Lydia was the second child of Emma Glasson of Breage Cornwall, by her first husband John Michell. John died in 1837 on a trip to Mexico when she and her older sister, also called Emma were still toddlers. Richard Glasson married their mother in 1838 and within months this new family of four had emigrated from Cornwall to Bathurst and Guyong, sailing on the ship “James Patterson”. Both girls loved their step-dad but Lydia at least did test his patience. When she was still only a teenager she took a fancy to a young man, one William Hosie who lived with his family on the other side of Cockatoo Hill from where they were living in the Old Guyong House. Like Lydia he had lost his biological father early to illness and his mother had re-married a Mr Wythes. They were renting land nearby. Despite Richard’s objections the romance blossomed until Richard felt it necessary to confine Lydia to the house. With the connivance of her mother Lydia escaped one night and made her way in the dark to the coach road to Sydney which passed not so far away as it does today. There she and William took a coach and hightailed it to Sydney where they were married by the well known pastor James Dunmoor Laing the very next day. Other conspirators, in the know managed to put a pursuing Richard off the scent by sending him in the opposite direction.

Sadly William too died early of illness, like his father and father-in-law and Lydia was left a widow after only a few years of marriage. She subsequently had a failed marriage to an architect, Arthur Hartly with whom she had a daughter, Alicia and a third marriage to a Charles Rattray Smith.

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