James Barnes & Emily Keziah Borrman, with Lavinia Borrman - Australian Dictionary of Biography style
James Barnes was born on 31 March 1854 at Garnett House, Strickland Ketel, three miles from Kendal in Westmorland, the third surviving child of Anthony Barnes, a farmer of some 188 acres, and Margaret Ellwood. The Barnes were several generations of settled Lake District farmers and strong local people; James was named for his uncle, the botanist James Martindale Barnes. He grew up on the land - the 1871 census lists him at seventeen as a farmer's son - but did not stay on it. By his own later account he reached Australia the roundabout way, spending time in New Zealand 'travelling about the country' before landing at Sydney on the Hero in 1876.
After about two years in Sydney he joined the New South Wales Police in 1880 and was posted to the Temora goldfield. There, in April 1882, he struck 'a good find' of gold and - 'with the restless fever in him', as he put it - resigned to make use of it, sailing home toward the north of England; finding the cold unbearable after the colony, he returned within months and rejoined the force at Deniliquin in 1883. A first, short posting then took him to Wentworth in 1885-86 - six years before the river town would give him a wife. The rest was country policing at its hardest: Silverton and the Barrier, where the lock-up was 'an old tin shed' and he caught pleurisy and pneumonia; three and a half years at Hay, escorting gold and prisoner coaches enormous distances; and Wentworth, where he was made first-class constable in 1892. He was one of some three hundred police entrenched at the 1892 Broken Hill strike, three days and nights in the trenches - 'the most stirring time of his career.'
On 21 October 1891, at St John's Church, Wentworth, he married Emily Keziah Borrman; they had five children. In January 1902, under the strain of his wife's failing health and the pressures of the job, he attempted to take his own life at the Wentworth lock-up; he recovered amid much public sympathy and a petition for his reinstatement, and served another eleven years. He moved soon after to the metropolitan district (North Sydney), where he served about four years; then, early in 1906, out to the central west - briefly Blayney, then Cowra - and, when the vacancy arose, in September 1906 to the quiet village of Kelso, near Bathurst. Widowed in 1908, he married Emily's sister Lavinia in 1910; because the Church of England would not solemnise a marriage to a deceased wife's sister, they wed by a Congregational rite at the police station. A Protestant and a well-regarded officer - six feet three inches and eighteen stone - he retired on pension in April 1914 after thirty-four years' service, and died at Kelso on 22 June 1914 of acute cholangitis; his last words, his daughter recalled, were 'this is heaven.' He was buried beside Emily at Holy Trinity, Kelso.
Emily Keziah Borrman was born on 12 November 1864 at Kangaroo Gully, one of the goldfields camps that became a suburb of Bendigo (then Sandhurst), Victoria. She was a daughter of Carl Heinrich 'Theodore' Borrman, a Silesian-born miller and goldfields man, and Keziah Tilley, an English migrant who signed her own marriage with a cross. Emily grew up in the German-influenced diggings community and, as a young woman, left home, probably looking for work. She went to Wentworth, at the Murray-Darling junction, where her brother Edwin ran a business, and there she was in domestic service when she met Constable James Barnes.
They married at St John's, Wentworth, on 21 October 1891. Over the next decade Emily bore five children - Constance (1896); Cecil (1897, born back at her family's Kangaroo Flat); Fredricka 'Freda' (1900); and the twins Myrtle and Ivy (1902) - of whom Myrtle died in infancy. For much of the marriage Emily was ill: her death certificate records some fifteen years of tuberculosis, the 'consumption' that shadowed the household and led her younger sister Lavinia to move in and help. A country policeman's wife through repeated transfers, she kept house on a constable's pay across Wentworth and, from 1906, Kelso. She died at the Kelso police residence on 3 June 1908, aged forty-three, and was buried - with a large attendance of her husband's fellow officers - in the Holy Trinity cemetery. She was of the Church of England, though born to a Lutheran family.
Agnes Lavinia 'Vene' Borrman, born in 1873 at Kangaroo Gully, was Emily's younger sister. As Emily's tuberculosis worsened she came to live with the Barnes family, attending the birth of the twins in 1902 and helping to raise them and run the household through Emily's long decline. After Emily's death in 1908 she and James decided to marry; barred by the Church of England from a union with a deceased wife's sister, they married by a Congregational rite at the Kelso police station on 23 June 1910 - a marriage the family remembered as their 'becoming Baptists.' There were no children of the marriage. Widowed in 1914, Lavinia was executrix of James's estate and, as 'Lavinia Agnes Barnes', sold the family's Kelso land in 1918. She died in 1939.