Gilbert was born at Pinda on 13 June, 1884. Before he was two years of age his parents had left their farm at Pinda and gone to live, temporarily, at a house in Gawler South. Here Ada May was born on 15 August, 1886. Both children would have attended school somewhere in Gawler before working on the farm. When his older brothers left Gawler, Gilbert alone stayed with his father Thomas on the farm, assuming control of it after his father became blind. When Sarah died in 1929, Gilbert may have bought out his elder brother Arthur’s share, as the place was to be divided amongst Thomas’s living children when his widow died. Gilbert and Ada farmed the land themselves - Ada remained home from shortly before the death of her mother until the farm was sold - with cropping and sheep being carried on. Ada had kept some cows until Gilbert needed the land for sheep grazing.

After Thomas Sandercock’s death in 1916, Ada had gone out to work. She nursed the wife Alice of her cousin Robert Sandercock, (son of Albert William) until her death in 1922, and later nursed her aunt Mary Ann Gregory’s husband Thomas until his death at Brighton in 1927. There is mention of ‘wages - Miss Sandercock - 7 pounds’ in the estate of Thomas Gregory. Generally the relations between Gilbert, Ada and their relatives were not very warm. John Thomas Gregory’s diary indicates that the Gregorys visited their Sandercock cousins at Gawler, but it is believed that Gilbert and Ada preferred to keep some of their cousins at a distance - ‘better to trust a stranger than a relative’, he was supposed to have once said. This was true when small jobs needed doing on the Sandercock farm, evidently!

Gilbert and Ada sold the farm at some later stage and bought a house in Bosanquet Avenue, Prospect. They became friends with their Uncle John Sandercock’s daughter Mona, Mrs R.A. Pritchard, who also lived at Prospect. (Mona and Ada were both born in 1886.) Gilbert died at Bosanquet Avenue on 9 September, 1960, and was buried at Willaston. When Ada was ill in hospital, their brother Arthur came over from Rudall to see her. She died while he was still in Adelaide, on 9 January, 1966, aged nearly 80. Ada’s house at Prospect was left to her next-door neighbour, a friend, and any belongings and photographs of the Sandercock family must now be dispersed. Thus we have no idea today what the children of Thomas and Sarah looked like in appearance. There are, of course, no descendants as none of them married.

Ada Sandercock joined her parents, and possibly two brothers, when her remains were buried in the family plot at the Willaston cemetery.