Bailey Family of Ireland & Australia:Information about Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield
Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield (b. 21 Dec 1866, d. 21 Jan 1948)
Notes for Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield:C:Documents and SettingsMissVikLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesOLK56Ninglun's Site Lives Again Whitfields1.htm
Grandfather Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield was born in Picton NSW in 1867 and died in 1948, so I was five years old when he died, and can just remember him as a benign but deaf old man with white hair, approximately as wide as he was tall. Mind you, in earlier days he seems to have been a tyrant and a right bastard, but that will become apparent later. He had been a carpenter, and all the family up to him seem to have been carpenters, bush workers, small farmers or bullock drivers and timber getters. There was one brother, John, who was a policeman though, for a time in Shellharbour; my brother remembers him. I do remember some of Thomas's siblings; one, Bill (William) continued to live at Picton and died in his nineties in the 1950s. We used to visit him and his unmarried daughter Ruth fairly regularly. His youngest sister Annie was born 25/12/1875. She was alive and well at the celebrations for my cousin Beverly's Olympic Games gold medal in Shellharbour in 1972, when five generations of the family came together. (Her husband, Tiberio Vacchini, "was born in NSW and therefore was NOT an Italian" as Stuart Daniels, a descendant, informed me in June 2004. There was talk of a connection with Garibaldi's Red Shirts somewhere way back when though. Fact is Vacchini is a long-established name in NSW; I recall an Inspector of Schools by that name in the 1960s and 70s, Ian Vacchini. The name is certainly Italian.)
I had the opportunity to probe Aunt Annie's memory not long before she died, but she was somewhat vague about exact details, though she did remember sitting on the knee of an old man with a long white beard when she was five years old; that man, her great-grandfather perhaps, she swore had been a redcoat in Ireland.
More About Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield:
Occupation: Carpenter.
Children of Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield and Henrietta Bursill are:
- +Jeffery Noel Whitfield, b. 1911, d. 1989.
- +Kenneth Ross Whitfield, d. date unknown.
- Aubrey R Whitfield, b. 1893, d. 1906.