The faces behind the naming of Harding Street, Coburg

This street was made in the very earliest days of Coburg (when it was still called Pentridge) but was first listed in a Sands and McDougall Street Directory as Harding Road in 1872. By 1911 it was known as Harding Street.

Street Names of Coburg tells us that the street was named for John Harding, listed in the 1868 Directory as a Sydney Road farmer located where the street began, so it's likely that it was an access road to his property in its very earliest days.

John Harding was a devout Methodist and a very early Sunday School teacher (as early as the mid-1840s, according to Richard Broome in his comprehensive history of Coburg).

I came across a photograph of this early Coburg pioneer taken in old age in a 1904 Jubilee History of the Methodist Church in Victoria and Tasmania. 

The volume also included photos of John's son Thomas and his wife Parysatis (nee Kendall), also stalwarts of the Coburg Methodist Church scene of the day.

At first I assumed that all three Harding family members were alive in 1904 when the church history was published, but this was not so.

John Harding died in December 1894 and is buried at Coburg Cemetery with his wife Elizabeth, who predeceased him. (She died in 1877.) They are buried in Methodist Section A, Grave 157.

Their son Thomas died in 1900 aged 69. He, too, is buried in the Methodist Section A (Grave 272) at Coburg Cemetery with his wife Parysatis, who died in 1910.

Parysatis Harding's unusual given name is spelled many different ways in the Victorian birth, death and marriage indexes. I can imagine that this was a constant cause of frustration for her. Parysatis was the name of a Queen of Ancient Persia. There were two of them - one was the mother of Cyrus the Younger and the other married Alexander the Great. I don't suppose there was anyone else in Coburg with that name, although the couple did call one of their daughters Parysatis and the name carried on for at least another generation.

Parysatis Harding was the daughter of another Coburg pioneer and member of the Coburg Methodist Church, John Buck Kendall, of whom I will write in a later blog entry.

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Even though I was looking through the Jubilee history for completely different reasons, I now have a gallery of photos of early residents of both Brunswick and Coburg. It is worth remembering that church attendance was almost universal in the 19th and early 20th centuries and that much rich local history material can be gleaned from the pages of church newsletters, histories such as this one and in newspaper articles.

I'll share some of my finds with you over the next few months and hopefully some of you reading this will recognise names and faces and can add to the stories of their lives.