Isabella Grace Burbury died in infancy, at an age of not much more than six months. She was a descendant of Thomas and Mary Burbury of Van Diemen's Land, but very few -- if any -- of the family in Tasmania would have ever heard of her or known that she had ever existed. And indeed, her existence did cause me some research problems, but they were eventually sorted out.
Isabella Grace was the daughter of Arthur James Burbury, the youngest son of Thomas and Mary. However, she was not a product of the marriage beween Arthur and Elizabeth Isabel Lewis which caused a minor scandal in the family in 1866 -- which is ironic, because the birth of this little baby girl would surely have been the source of quite a bit of scandal at the time also, if the story had been public knowledge. Indeed, it might have been one of the reasons why the Lewis family was so strongly against the marriage of their daughter Elizabeth to the "likeable, high-spirited young lawyer", in addition to the fact that Arthur's father Thomas had been a convict.
Basically, Isabella Grace was Arthur's illegitimate daughter, by a girl called Ann King. Ann was the daughter of James King, a labourer who was possibly an ex-convict. He married Hannah COWLEY and they had several children.
According to her birth certificate, Isabella Grace Burbury was born on 29 December 1866 in Hobart, Tasmania to Arthur Burbury, Solicitor, and Ann King. The informant for the birth was Hannah King, the child's grandmother, whose residence was given as Goulburn Street (a street in West Hobart), and the birth was registered on 6 February 1867. This birth certificate does not make clear what the marital status of the child's parents was. There was only one Arthur Burbury I knew of who was a solicitor in Hobart, but at first I discounted him as the father, for what seemed at the time a self-evident reason: that Arthur had married Elizabeth Lewis on 15 December 1866, only two weeks before this birth!
And so I looked everywhere for evidence of another Arthur Burbury who was a solicitor and who might have been in Hobart at around this time. But of course, I didn't find anyone.
Isabella Grace was privately baptised in the parish of St. John, Hobart on 15 July 1867, four days before she died on 19 July. She might have been ill, and so the baptism might have been performed with the fear that she might soon die. The baptism register contains several columns for information about the person who is being baptised, and among these are separate columns for the Christian names of both parents and their surname. In the entry for Isabella Grace, her parents' Christian names are given as Arthur James & Ann. The birth certificate did not record her father's middle name, so this extra information proves conclusively who Isabella Grace's father was. Moreover, in all other entries on the same page, there is only one name in the surname column, but for Isabella's entry, there are two surnames: Burbury and King. The conclusion is that Isabella Grace's parents were not married, and we know this to be true because Arthur James Burbury was married to Elizabeth Isobel Lewis at the time of the baptism.
One ironic thing about this story is the baby's name: Isabella. I don't know if this name was common in the King family, but it appears several times in the Lewis family; Arthur's legitimate wife was Elizabeth Isobel Lewis, and her paternal grandmother's given name was Isabelle. Maybe Ann King thought up the name as a bit of a slap in the face for the "legitimate" family. But ultimately, the baby Isabella Grace died in infancy.
An abridged timeline of events is as follows:
| 15 Dec 1866 | Marriage of Arthur James Burbury and Elizabeth Isobel nee Lewis | |
| 29 Dec 1866 | Birth of Isabella Grace Burbury, illegitimate daughter of Arthur James Burbury and Ann King | |
| 15 Jul 1867 | Baptism of Isabella Grace Burbury | |
| 19 Jul 1867 | Death of Isabella Grace Burbury | |
| 20 Oct 1867 | Birth of Violet Isabelle, legitimate daughter of Arthur James Burbury and Elizabeth Isobel nee Lewis |
Other related links: