Eliza Ditchburn

(nee Crowdy)

Agnes Ditchburn

(nee Hughes)

Wellington House, Hawthorn

John Ditchburn jnr

(father of Violet)

Violet Ditchburn

It appears likely that the ancestors of all people named Ditchburn originated from the area of Ditchburn Farm near Alnwick in Northumberland, northern England. This is the conclusion of a distant cousin, Robin Ditchburn, who is conducting a one-name study of the Ditchburn name.

The earliest of my forebears who can be identified with reasonable certainty (although not with documentary proof) was William Ditchburn, a tenant farmer at West Ditchburn Farm, who was born about 1732 and married Sarah Dickeson in 1777. The earliest definite ancestor of mine was one of their grandchildren, another William, born in 1803. He became a coal miner and married Elizabeth Paxton in 1824. The first of their children was John, my great great grandfather.

At the age of 25 John migrated to Australia on the ship Glen Huntley, arriving in Melbourne in January 1850. In 1852 he married Eliza Crowdy who had arrived four months earlier on the Cromwell with her parents. They soon moved to the booming town of Ballarat in the heart of the Victorian goldfields, where their three children were born. By 1865 John had set himself up as a stock broker. Over the years he acquired substantial holdings in many mining companies, and outlaid large sums to purchase and finance the activities of several private firms. He was very successful and in the late 1880s was able to retire to the affluent Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.

John's eldest child, John jnr, also entered the mining business in Ballarat, becoming the legal (administrative) manager for many companies and occupying many board positions. He married Agnes Hughes and they had two girls and two boys, the second daughter being Violet, my grandmother. In due course, Violet Ditchburn met George Kinloch, after the two families had lived in the same street in Hawthorn for some time, and married in 1911. My mother Jean was their second child.

The Ditchburn and Kinloch families are the subjects of my book Kinloch-Ditchburn: a family sketch, details of which are given on the Publications page.