Catherine was born in 1825 in Ireland, in the northern town of Ardee, in County Louth.^[4] When she was five years old, her father was convicted on charges of housebreaking, sentenced to 7 years exile, and transported to New South Wales. Five years later, her mother Margaret’s petition for free passage to the colonies was successful, enabling the family to be reunited. Catherine, her mother and older sister, made the long journey to Sydney on the Thomas Harrison in 1836.

Her new home was on a property in the the Hawkesbury River area of the colony, where her father had been assigned. The farm, on the river flats at Wilberforce near Wiseman's Ferry, north west of Sydney, was on prime fertile land fronting the McDonald River. There, Catherine met another convict, Thomas Berryman, who was working on a property belonging to the Fleming family, who had extensive interests in the colony, both in the Hawkesbury and in the New England area.

Although Thomas was up to 10 years older than she was, the 18-year-old Catherine married him in a ceremony in the Catholic chapel at Leet’s Vale, on the McDonald River near St. Albans. This chapel, named after St. Rose of Lima, doesn't exist today, presumably having been swept away in one of the many torrential floods which inundated the Hawkesbury Valley.

Thomas, still being a convict, required official permission to marry, which was granted in January 1844.

During earlier assignments for the Flemings, Thomas had become familiar with parts of the New England and northwest areas of the state, and so, by about 1850, Thomas and Catherine with a growing family of young children, found their way back there. Catherine and Thomas had 10 children who grew up in the Bundarra area of New England, near Armidale (An 11th child, a boy, was listed as 'deceased' on various family documents from the 1860s onwards) .

Thomas died suddenly, of a heart attack, when Catherine was only 47. Although Thomas had failed to make a will, the wheels of bureaucracy moved reasonably quickly to grant Catherine the proceeds of his estate valued at £1600, not an insignificant amount for the time. Catherine's lack of education, or at least literacy, is recorded in the estate documents, which had to be read to her, before she signed them with a cross.

She survived her husband by many years, dying in 1908 aged 82, on her son's selection ‘Zig Zag’, formerly part of the old Abington property, near Bundarra. The cause of her death was noted as ‘Senile decay’, from which she apparently suffered for two days!

Although she had been baptised and married in the Catholic religion, Margaret was buried according to the rites of the Church of England, and is buried along with Thomas in the Church of England section of the cemetery in Bundarra.

The gravestones of Catherine Berryman (left) and her husband Thomas in Bundarra cemetery.