Ellen Skierys

One of the earliest Australian Lithuanian women we have any details about was Ellen Petraitis/Peterson Skierys. My thanks to her niece Rosemary Petraitis/Peterson Mitchell for the following biographical outline.

Ellen was born around 1892 in Manchester, England, to a Lithuanian family. Her elder sister Mary had been born in Lithuania only a year earlier, so we can assume the family were very recent immigrants. Her parents Alexandra and Izidorius Petraitis - later known as John Peterson - went on to have another 10 or 11 children in Manchester, but only 7 of their offspring survived to adulthood.

Izidorius Petraitis/John Peterson was a successful tailor who operated his own business in central Manchester until the depression years of the 1930s forced him to close. Not only was the business profitable for Izidorius but it also provided a solid start in life for most of his children who were employed there at one time or another. It also appears he travelled back to Lithuania, at least in the late 1890s, on business matters: earlier posts here and here have recorded the stories of Australian Lithuanians Jonas Vedrinaitis and Ksaveras Skierys and how they seem to have been recruited by Petraitis as apprentices.
 
Ksaveras (also known as Alexander) Skierys lived with the Petraitis family in Manchester for some time, as well as working further afield, including Scotland and Ireland. However in 1911 he departed for Australia, settling in Sydney where he found work as a tailor.  Ellen, who had fallen in love with him in Manchester, decided to follow him. So, at the age of 21 she boarded the 'Irishman' in Liverpool on 20 March 1913 for the two month voyage to Sydney.  There she worked for a tailoring firm in Surrey Hills until she and Ksaveras/Alexander married in 1916.

Ellen and Ksaveras Skierys had three children: Alexander, Nelly and William (Bill). They were active members of the Lithuanian community in Sydney and Nelly, at least, continued the family tradition of entering the tailoring trade, initially indentured to her father.

Ellen and Alexander Skierys, with Nellie (born 1919) and Alexander (born 1917)

Forty years after leaving Manchester Ellen travelled back to revisit England and spend time with her relatives; she returned to Sydney in 1955 with her younger sister Nellie (Angela) who stayed for 18 months.

Ellen died in 1975, Ksaveras in 1961. They are buried at the Woronora cemetery (Sydney) together with two of their children, Nellie and Bill.   

    

Arrivals from Scotland

http://www.brill.com/scots-polish-lithuanian
-commonwealth-16th-18th-centuries

Individuals have moved between Scotland and Lithuania since at least the sixteenth century. However it was only from the 1880s that significant numbers of Lithuanians began settling in Scotland. By the first decade of the 20th century there were several thousand Lithuanians living and working in Scottish coal mines and steel mills; the linked article from the BBC (click here) provides some background to their lives and communities. If you have a little more time, the linked educational video from Youtube.com (click here) may be entertaining.

Scottish Lithuanians migrating to Australia generally arrived either immediately before the First World War or during the 1920s. A feature of these migrants was that they tended to arrive in family groups; most had lived in Scotland for several years, in some cases for decades, and many arrived with spouses or children who had been born in Scotland.  Another feature is that many of these migrants had already anglicised or simplified their Lithuanian names. Here are a few examples of their stories.

Naturalisation records from the National Archives tell us about Antoni (Antanas) and Eva (Ieva) ALANSKAS who had arrived in Western Australia in 1912 with their three daughters. The parents had been born in Lithuania and lived in Scotland for 9 years, while the children (Annie Kathleen, Mary Cecelia and Maggie Veronica) had all been born in Glasgow. The family settled at Bellevue, near Perth.

The KAIRAITIS/PETRAITIS family had a somewhat different composition. Two brothers, Petras (Peter) and Vincas (William/Bill) Kairaitis had arrived in New South Wales from Scotland before World War One and settled at Blacktown, near Sydney, where they worked as dairymen. Anna Bauze's memoirs relate that by the 1930s they had been joined by their niece Nelly and her husband George Peters, their nephew Bronius and his wife and children, and their nephew Antanas (Tony) who was single. Bronius and Antanas used the surname PATRICK in Australia in place of the Lithuanian Petraitis.  Nelly, Bronius and Antanas had all arrived in 1928 from Scotland.

Another migration pattern is represented by the JESNER family. Isidor Jesner was a Lithuanian Jew who had left Tsarist Russia in 1904 at the age of 19, arriving in Hobart from Glasgow in 1911. Some time later he established himself in Lygon Street, Carlton (Melbourne) where his younger sister Lena joined him in 1928. Lena was aged 33, unmarried, had lived in Scotland for 17 years, and was initially employed by her brother as a domestic. Records at the National Archives suggest that Isidor also sought to sponsor the immigration of other Jesner family members.

William and Margaret DELADE (Vincas and Magdalena DAILIDE) arrived in Australia in the late 1920s with their daughter Natalie, settling at Dapto, New South Wales, where Vincas found work in the coal mines. As recounted in their published family history (click here for the earlier post), Vincas was born in Suvalkija (Lithuania) but left for Scotland in 1912 at the age of 19. Magdalena, on the other hand, had been born in Scotland to Lithuanian parents in 1898.

In Australia the Delade family were friends with another extended Scottish Lithuanian family - the AUGUSTUS/AUGUSTAITIS family. Pranas (Frank) Augustaitis had been born to Lithuanian parents in Scotland in 1892, reached Australia in 1924, and settled in Redfern, Sydney, with his wife Maggie and two sons. They were joined in Sydney by Frank's sister Bella who was married to Juozas PLAUSINIS/known as Joe MILLER; this family lived at Waterloo with their two sons (source: Anna Bauze's memoirs).      

  

Some updates

Thanks to everyone who has written to me or commented on this blog site since it started in February 2015!  Here are a few of the updates, amendments or corrections that have come to light:


Joe BROWN, Perth (blog post of 12 February 2015).  Thanks to Žydrė Pember, I now realise that the man who had introduced my father to Australian horseracing in Perth way back in February 1948 was probably Joseph Brown, born in Scotland in 1915 and the son of Juozapas LAZORAITIS, who had lived in Scotland for around 35 years before arriving in Australia with his family in 1928.


Alexander (Ksaveras) SKIERYS (post of 12 March 2015).  Thanks to Rosemary (Petraitis/Peterson) Mitchell for forwarding this great photo of Alex Skierys and Ellen (Petraitis) Skierys with their first two children Alex and Nelly, taken in Sydney in 1917.  Rosemary has some great family stories which I hope to share in due course.

Nathan WATCHMAN (post of 19 March 2015).  Thanks to Dana Grigonis for alerting me to additional information on this Lithuanian Jewish Anzac and to Simon Hill for agreeing to share the following:

Nathan Watchman was born Notel-Kalman Pelts on 2nd February 1884 in Virmenai, Telsiai, Kovno, son of Aron (Orel) Pelts and his wife, Iudes. They were part of an extended family of Peltses who lived in Nevarenai and the surrounding area, having come there in the 1870s from Plunge. Before going to Newcastle [UK] (to embark for Australia – see 1911 UK Census), Nathan visited his second cousin, Shneyer Peltz, in Dublin. Shneyer had gone to Dublin in the 1880s to work for a Mr Wachmann, and had changed his name because it was easier, to Simon Watchman - after this, any members of the family who came to Dublin had to change their names to Watchman, to avoid awkward questions! Simon Watchman was my wife's maternal grandfather.  Nathan’s birth details come from the Telsiai records. 

Jonas BALAIKA (post of 27 July 2015).  Balaika had returned to Lithuania in 1925, taking out Lithuanian citizenship and thus losing his Australian (British) citizenship.  He married and raised a family, surviving the Second world and the Soviet annexation of the country, but in 1947 expressed a desire to return to Australia with his family. An anonymous contributor has advised that she is Balaika's great granddaughter and that three of Balaika's daughters are still alive; it would be valuable to learn more of that family's story (please!).


Norman McLEOD (post of 10 August 2015).  The Latvian Government appointed Norman McLeod (not 'J McLeod' as recorded elsewhere) as the Honorary Consul for Latvia in Sydney in July 1931.  McLeod also attended Australian Lithuanian Society functions in Sydney as a guest of honour and served as Latvia's Honorary Consul until his death in June 1958.

Alexander (Ksaveras) Skierys

Ksaveras Skierys, like his friend and neighbour John Wedrien (see my earlier post), was a co-founder of the Australian Lithuanian Society in Sydney in 1929.  Their stories also have several other parallels.

Skierys was born in Marijampolė in southern Lithuania, around 40km from Wedrien's home town of Kudirkos Naumiestis;

• the modern-day town of Marijampolė was known as Senapilė or Staropolė in czarist times, and Skierys gave his birthplace as Senapilė on his Application for Naturalisation in 1925; 

• he recorded his father's name as Andrius Skierys;

• at the age of 17 (like Wedrien, around 1899) he left for the United Kingdom and, after spending a decade in Scotland, England and Ireland and establishing himself as a tailor (again, like Wedrien) he came to Sydney;

• Skierys was listed as a steerage class passenger aboard the SS Rotorua which sailed from London to Sydney via Hobart, arriving on 21 September 1911.

SS Rotorua; launched 1910, torpedoed and sunk 1917

Skierys and Wedrien knew each other in England and, as noted in the earlier post, Skierys accommodated Wedrien on the latter's arrival in Sydney in 1913 and helped him find employment. Popenhagen in Australian Lithuanians notes that Skierys and Wedrien co-wrote an article on Australian Lithuanians for the American-Lithuanian newspaper Lietuva [the article was published in 1915].

Ksaveras married in Sydney in 1916:

• the NSW state marriage indexes record that 'Askaveros Skierys' married  'Helena Petreytis';

• Skierys' 1925 Application for Naturalisation shows that his wife's birthplace was Manchester, England;

• the bride's maiden name is of interest, because Wedrien's history shows him leaving Lithuania for Manchester in the company of a tailor named Izidorius Petraitis.  It seems at least possible that Helena/Ellen Petraitis-Skierys was related to that Petraitis, also that both Skierys and Wedrien may have worked for Petraitis in Manchester.

By 1925, Skierys was calling himself Alexander and working as a tailor for a major Sydney department store, Farmer's Ltd, in Pitt Street.  He was living at Arncliffe, as was Wedrien, and raising a family with Ellen.

In 1929, together with three others, Skierys founded the Australian Lithuanian Society and was at different times the Society's treasurer and secretary.  

As with the Wedrien family, Alexander (1882-1961) and Ellen (c1895-1978) Skierys are buried at the Woronora cemetery in Sydney, catholic section;

• two of their children, Nellie (1919-2009) and Edward William (?-2008) are also buried at Woronora, while their eldest child Alexander Skierys (1917-1982) was buried in Queensland.

Sources: Metrastis No 1; Australian Lithuanians; National Archives of Australia; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages; Ancestry.com