• General Notes

  Shipping records indicate that Martin and Margaret arrived in Port Phillip on the Royal Saxon on 7/7/1841.  Martin and Margaret were bounty passengers which means the government paid a fee to the shipowner who brought them to Australia. Healthy, childless couples were preferred as bounty passengers and Martin and Margaret left their children behind when they set sail for Australia. Martin was nearly 40 when they came to Australia but they both put their age down as younger on the shipping records.  The shipping records indicate that the family came from Kilmacduane or Cooraclare in County Clare in Southern Ireland.  Thus, Martin was of the southern branch of O'Donnells, being O'Donnell Ui Maine, not the more numerous O'Donnell Ui Neil of the Donegal area and surrounds. Martin was killed in a horse riding accident at the Geelong races in 1848, and his tombstone is one of the oldest in the Geelong Eastern Cemetery.  The report of his death in the Maitland Mercury reads "The second day was marked by the violent death of Martin O'Donnell, a settler, who came by his death when riding round the course, by coming at full speed in violent contact with the limb of a tree, he fell, and in a few minutes breathed his last.  This unfortunate man has left a wife and nine young children to mourn his loss, three or four of whom hed been sent out to him in one of the last emigrant ships"

Details of Martin's family with Margaret Green