John Saltmarsh

John’s Story

John Saltmarsh was born on 21 August 1821, the son of William Butler Saltmarsh and Elizabeth Riley Stevens. His baptism just eleven days later provides a remarkable surviving record from the earliest decades of colonial Tasmania. The register records the family’s home as Norfolk Plains, the district that developed around present-day Longford.

John grew up in a Tasmania still in the early stages of European settlement. His family had already established itself in the Norfolk Plains district, and Longford would remain at the centre of John’s life. On 14 May 1844, aged 22, he married Elizabeth Letitia Hodgetts in Launceston.

Their first child, Emma, was born at Longford the following year. John and Elizabeth went on to have a large family, with 16 children recorded over the following 27 years. The births of their children, together with other family records, show the Saltmarsh family remaining closely associated with Longford for much of the nineteenth century.

Family life also brought considerable loss. Several of John and Elizabeth’s children died before reaching adulthood, while others survived to establish families of their own. Their daughter Emma became the beginning of my direct line through Clara Saltmarsh, Pearl Neal, Lexie Atkinson and Shirley Hyland.

Elizabeth died at Longford in December 1884, aged 55. John survived her by a little more than six years, dying at Longford on 6 May 1891, aged 69. Their shared gravestone still provides a physical connection to this generation of the family and to the district in which they spent so much of their lives.

John’s Family

William Butler Saltmarsh + Elizabeth Riley Stevens
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John Saltmarsh + Elizabeth Letitia Hodgetts
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Emma Saltmarsh
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Clara Elizabeth Saltmarsh
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Pearl Neal → Lexie Atkinson → Shirley Hyland → Peter → Ashley