William Macky

Biography

The last letter William Macky's family received from him came from Buninyong, near Ballarat in the Australian state of Victoria. He had gone to Australia expecting his wife and children to follow. According to the family's 1913 account, the letters stopped within a year of his departure; subsequent inquiries failed to establish his fate.

Before emigrating, William farmed at Lisfannan in County Donegal, in northwestern Ireland. The family reconstruction places his birth around 1815. He married Susannah Dill, a Presbyterian minister's daughter, and they had five children: James, Grace, Richard, William Marcus and Dorcas. The family history records Grace's birth at Lisfannan on September 26, 1845 and Richard's there on September 13, 1847; Dorcas was born in Derry, the city now in Northern Ireland, on January 3, 1851.

That history attributes the loss of William's farm around September 1850 to his refusal to pay tithes. It dates his departure for Victoria to May 1852. The later newspaper account describes the attraction of the goldfields, but the last letter from Buninyong remains the final trace it gives of William himself. Susannah and the five children stayed in Ireland.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography places their son William Marcus’s birth at Lisfannan in 1849. Their sons were later known as Dr. James Dill Macky, the Rev. Richard Dill Macky and the Rev. William Marcus Dill Macky.