Feet Up; Time to Think

On Armistice Day last year I was sent a very special photograph - a boy placing red roses, as poppies were out of season, beneath a gravestone in a kirkyard in the south west of Scotland. That photograph tells the story of 160 years of my Scottish family history. The boy is my nephew and the gravestone is a memorial to his great great grandparents, his grandparents and great aunt and uncle. The saddest part is the initial reason for the headstone. In May 1916 my grandfather, John, was in the south of England awaiting embarkation to France with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, I think. He spied a notice asking him to visit the padre. The news was bad - his 11 month old daughter, Jean, had passed away. He was given leave to return to Scotland to bury her before returning to his unit at the front. While that is sad enough, I then think about the man who carved the headstone - her grandfather, Sandy King, a monumental mason. Jean and her mother, Mary, who was an only child, had b...

New Zealand's coast is littered with shipwrecks, some caused by the weather and some by poor seamanship. The wreck of the Queen Bee on Farewell Spit in 1877 was caused by the latter, but finding her 30 passengers and crew was made more difficult by a storm. The tenacity of mariners like Olaf Sven Nilsson aka William Johnson meant that all but one were rescued. Nilsson/Johnson must have experienced many storms at sea as he had arrived in Nelson, New Zealand from Sweden as ship's crew in the early 1860s. The Queen Bee should have arrived in Nelson from London early in August 1877 and she was slightly overdue. About 8:30pm on Monday 6 August she sighted the lighthouse at Farewell Spit right at the very top of the South Island, but by midnight she had run aground about 6 miles from shore. As the ship was taking on water, and gunshots, flares and burning blue light had failed to attract attention of anyone on shore, the captain sent the second officer and some crew in a dingy f...

Taxes and not paying tax on time are the main reasons my great great grandfather, Charles Woolcock, is remembered in the annals of New Zealand parliamentary history. (Charles is sure to appear again this year as he is my most interesting ancestor.) If you read my blog about Sister Lydia Woolcock last week, you may remember that I mentioned her father, Charles, had fled to New Zealand in 1864 and that he had “aspirations”. Those aspirations, I suspect, were social status and power. I'd like to think he too wanted social change. Within ten years of his arrival in New Zealand, Charles had moved away from farming and had set up a very successful store on the Greymouth goldfields. He had also sought political office, becoming a borough councillor, a member of the Provincial Council, then Provincial Secretary and Secretary for Public Works in the Province of Westland. His next step was to become a Member of the House of Representatives. He was duly elected in November 1875. ...

The term "maiden aunt" is negative, but my grandfather's maiden aunt, Lydia Woolcock, was destined to make a difference regardless of marital status. Sadly, until I started my family history research, I had never heard of her. Did any of her fifteen New Zealand half-nieces and nephews know about her either? Lydia, an only child, was born in 1854 into a middle class Cornwall farming family with incredibly strong Wesleyan roots. Her mother, Betsy Lawry, was the cousin of the Rev. Walter Lawry, who was the second Wesleyan minister to New South Wales, the first missionary to Tonga and later superintendent of the Wesleyan missions in New Zealand and Fiji. Betsy had married at 43 and must have been surprised to have Lydia, the honeymoon baby, the following year. Betsy's husband, Charles Woolcock, a mere lad of 25, was a successful farmer who had aspirations. Why he married a woman so much older than himself is anyone's guess. Was there pressure from his widowed mother...