Tracing Family Branches

In April 1938 my grandfather Mervyn James Phillip Donnelly was before the courts due to his committing bigamy and some of the articles reporting on this case are the subject of my Trove Tuesday posting this week. My grandfather Mervyn James Phillip Donnelly, commonly known as James or Jim was born in Bourke in 1905, the son of John Joseph (Jack) Donnelly and his wife Bridget Anastasia (nee Lambert). John Donnelly was a school teacher and the family, which included Mervyn's older half brother Frederick, moved around the state due to his employment.  In Sydney in November 1925 Mervyn joined the New South Wales Police as a Probationary Constable, but this was to be a short lived career as he resigned in April 1926.  Later in Sydney that same year he married Marie Rose Thomson (known as Rose or Rosie) who was born in 1906, the daughter of Thomas Thomson and his wife Mary Ethel (nee Smith).   Rose had been declared an uncontrollable child by the courts in June 1922 and admitte...

My late Aunt told me in confidence many years ago that her oldest sister had confided in her that their father was a bigamist and that it had been a huge public scandal, hitting the front page of the local newspapers and causing the family trouble with the Catholic Church.  She said that this was part of the reason my Grandmother rarely spoke about him, Nan kept her family secrets well hidden (My father was in his fifties before he ever found out!).  So when I started researching my tree it was high on the list of stories I wanted to check out.  The certificates for the two marriages were easy to obtain but they added to the mystery rather than solved it.  I even managed to get in contact with relatives of his first wife, only to find that she was quite a mystery to them too and they didn't know about her marriage to my Grandfather.   Today the first of a series of articles about the case has been released on Trove and I can finally confirm that the story was tr...