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Sarah Anna Goyder
(1823 - 1909)
Sarah Goyder had a truly remarkable life. She is not an important historical figure,
but had a life and a resilience to what it threw at her which I want to celebrate here.
Born in Bristol, England on 29th January 1823, she died eighty-six years later in
Annisquam, Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA.
Her father, the Rev. Dr. David George Goyder, was a minister of the New Church which
had been founded by followers of Emanuel Swedenborg in the late eighteenth century.
He had been baptised as an adult into the New Church in 1818 at the New Church in
Waterloo Road, Lambeth, London. The following year a young lady named Sarah Etherington
was also baptised into the New Church in Waterloo Road. It seem probable that it was
through the church that they got to know each other, and 1821 they were married there.
Sarah Etherington's grandson, John Martin Harvey,
wrote her of her in his Autobiography:
Of my charming grandmother I should like to make a few notes. She had been given
up as an incurable consumptive at the time my grandfather fell in love with her, and he
had been warned that a marriage was out of the question. This advice he characteristically
defied, and he married her when she was eighteen. She was a delightful little lady, full
of humour and humanity, and bore him a large family - two of whom lived to be
nonagenarians. Her devotion to her religious duties was unexceptionable until the very
end, when she bade her daughter, who volunteered to read her comforting hymns, to
"throw away that rubbish", and died fighting death to the last, at the age of
ninety-five.
A year after the marriage their first child was born, William David Goyder. He died the
following year and in the same year Sarah Anna Goyder was born in Bristol where David was
working at the Bristol Infants School in Meadow Street.
Their third child, John Thomas Goyder, was born in 1824. On New Year's Day 1826 both
Sarah Anna and John Thomas were baptised in the New Church in Waterloo Road, Lambeth,
London.
As a minister, David and Sarah Goyder moved around the country. By 1826 they had moved
to Lancashire where their fourth child, George Woodroffe Goyder was born in Liverpool in
1826. The name Woodroffe came from friends the Goyders had at the Waterloo Road church -
the Woodroffes may even have introduced David and Sarah.
By 1828 they had moved to Preston where Charles Stones Goyder was born on 20th July. In
1830 David George Goyder was born in Accrington (where there is still an active New
Church) on 31st January. By 1832 they had moved further north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
where Anne Josephine Goyder was born on 13th August. Three years later their last child,
Margaret Diana Mary Goyder was born.
In the late 1830s they moved to Glasgow. Here the eighteen-year-old Sarah Anna Goyder
met the nineteen-year-old Hugh Galbraith McLachlan. Sarah and Hugh were married by her
father in the Parish Church of the Gorbals, Lanark, on 5th December 1841. Hugh appears to
have become a minister of the Church of Scotland.
Hugh and Sarah's first child, George, was born a year or so later in 1843. Some time
between that year and 1848, they moved to either Adelaide or Sydney, Australia. In 1848
Sarah's younger brother George Woodroffe Goyder followed them to Australia where he went
on to become Surveyor General of South Australia, giving his name to several towns and
rivers and the Goyder Line.
In 1850 Hugh and Sarah's first daughter, Sarah Anna, was born. Two years later their
second daughter, Margaret (named after her aunt in England) was born on 10th June 1852.
Her story continues...
© Chris Goddard, 27 November, 2004
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