According to her biographer James Cameron (q.v.), Adelaide de la Thoreza was the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, Julian de la Thoreza. When the family was forced into exile, due to suspected liberal leanings, Thoreza moved to France and then Italy. In Italy, she fell in love, and was due to be married when she reached the age of fourteen, but her fiance was killed by a Spaniard to whom Theroza had been betrothed as a child.
The family returned to Madrid the following year, but Julian de la Thoreza was murdered and Thoreza's mother died from shock. Thoreza then lived with two respectable families in London, but was charged with theft in one of the households, convicted and sent to Botany Bay. (Until the time of her trial, no evidence of Cameron's version of events has been discovered.)
Once in New South Wales, Theroza was assigned to the Cox family at Richmond. There she bore a child (whose father, according to Cameron, later drowned). In 1836, Theroza married John Masters. They had two children and established a store in Richmond.
Suan Ballyn and Lucy Frost ('A Spanish Convict, Her Clergyman Biographer, and the Amanuensis of Her Bastard Son' in Chain Letters : Narrating Convicts Lives, 2001) consider Cameron's account of Theroza's life to be questionable in major details and substantially unverifiable.
