Feet Up; Time to Think

On 28 January 2011, you may be surprised to learn that King Robert the Bruce of Scotland gained a new "Kindly Tenant of Lochmaben". My uncle, aged 93, had passed away and my brother inherited the title - if that's what you would call it - and a very small piece of land in the South West of Scotland. The area known as the "Royal Four Towns" includes the villages of Heck, Smallholm, Hightae and Greenhill, and is close to Lockerbie where Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on 21 December 1988. The land itself is a small, stony field and I remember standing with my uncle looking over the gate at the brambles. There was no dwelling or homestead, but a pile of rocks suggested there may have been a tiny cottage in the distant past. Firstly, you may be interested in the history of "Kindly Tenants" and how they could exist in 2018. Over seven hundred years ago, in June 1314, Robert the Bruce led an army of maybe 10,000 Scottish soldiers to capture Stirling Castle he...

My mother-in-law, Elsie, passed away quite suddenly on 13 August 2000. She was 86 years old. When the funeral director came to complete her death certificate, I scoured the house for Elsie's birth and marriage certificates which she used for a new passport before emigrating to New Zealand. They were nowhere to be found, which was no surprise; Elsie was very good at throwing out things. Her date and place of birth and the details of her husband and her mother were easy. I knew nothing of her father at all, other than the vague, "Oh, he was killed in the Great War." Phone calls to her half-sisters in England were just as unproductive, though they did confirm the story of her father's death. Five years earlier, I had attempted to find out the name of Elsie's father while deciding upon the name for our son. We wanted him to have family names. Elsie had been adamant that her father had been killed in the First World War, but no, she couldn't remember his name. On...

My initial thought when seeing the prompt "Lucky" was to write about me, but from a genealogical point of view, that didn't seem quite right. As the Irish are celebrated during March, and it's close to St. Patrick's Day, the subject of the "Lucky" blog will be my great great grandmother, Helen or sometimes Ellen Riley, who married Alexander McMinn, a prominent 19th Century New Zealand journalist. I always believed that Helen was the first European child born at Himitangi near Foxton as that is what my grandmother, Marcia, believed. In fact, Marcia was wrong. Helen was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1845 into a poor Catholic family. Those three facts were potentially a death sentence for Helen as from September that year, potato blight had mysteriously occurred initially around Dublin and before long Ireland was in famine. However, Helen's family had an escape route. In 1841, Helen's father Francis Farrell Riley had enlisted in the 65th Regiment o...

A couple of weeks ago, the top part of the South Island of New Zealand was inundated by Ex-Tropical Cyclone Gita. The Takaka Hill Road was washed out leaving Golden Bay isolated from the rest of New Zealand. The only way out was by air or by sea for some days, and food and fuel had to be barged in. To my 4x great aunt, Ann Lovell, the sister-in-law of Hester, this situation would have been normal. As one of the first European women in Golden Bay, Ann was no stranger to isolation or adversity. Ann arrived at Nelson, New Zealand on the Lord Auckland in February 1842. The five month voyage from the West India Docks had taken a toll on the Lovell family. Their younger daughter, Mercy, had tragically died. Ann was bitter as Captain Jardine had refused to supply potatoes for her sick child who craved them. She refused to donate to the silver snuff box presented by other grateful passengers to thank the captain for their safe arrival. Life did not get any easier once dry land was reache...

This morning I walked through the living room of my 3x great grandmother, Hester. Well, if I'm honest, it may not have been her living room, it may just have been her garden. Around me the stall holders of the Motueka Sunday Market, held on Deck's Reserve, were selling everything from blueberries to second hand hoes. It wasn't until I found Hester's will and newspaper advertisements related to her estate, that I realised the connection. Hester passed away in Motueka in 1898 aged 85 and after her death, the property she and her husband Ben had cleared of forest and where they had run a store, was auctioned. It was bought by Dr. Deck, one of the witnesses to her will "signed" with a very shaky cross the previous year. In the 1950s, these three acres were gifted by Dr. Deck's daughters to the people of Motueka and are now the Deck's Reserve. Half of the area is a carpark during the week but a market on Sundays, and half is parkland where the local histo...