Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 7
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[Page 7]
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among the first five in one of the annual spelling bees that were held for the whole of these schools. The winner this particular year was an English girl who was awarded the usual gold watch. The four runners-up, including Dad, each received a suitably engraved medal of pure silver, the size of a half-crown. Dad kept it for most of his life but lost it at our home "Rosedernate" at Parkes, probably when digging in the garden. The one word that beat him was "ipecacuanha".
In 1881, at the age of eighteen, my Father, and an older brother Robert, migrated to Australia. The three other brothers went to the U.S.A. The eldest, William John; settled in Montana where living conditions were rough. He married a local girl and fathered two children, Margaret and Joseph. While they were still infants their mother died and their father returned to Ireland permanently. My aunt Margaret (Maggie) went over to Montana and brought the children back.
Joseph my second uncle became a Presbyterian missionary and worked in South America, Egypt, and finally at Guadalajara in Mexico, where he is buried. He married and had five children none of whom I have been able to trace, but one son is thought to be in Akron, Ohio.
The third uncle, James, lived out his life in the U.S.A. I met three of his four grandchildren (now adults) at Pennington, New Jersey, in May 1967: namely Robert Joseph Stewart (same name as mine), Sam Stewart, and Dorothy Schwab (nee Stewart). I also met their mother, but their father who was a first cousin of mine had died. The meeting, which included the wives and children of the visiting relatives, took place in the Schwab home on Federal City Road, on a very pleasant Sunday afternoon. Dorothy and her quiet husband William K. Schwab Jnr had invited me to come down from New York and stay for the week-end during which I was driven many miles around the verdant hills along the Delaware river and visited Washington's Crossing where I saw the famous painting of the event and also the screening of a coloured