either didn’t know about, or chose to ignore, Elizabeth’s first marriage to Anthony Shaw. In the section for ‘Marriage’ there are two listed: one in 1845 (which was around the time her de facto relationship with Thomas began) and the other to Richard Rainsdon (the date incorrectly given as 1859, not 1858). I wonder if Elizabeth and Thomas had discussed their de facto status with Amelia, Louisa and Albert. Perhaps they’d been content to allow the children to believe that their marriage had been formalised.
Albert gave his maternal grandfather’s name as George Greenwood, an understandable mistake, given he had never met Elizabeth’s father.

Albert eventually moved to Queensland with his wife, Emma, and died there in 1922, aged seventy.[6]

Richard died in 1876 and was buried beside his wife at the Pioneer Memorial Park in Norton Street, Leichardt. [7] Formerly Balmain Cemetery, it was closed in the 1940s and its headstones and memorials (but not the bodies) removed, turning it into a public park.

Legacy

Thomas and Elizabeth had begun life in such different worlds: he was a son in a wealthy emancipist family; she from the slums of London. He felt loss and sorrow in his youth, certainly, but never wanted materially for anything. She experienced the injustices of transportation despite her own free status. Fate brought them together when she came to work for the Roberts household, caring for a widowed father and his motherless children. Romance bloomed. More children arrived.

What they did have in common were the tight bonds that kept their respective families together. Thomas and his siblings demonstrated fierce loyalty to each other and to their mother, with shared interests and activities throughout their lives. Elizabeth’s family endured the trauma of their voyage and a difficult start in the colony. After enforced separations, they re-united as soon as they could and stayed part of each other’s lives.

Elizabeth herself is a quiet example of the remarkable trajectory that colonial lives could follow. In her fifty-one years she experienced so much: a childhood in poverty, a journey across the seas, three relationships, four children and the loss of her firstborn; life and work on a prosperous farm; finally, breathing her last in a bustling city, across the seas from where she began.

The Roberts family story will be continued…

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[1] NSW Death Registration for Mary Ann Greenwood, reg no 5056/1858

[2] NSW Marriage Registration for Elizabeth Shaw & Richard Rainsdon, reg no 973/1858

[3] Gould Genealogy; South Australia, Australia; New South Wales Government Gazettes, 1832-1885 1863 p1241; Sands Directories: Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, 1858-1933 1876 p 448; England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995, Jan 1878. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026

[4] Australian Convict Transportation Registers – Other Fleets & Ships, 1791-1868, Class: HO 11; Piece: 9. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026; State Archives NSW; Series: NRS 12188; Item: [4/4019]; Microfiche: 692. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026

[5] Sands Directories: Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, 1863 p232 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 28 May 2026; Death Registration for Elizabeth Rainsdon, reg no 1838/1871.

[6] Qld Death Index 1920-1924, Albert Roberts, reg no 4172 p1392. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 28 May 2026

[7] Australia and New Zealand, Find A Grave Index, 1800s-Current for Richard Rainsden 1876