Sarah Nash and John Fell

Sarah Nash

(1840 - 1909)

and her husband John Fell

Farmer, innkeeper and coachdriver of Hartley, Inverell, Bundarra and Tamworth NSW

Sarah Nash was named after her father's sister, Sarah (Nash) Williams, and was born in 1840 in the Castlereagh district NSW. Her parents, George Nash and Mary Lees were farming 100 acres of land in Londonderry Parish, north-east of Castlereagh, at that time. Sarah relocated with her family to the Windsor district in the late 1840's, then to Hartley in the mid-1850's. She married John Fell in 1859 at Hartley.

John Fell (1838-1883) was the son of Yorkshire convict Charles Fell (per Hindostan 1821) and currency-lass Frances Pembroke nee Collits (daughter of Hartley innkeepers Pierce Collits and Mary Hardwick, and widow of Irish convict Thomas Michael Pembroke per St Michael 1819). John Fell was born in 1838 at Penrith, where his father was apparently a coachman on Sir John Jamison's "Regentville" estate. The Fell family relocated to Hartley in the early 1840's.

John and Sarah Fell remained in the Hartley district for a decade after their marriage where John worked as a farmer. Around the year 1870 the family moved north to the Inverell district where John was working as a carrier in Inverell and Bundarra in the early 1870’s and as an innkeeper at King John's Swamp near Bundarra by the mid-late 1870's. In the early 1880's John decamped with a much younger woman named Alice White or Steus. They had a son born in 1882 at Tamworth and had settled in Sydney a year later. John contracted typhoid and died in Sydney in 1883.

Sarah and her family had moved to Inverell by the mid-1880's. Sarah remained there until 1907 or 1908 when she joined her son Edwin Henry Fell in Ashfield, Sydney. She died there in 1909 and was buried at Rookwood Cemetery with her late husband John Fell.

This is a brief summary of the chapter relating to Sarah Nash and John Fell published in Nash: First Fleeters and Founding Families - A Three Generational Biographical History.

The family of John Fell and Sarah Nash*

1. Victoria Maria Fell (1860 - 1934) md her cousin John James Lees in 1877.

2. Garratt Rowland Fell (1862 - >1878)

3. Edwin Henry Fell (1866 - <1909)

4. John Wesley Fell (1871 - 1944) md Maud M. Farnant in 1909.

5. Eveline Cecilia Fell (1873 - <1909) md Thomas Cusick in 1891.

6. Edgar George Pembroke Fell (1878 - 1938) md Ada Hoey in 1899.

* Many of these dates come from registrations of births, deaths and marriages. In some cases the event itself will have occurred late in the previous year.

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