52 Ancestors Week 1 - Start: Mary Ann (Grey) Edwards, my great great grandmother

It's summer in New Zealand; Christmas and New Year have flown by. As summer holidays are the start of our year, I thought about how I spent it as a child. Summer holidays always meant a day-long journey from Wellington to Tauranga in a stifling hot car along windy, dusty roads; trips to the Mount (Mount Maunganui, a popular surf beach) and Nana. Nana-in-Tauranga was the only grandparent I ever knew as she had been widowed just before my younger brother was born. My other grandparents were shadowy figures: Granny-in-Scotland and Grandpa. In the 1960s, communication was by aerogramme and my only contact was writing two letters a year to thank them for the postal note they sent at Christmas and for my birthday in June.

Arriving at Nana's was tinged with both excitement and relief. Heading inside the back door on the left hand side, the first thing I always saw was a large portrait of a white haired lady. And to me, she was a lady! She was dressed in black with a high-necked white lace blouse. At her throat was a small gold brooch with an orangy stone. She looked very regal, but not at all imposing. She was Nana's grandmother, Mary Ann Edwards, and this great great-grandmother was really the start of my interest in family history.

The portrait was in fact a hand-coloured photograph which had been taken in Wellington about 1926, a year or so before Mary Ann died. How do I know this? There is another photo taken that day of a baby, my uncle born in June 1926; Nana; my great-grandmother and Mary Ann. It's one of those rare "four generations" photos and Mary Ann is wearing the same dress as in her portrait.

Over the summer, we would encourage Nana to tell stories of our various relatives from the "olden days" which included her grandmother, who had come to New Zealand from Bath on the "Wild Duck". With her she had brought a 'silver' tea service as part of a dowry. For years it lay in a cardboard box in Nana's wood cupboard until my mother rescued it and had it refurbished. There was no way Nana was going to clean that old thing when the 60's offered easy-care chrome! 

That's where family history stood till about the time Nana passed away in 1979. Just after her death, my mother and I had to go to Scotland as my Uncle James, the last Scottish relative, was ill. On that trip, Mum and I went to Bath and imagined Mary Ann promenading along Royal Crescent, taking the waters in the Pump Room where we had a very expensive lunch and attending Sunday service in the cathedral. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

It wasn't until the arrival of the internet that researching English family history became a possibility without considerable travel and expense. In the early 2000s Mum and I came across an "Edwards Family" website and there was Mary Ann, our ancestor. The sourcing was impeccable and traced the family all over the world and showed one of her daughters had ended up in Utah. The producer of the website was Shon R. Edwards, who is therefore a distant cousin. Sadly, that website is now hidden behind a paywall, though Shon and I are Facebook friends.

So what is the truth about Mary Ann? Census records show us that in 1861, she was a laundress in Saltford, a village near Bath. She sailed to New Zealand in steerage with her sister, and it is likely that her maternal aunt and uncle sponsored her, though by the time she arrived in Wellington, her aunt was dead. Within months, at St. Paul's Church, Wellington - which I presume is now Old St. Paul's Cathedral - she married John Edwards, a carpenter, who had emigrated to New Zealand as a child, on one of the first ships. She and John lived at Taita, an area I travelled through every day to high school, and produced a large family whom I have never got around to documenting. I keep hoping someone else will find her and add some more of her children. She was widowed before she was 50 and lived on and off with various family members until she passed away at the Soldier's Club in Hawera in 1928 aged 83.

So there it is - my "start" with family history. It all came from the photograph of a merry old lady, my grandmother's grandmother. And the tea service. It has pride of place in my dining room.