The Elusive Catherine/Kate/Kathleen Degnan/Dagnall/Degnann/Degnall
Catherine Degnan was my great grandmother and I bear the name under which she died, Kathleen Hastings
I had come to Chesterfield in May 2008 in search of memories of her in the land of her birth. I had her address from the 1861 English census, Church Alley, Chesterfield. Her father, according to the census, was a coal miner, originally from Roscommon, Ireland.
I had had great trouble tracing Catherine to even being a “Degnan” by surname. She had given her name on her marriage certificate as Degnall. She maintained the “Degnall” on several birth certificates. Once she became Degnann and only once reverted to Degnan; never Dagnall as she had been called in Lancashire I was later to discover. She resumed Degnan once and that possibly after she had reconnected with her Chesterfield family. I only noticed that after I had down as a Degnan. Her maiden name is still given as Degnall on her death certificate. I had never thought that there could be such confusion over one’s own name. Confusion between the letters “ll” and “n” hardly explain these variations via transcription. She was either illiterate and with a very thick accent or speech defect, severely confused or an elusive romantic. I prefer to choose the latter. At any rate, she died Kathleen Hastings. It is strange to see one’s name on a tombstone when one is still warm and above earth.
I had given myself two days to walk in her footsteps, hear the accent she may have spoken (to hear if there could have been confusion between the “ll” and “n” sound…Not), and, with any luck, see if any traces of her remained. I had not been very optimistic about this as I had, at that stage, never been able to track her voyage from England to Australia. I had imagined that records had been lost in floods, destroyed in fire or mistranscribed…as everywhere. I had even considered her being adopted and taking yet another name on the voyage to Australia.
She had married at 19, or so she thought, and had therefore left England at the grand old age of 17 or 18, a single girl, migrating on her lonesome. She had come from Lancashire via London on the ship “Sepia” in 1875. She migrated under the name of Kate Dagnal, the name she had assumed as a domestic in Walton-on-hill, Lancashire, a fair stretch again from that of Catherine Degnan, born under the strange twisted steeple of Chesterfield cathedral in 1858.
I booked into a Chesterfield B&B hoping for some insight into the mining history of the town. Catherine’s dad had been a coal miner. Past experience has taught me that B&B proprietors are often fountains of local information and sometimes local history.
This time, not. The proprietor I had chosen, though very nice, was relatively newly arrived to Chesterfield, more concerned with running his business and providing an excellent breakfast than with local history. He wasn’t even aware of the difficulty of getting an early morning taxi in Chesterfield, but that is another story.
I wanted to feel a presence of my great great grandmother, experiencing remnants of an older Chesterfield that might have been known to the young Catherine Degnan; walking the streets that she may have known in her youth, seeing what she may have seen, a life so different from that which she was to experience in Australia. So, day one, a rainy Sunday morning in early May saw me walking to Chesterfield’s market place. Things may have changed but I am sure she would have recognized the market and known the church steeple. It probably seemed very normal to her; very exotic and medieval to me, a trip back in time.
My direct route to the city centre took me past a striking pink flowering tree next to a grey stone building, grey as the skies above. A church and singing. An engraved plaque told me that this was once the Independent Chapel, 1822, and inside, a service was in progress. Comfortingly familiar hymns from my youth where I grew up in Queensland drew me to the front pillars.
Should I enter in mid service? Catherine had been married in the primitive Methodist Church in Rockhampton, Australia in 1876; so I presumed she was protestant in spite of her Irish father. Had she once stood where I now stood, contemplating the warmth of inside the church? The singing? Stories she told, repeated by her grandsons to me, were of her making being asked tossing at the captain’s dinner parties on the long voyage to Australia. I had thought that travelling alone at 17 on a two month journey to the other side of the world, destination and final expectations quite unknown, to be unique. However, the Sepia seemed to have carried many young, single people, possibly being assisted by the Queensland government of the day trying to provide workers for the north of the state. The ship was to land at Rockhampton. Catherine was married within 18 months to my great grandfather, Thomas Hastings, the younger.
The previous week, I had been in India with temperatures reaching 50oC. Heat for me as a Queenslander was preferable to the cold, wet of an early English summer. Taking refuge in a church even in mid service was not that difficult a decision to make. Besides, my curiosity was overwhelming. A divulgence back in time again.
The interior was well preserved, familiar and friendly. The church was full; the congregation, of an age, my age. An age when family history counts and becomes a passionate never ending voyage of detective work and discovery. I sang along happily imagining myself to be the young Catherine and awaited my chance to “make enquiries” at the end of the service. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. One has to be courageous when doing local research abroad even if introspective by nature.
Not much luck. The people I spoke to were kind, and interested in this damp Australian of a certain age who had just walked in off the street. John, the church historian, suggested the local historical society. But, then, I had known nothing of the first of May and knew nothing of English bank Holidays. Besides that, the museum did not open on a Monday, the only day I had allocated to Chesterfield in a very tightly scheduled European trip. Drat! Nothing worse than bad timing especially when trying to peal back the layers of time itself. I would have to content myself with soaking up whatever remnants of the Chesterfield of the late nineteenth century I could find. What more could I expect from a stay of only two days, both of which were holidays.
I roamed the market place, observed a couple of beautifully renovated buildings from the sixteenth century, and the strange, bizarre spire of the church that the devil’s tail was supposed to have twisted, a tale of tails that I am sure Catherine would have been told. No Church Alley remained. I could see that it had gone the way of urban development. The way of the world from Iron age ever onwards.
Thanks God for the web and white pages. I had looked at these before leaving Oz. I had found one Degnan still living in Chesterfield. Sunday evening, I made the phone call, a long shot; but one that paid off. That one Degnan, by a huge coincidence also Katherine by name, had returned to Chesterfield some years previously and resumed her maiden name!
I had used this random approach before. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. This time I was lucky. Very, very lucky.
-Had anyone done any family research?
-Yes, an unknown relative had turned up one day with a family history. It was somewhere.
She looked and found said paper.
-There is a Thomas Hastings here, she said.
I couldn’t believe it then and still have difficulty believing it all now. How could there be a Thomas Hastings, my great grandfather, Catherine’s husband, Australian born and bred, a Thomas Hastings in the Degnan family tree of the 1890’s? A visit was absolutely necessary. Had I solidified my Chesterfield connection?
Monday morning. I trailed the May Day procession, bands and performers dressed in odd costumes, very un-English; and walked about the town, the church, wherever. Being May Day, most shops were closed. By chance, I walked past the library. I looked at the sign. A special Family History Day!! I couldn’t believe my luck. Another huge coincidence. A special open day on a bank holiday.
The society members with whom I spoke were most kind. No Degnans in the Chesterfield records. But I knew they were there in the 1861 census. So, patiently, we went to the 1861 census. After this date, I had been unable to find the existence of any Catherine Degnan in any English records. I hoped the Chesterfield locals would be more expert…or lucky. No go.
Catherine seemed to have disappeared without trace after 1861 although her family were still thriving and increasing in Church Alley in the 1871 census. As she was only 3 years old in 1861 I wondered just what fate had befallen her. She would have been 13 year old in 1871. Even if on holiday, (unlikely) she should have shown up somewhere.
A bright sunny afternoon. I took the bus out to visit the holder of the Degnan family tree.
The family was wonderful. I recognized a spiritual connection. These were my people.
Out came the prized piece of recorded family history. Amongst various family names there he was, one Thomas Hastings Degnan. I must admit I had been quite perplexed on the phone regarding who on earth my newly found relative was talking about. I thought she had misunderstood me and was simply repeating my surname. I must have inadvertently mentioned the name of Catherine’s husband, Thomas Hastings, my great grandfather, the man whom Catherine Degnan had married in far off Rockhampton, Australia, in1876 and she was repeating it back to me.
But, to my amazement there he was: Thomas Hastings Degnan, born in 1894 to a Charles Degnan, who turned out to be Catherine’s younger brother. The child, Thomas Hastings Degnan, lived only into his first year. The Katherine Degnan who supplied me with this link was a descendant of Catherine’s uncle. But they were my Chesterfield kin. Of that, there was no longer any doubt.
Catherine lived most of her life in outback Western Queensland, only moving back to the small town of Maryborough in the later part of her life. She and her husband would have been party to the miner’s strike of 1891 and the subsequent formation of the Australian Labor party. She would have known the Tree of Knowledge in the main street of Barcaldine, beneath which the party was formed. I like to think of her being driven in the buggy on the dusty dirt road in the 1880’s (dare I imagine that she drove herself?), doing her shopping across the street, perhaps even having been part of the monumental crowds of 1891 who put Australia on the path to democracy and gave power of the working man via the union movement. Had she been moved by the oratory around the tree itself? Or in the shearing sheds as she brought the shearer’s their smoko? Or around the lamp light in the evening when she fed the station hands and shearers? What times she saw. Was she merely an unconscious bystander as the ploughman in Breughel’s painting of Icarus falling from the sky? Or did this spirited woman from Chesterfield seed ideas, clarify points of view in those who would later take action?
No stories of this struggle survive in my family history. Was she the Ploughman’s wife… not even in the picture?
Neither Catherine nor any of her family ever returned to England even though she had still craved for adventure, wanting to take her family with her to far off Patagonia in South America in a socialist experiment. She didn’t, and so I exist.
This interest in a socialist Utopia, a chance to begin a Brave New world for the working man across the ocean, all becomes clear if examined in the context of 1891 and the events in Barcaldine. So, perhaps, even if not shown in the picture, she was, unlike the Ploughman, actually observing Icarus’s fall.
Just how had Catherine reconnected with her family? I am left wondering. By the 1891 census, her parents were no longer at their old address in Church Alley. Is it a question of “Thank God for the British postal system”? Perhaps she merely wrote a letter which somehow reached her brother, Charles.
Maryborough, where she lived in her old age, and nursed her dying husband through a cruel death from tuberculosis, was a port of entry for over 20,000 immigrants from 1860. Perhaps she met someone from her past when walking the streets doing her shopping, going to church; someone newly arrived from her old life in Chesterfield, en route to their new life in Australia just as she had done in 1875. Who am I to argue with coincidence?
Her brother, Charles, must have had some knowledge of his never seen brother-in-law, Thomas Hastings, Catherine’s husband, and paid tribute to his existence by naming one of his sons in his honour in 1894. I still find it hard to believe. If this was not registered in black and white, I would still be in doubt as to my connection with the wonderful Katherine Degnan and her family with whom I fell in love and Joe Clark who had provided her with his invaluable research.
Even though she must have left home as a young girl, before she was 13, there must have been a very strong bond between the brother, Charles, and his sister, Catherine. She, in turn, had named one of her sons Charles, in 1880, well before any reconnection had been made. Or had there?
I was to later find her, under yet a different name, Kate Degnall, in the Lancashire census of 1871, aged 14, domestic servant, born Chesterfield, c. 1857. She always thought she was one year older than she actually was, as given in the 1861 census at any rate. Either that or her parent completing the census was confused with her date of birth. Dads can sometimes do this, I suppose.
All I know is that my great grandmother came from Chesterfield and I found some of the missing pieces of the story of her life in my two day stay through a litany of small miracles. Coincidence? Fate? Destiny? Our searches are often frustration personified; but this time, it all came together and I left with confirmation of my Chesterfield connection.
Kath Hastings
I had come to Chesterfield in May 2008 in search of memories of her in the land of her birth. I had her address from the 1861 English census, Church Alley, Chesterfield. Her father, according to the census, was a coal miner, originally from Roscommon, Ireland.
I had had great trouble tracing Catherine to even being a “Degnan” by surname. She had given her name on her marriage certificate as Degnall. She maintained the “Degnall” on several birth certificates. Once she became Degnann and only once reverted to Degnan; never Dagnall as she had been called in Lancashire I was later to discover. She resumed Degnan once and that possibly after she had reconnected with her Chesterfield family. I only noticed that after I had down as a Degnan. Her maiden name is still given as Degnall on her death certificate. I had never thought that there could be such confusion over one’s own name. Confusion between the letters “ll” and “n” hardly explain these variations via transcription. She was either illiterate and with a very thick accent or speech defect, severely confused or an elusive romantic. I prefer to choose the latter. At any rate, she died Kathleen Hastings. It is strange to see one’s name on a tombstone when one is still warm and above earth.
I had given myself two days to walk in her footsteps, hear the accent she may have spoken (to hear if there could have been confusion between the “ll” and “n” sound…Not), and, with any luck, see if any traces of her remained. I had not been very optimistic about this as I had, at that stage, never been able to track her voyage from England to Australia. I had imagined that records had been lost in floods, destroyed in fire or mistranscribed…as everywhere. I had even considered her being adopted and taking yet another name on the voyage to Australia.
She had married at 19, or so she thought, and had therefore left England at the grand old age of 17 or 18, a single girl, migrating on her lonesome. She had come from Lancashire via London on the ship “Sepia” in 1875. She migrated under the name of Kate Dagnal, the name she had assumed as a domestic in Walton-on-hill, Lancashire, a fair stretch again from that of Catherine Degnan, born under the strange twisted steeple of Chesterfield cathedral in 1858.
I booked into a Chesterfield B&B hoping for some insight into the mining history of the town. Catherine’s dad had been a coal miner. Past experience has taught me that B&B proprietors are often fountains of local information and sometimes local history.
This time, not. The proprietor I had chosen, though very nice, was relatively newly arrived to Chesterfield, more concerned with running his business and providing an excellent breakfast than with local history. He wasn’t even aware of the difficulty of getting an early morning taxi in Chesterfield, but that is another story.
I wanted to feel a presence of my great great grandmother, experiencing remnants of an older Chesterfield that might have been known to the young Catherine Degnan; walking the streets that she may have known in her youth, seeing what she may have seen, a life so different from that which she was to experience in Australia. So, day one, a rainy Sunday morning in early May saw me walking to Chesterfield’s market place. Things may have changed but I am sure she would have recognized the market and known the church steeple. It probably seemed very normal to her; very exotic and medieval to me, a trip back in time.
My direct route to the city centre took me past a striking pink flowering tree next to a grey stone building, grey as the skies above. A church and singing. An engraved plaque told me that this was once the Independent Chapel, 1822, and inside, a service was in progress. Comfortingly familiar hymns from my youth where I grew up in Queensland drew me to the front pillars.
Should I enter in mid service? Catherine had been married in the primitive Methodist Church in Rockhampton, Australia in 1876; so I presumed she was protestant in spite of her Irish father. Had she once stood where I now stood, contemplating the warmth of inside the church? The singing? Stories she told, repeated by her grandsons to me, were of her making being asked tossing at the captain’s dinner parties on the long voyage to Australia. I had thought that travelling alone at 17 on a two month journey to the other side of the world, destination and final expectations quite unknown, to be unique. However, the Sepia seemed to have carried many young, single people, possibly being assisted by the Queensland government of the day trying to provide workers for the north of the state. The ship was to land at Rockhampton. Catherine was married within 18 months to my great grandfather, Thomas Hastings, the younger.
The previous week, I had been in India with temperatures reaching 50oC. Heat for me as a Queenslander was preferable to the cold, wet of an early English summer. Taking refuge in a church even in mid service was not that difficult a decision to make. Besides, my curiosity was overwhelming. A divulgence back in time again.
The interior was well preserved, familiar and friendly. The church was full; the congregation, of an age, my age. An age when family history counts and becomes a passionate never ending voyage of detective work and discovery. I sang along happily imagining myself to be the young Catherine and awaited my chance to “make enquiries” at the end of the service. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. One has to be courageous when doing local research abroad even if introspective by nature.
Not much luck. The people I spoke to were kind, and interested in this damp Australian of a certain age who had just walked in off the street. John, the church historian, suggested the local historical society. But, then, I had known nothing of the first of May and knew nothing of English bank Holidays. Besides that, the museum did not open on a Monday, the only day I had allocated to Chesterfield in a very tightly scheduled European trip. Drat! Nothing worse than bad timing especially when trying to peal back the layers of time itself. I would have to content myself with soaking up whatever remnants of the Chesterfield of the late nineteenth century I could find. What more could I expect from a stay of only two days, both of which were holidays.
I roamed the market place, observed a couple of beautifully renovated buildings from the sixteenth century, and the strange, bizarre spire of the church that the devil’s tail was supposed to have twisted, a tale of tails that I am sure Catherine would have been told. No Church Alley remained. I could see that it had gone the way of urban development. The way of the world from Iron age ever onwards.
Thanks God for the web and white pages. I had looked at these before leaving Oz. I had found one Degnan still living in Chesterfield. Sunday evening, I made the phone call, a long shot; but one that paid off. That one Degnan, by a huge coincidence also Katherine by name, had returned to Chesterfield some years previously and resumed her maiden name!
I had used this random approach before. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. This time I was lucky. Very, very lucky.
-Had anyone done any family research?
-Yes, an unknown relative had turned up one day with a family history. It was somewhere.
She looked and found said paper.
-There is a Thomas Hastings here, she said.
I couldn’t believe it then and still have difficulty believing it all now. How could there be a Thomas Hastings, my great grandfather, Catherine’s husband, Australian born and bred, a Thomas Hastings in the Degnan family tree of the 1890’s? A visit was absolutely necessary. Had I solidified my Chesterfield connection?
Monday morning. I trailed the May Day procession, bands and performers dressed in odd costumes, very un-English; and walked about the town, the church, wherever. Being May Day, most shops were closed. By chance, I walked past the library. I looked at the sign. A special Family History Day!! I couldn’t believe my luck. Another huge coincidence. A special open day on a bank holiday.
The society members with whom I spoke were most kind. No Degnans in the Chesterfield records. But I knew they were there in the 1861 census. So, patiently, we went to the 1861 census. After this date, I had been unable to find the existence of any Catherine Degnan in any English records. I hoped the Chesterfield locals would be more expert…or lucky. No go.
Catherine seemed to have disappeared without trace after 1861 although her family were still thriving and increasing in Church Alley in the 1871 census. As she was only 3 years old in 1861 I wondered just what fate had befallen her. She would have been 13 year old in 1871. Even if on holiday, (unlikely) she should have shown up somewhere.
A bright sunny afternoon. I took the bus out to visit the holder of the Degnan family tree.
The family was wonderful. I recognized a spiritual connection. These were my people.
Out came the prized piece of recorded family history. Amongst various family names there he was, one Thomas Hastings Degnan. I must admit I had been quite perplexed on the phone regarding who on earth my newly found relative was talking about. I thought she had misunderstood me and was simply repeating my surname. I must have inadvertently mentioned the name of Catherine’s husband, Thomas Hastings, my great grandfather, the man whom Catherine Degnan had married in far off Rockhampton, Australia, in1876 and she was repeating it back to me.
But, to my amazement there he was: Thomas Hastings Degnan, born in 1894 to a Charles Degnan, who turned out to be Catherine’s younger brother. The child, Thomas Hastings Degnan, lived only into his first year. The Katherine Degnan who supplied me with this link was a descendant of Catherine’s uncle. But they were my Chesterfield kin. Of that, there was no longer any doubt.
Catherine lived most of her life in outback Western Queensland, only moving back to the small town of Maryborough in the later part of her life. She and her husband would have been party to the miner’s strike of 1891 and the subsequent formation of the Australian Labor party. She would have known the Tree of Knowledge in the main street of Barcaldine, beneath which the party was formed. I like to think of her being driven in the buggy on the dusty dirt road in the 1880’s (dare I imagine that she drove herself?), doing her shopping across the street, perhaps even having been part of the monumental crowds of 1891 who put Australia on the path to democracy and gave power of the working man via the union movement. Had she been moved by the oratory around the tree itself? Or in the shearing sheds as she brought the shearer’s their smoko? Or around the lamp light in the evening when she fed the station hands and shearers? What times she saw. Was she merely an unconscious bystander as the ploughman in Breughel’s painting of Icarus falling from the sky? Or did this spirited woman from Chesterfield seed ideas, clarify points of view in those who would later take action?
No stories of this struggle survive in my family history. Was she the Ploughman’s wife… not even in the picture?
Neither Catherine nor any of her family ever returned to England even though she had still craved for adventure, wanting to take her family with her to far off Patagonia in South America in a socialist experiment. She didn’t, and so I exist.
This interest in a socialist Utopia, a chance to begin a Brave New world for the working man across the ocean, all becomes clear if examined in the context of 1891 and the events in Barcaldine. So, perhaps, even if not shown in the picture, she was, unlike the Ploughman, actually observing Icarus’s fall.
Just how had Catherine reconnected with her family? I am left wondering. By the 1891 census, her parents were no longer at their old address in Church Alley. Is it a question of “Thank God for the British postal system”? Perhaps she merely wrote a letter which somehow reached her brother, Charles.
Maryborough, where she lived in her old age, and nursed her dying husband through a cruel death from tuberculosis, was a port of entry for over 20,000 immigrants from 1860. Perhaps she met someone from her past when walking the streets doing her shopping, going to church; someone newly arrived from her old life in Chesterfield, en route to their new life in Australia just as she had done in 1875. Who am I to argue with coincidence?
Her brother, Charles, must have had some knowledge of his never seen brother-in-law, Thomas Hastings, Catherine’s husband, and paid tribute to his existence by naming one of his sons in his honour in 1894. I still find it hard to believe. If this was not registered in black and white, I would still be in doubt as to my connection with the wonderful Katherine Degnan and her family with whom I fell in love and Joe Clark who had provided her with his invaluable research.
Even though she must have left home as a young girl, before she was 13, there must have been a very strong bond between the brother, Charles, and his sister, Catherine. She, in turn, had named one of her sons Charles, in 1880, well before any reconnection had been made. Or had there?
I was to later find her, under yet a different name, Kate Degnall, in the Lancashire census of 1871, aged 14, domestic servant, born Chesterfield, c. 1857. She always thought she was one year older than she actually was, as given in the 1861 census at any rate. Either that or her parent completing the census was confused with her date of birth. Dads can sometimes do this, I suppose.
All I know is that my great grandmother came from Chesterfield and I found some of the missing pieces of the story of her life in my two day stay through a litany of small miracles. Coincidence? Fate? Destiny? Our searches are often frustration personified; but this time, it all came together and I left with confirmation of my Chesterfield connection.
Kath Hastings
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