Hester Wilshire and family

Hester, the youngest of the Pitt siblings, married James Wilshire on 12th February 1805 at St Phillip’s church in Sydney. Wilshire had arrived in the colony as a free settler in 1800 and at the time of his marriage he was working both as acting deputy commissary and running his own tannery in Brickfield Hill. He also owned land in Lane Cove.

Hester and James lived in Sydney and produced eleven children, two of whom died in infancy. Their son Austin Forrest Wilshire married his cousin Eliza Pitt, Thomas’ daughter; their daughter Matilda Pitt Wilshire married William Jenkins, Jemima’s son by her second husband Robert, and their son Thomas Matcham Pitt married Helen Faithfull, daughter of William Faithfull by his second wife, Margaret. All of which suggests firm family ties.

James Wilshire was a successful businessman and as deputy to the commissary John Palmer he held a position of some authority. Following the Rum Rebellion of 1808, when Governor Bligh was deposed by members of the New South Wales Corps, Wilshire was asked by Bligh to accompany him back to England to act as witness on his behalf.  (Bligh did not himself go back for some years and James did not accompany him.)

Hester died in 1836, aged 49, and her husband four years later in 1840. The Wilshires’ eldest son, also called James, became the 2nd Mayor of Sydney in 1844.

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Descendants of the Wilshire, Pitt and Jenkins families, 2009