Is your Great-Gran on this list?

This is a callout for information to assist with my latest project. I'm currently researching private midwives from Townsville and the North Queensland region*.

Anna Petronella Wilson (nee Gronlund) - a midwife in Cairns in the early 1900s.
Photo courtesy of Rob Wood.

At the moment the project will potentially cover the years 1880 to 1940, so if you have a relative that was a private midwife (by private I mean not associated with a large public hospital) and have information to share, please get in touch. I'm particularly interested in photographs of the women, their homes, families etc. and any documents, diaries etc. that detail their day-to-day work, for example journals or registers of patients, fees charged, places/locations they travelled to, or in fact any records they kept.

Is your Great-Gran or Great-Great Gran on this list? If so, I'd like to hear from you!

TOWNSVILLE:
Helen Beaton	Rose Blaxland	Elizabeth Bradshaw
Jessie Bullimore	Lydia Calder	Fredericka Christian
Margery Clements	Alice Crawford	Mary Darch
Edith Day	Harriet Dennis	Eva Duman
Gladys Duman	Mercy Flowers	Norah Gaul
Lillian Gordon	Susannah Graves	A. Hagen
Kate Hebb	Mrs A. Henry	Edith Lambton
Jessie Lenham	Margaret McArdle	Mary MacDonald
Frances Macintosh	Isabel Macintosh	Margaret Monaghan
Agnes Paterson	Nurse Pope	Emma Prince
Margaret Purcell	Charlotte Sherlaw	Kath Terry
Lillian Terry	Lydia Thurston	Mai Treacy
Edith Trenow	Janet Veitch	Margaret Walsh
Margaret Ward	Susan Wells	Jessie Wheeler
Margaret Williams	Annie Wright
AYR/BRANDON:
Ellen Francis	Nurse Harris	Jane Kennedy
BOWEN:
Amy Field	Sarah Wheelhouse
CAIRNS:
Anna Wilson (pictured above)	Janet Herries	Molly O’Byrne
Matron O’Hara	Nurse Winkworth
CHARTERS TOWERS:
Catherine Symons	Elizabeth Dobson	Mary Bowden
CHILLAGOE:
Margaret Timmins
CLONCURRY:
Amelia Johnstone
KURIDALA:
Ann Edmonds

As you can see from the list, some of these women don't even have a first name listed. After some painstaking research I have been able to dig up the first names of many of them, but it's still a work in progress. I have concentrated my research on the Townsville midwives so far, which is why I don't have many names yet for the other areas. Thank you to those who have already contacted me with information. Please feel free to get in touch again if you like. I can be contacted on nqhistory@gmail.com

The height of private midwifery services (at least in the Townsville region) seems to have been from around 1900 to about mid-1930s. After that time, more and more women were giving birth in the public hospital and the services of private midwives became increasingly obsolete.

*For the purposes of my research, I'd like to include towns/cities such as Bowen, Ayr, Home Hill, Charters Towers, Pentland, Ingham, Cardwell, and potentially Cairns and surrounds as well.

Further reading on this topic:

NQ Midwives - Invisible Heroines

Susannah Graves - one of Townsville's private midwives