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away from New South Wales once they had got there - and where they both eventually died.
In fact, the records show that eleven of their children were born in New South Wales between
1855 and 1870: Honoria (Norah) in 1855; George in 1857; Peter in 1858; Margaret in 1859;
David in 1861; Patrick in 1863; Ellen in 1864; Elizabeth in 1865; Daniel and James in 1868;
and Elizabeth (Lizzie) in 1870. Nearly all of them also died in New South Wales; David in
1861; the first Elizabeth in 1866; Peter in 1878; and Patrick junior in 1889. There is no
evidence to suggest that any of them was ever in Tasmania.
There is also no proof that Mary Honeycombe ever lived in Tasmania. We know nothing about
her early life, apart from the fact that she was not illiterate (like her parents) and must have had
some sort of proper Catholic schooling. We know nothing other than that she arrived in
Australia in 1855 as a baby, and married in Queensland in 1881. What happened to her in the
intervening 26 years?
It is possible that she married in Tasmania in 1871 - and if so, she may have lived there for
awhile as a teenage girl. For on 8 May 1871, in Hobart, a Mary Casey (giving her age as 19)
married a sailor, Charles Palmer, who is allegedly 23. They were married, by licence, in St
Josephs' 'according to the rites and ceremonies of the Holy Catholic Church'. Evidently, this
Mary was a Catholic, like our Mary.
Unfortunately, none of the parents is named in the marriage certificate, nor is this Mary's place
of birth. So we cannot be sure that the Mary Casey who wed a sailor in Hobart in 1871 is our
Mary Casey, who married John Honeycombe ten years later, on 14 July 1881. If our Mary was
the one who married Charles Palmer in 1871 she would have been three months short of her
18th birthday (not 19). That is very possible, given the fact that a licence was required, and our
Mary was always inaccurate when she gave her age.
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on the staff of the Hobart General Hospital and in private practice, and in 1848 he became for a
while the police medical officer in Launceston; he was also a justice of the peace. A son of his,
Cornelius Sydney Casey, was born in Hobart in 1856, and he must have been living there or in
Launceston, where Mary Casey is said (by her) to have spent her early years.
Launceston was well established by 1855, when Patrick and Winifred Casey came to Australia,
having been in official existence since 1805, when the settlement was called Patersonia. It was
from the north of the then Van Dieman's Land that settlers sailed for Port Phillip Bay in the mid-
1830's, to become the founding fathers of Melbourne and Geelong, which was later the home of
the first Honeycombe family to emigrate, and where the young John Honeycombe, Mary's
husband grew up.
When Cornelius Casey's wife died in 1863 he left Tasmania with his 16-year-old son, and spent
most of the rest of his life in Victoria, where he remarried, living off the profits of several prudent
investments, in land and mines. He died in 1896, six years after the birth of his grandson.
It is just possible that Patrick Casey's father and Cornelius Casey's father were cousins, even
brothers. The two families are, as far as we know, only linked otherwise casually and
geographically, by Liverpool and Launceston. Lord Casey did not become a lord until 1960,
long after Mary's death - although he had been an MP from 1931 and then a federal
government minister.
Some families in England like to imagine they are descended from royalty, or from noble lords
bearing the same surname. Mary very probably invented a family connection (or her father may
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