Feet Up; Time to Think

All of my direct ancestors were English speaking, born in England, the South West of Scotland or the northern part of Ireland. Of those who were early settlers to New Zealand, some spoke Maori. I know my 3x great grandfather Ben Lovell found this very challenging, though my 2x great grandfather, Alexander McMinn, was fluent enough to act as an interpreter on occasions. Perhaps this was because Alexander was university-educated, reputed to speak eight languages, so adding another might not have been too difficult. My most linguistically interesting "ancestor" started off life as a French speaker, must have charmed the ladies with his accented English and ended up dying in Naples, so he would have been a speaker of French, English and Italian. To be honest, Augustin Bullot, is not really my ancestor. He was the grandfather of my 2x great grandmother's second husband, but I've borrowed him as there are a great number of his descendants in New Zealand. Augustin Bullot...

Sometimes we learn things about our ancestors in the strangest places. The last place I expected to hear about my great grandmother, Eda Sarah Edwards, was during a eulogy at my own mother's funeral. My mother had been a wonderful grandmother and her grandmother, Eda, had been her role model. Eda Edwards was born at Taita in the Hutt Valley, New Zealand in 1886. She was the youngest child of John, a carpenter, the local undertaker and small farmer. John had arrived in New Zealand as a child in 1842. Her mother, Mary Ann Grey, had emigrated from Bath in 1867 and had married John within two months of her arrival in Wellington. When she was aged about 6, Eda’s father died suddenly on his way home from Wellington. Where Mary Ann and her family lived immediately after John's death is unclear though they may have remained at Taita for some years before moving across the Rimutaka Ranges to the Wairarapa. She may have met her future husband, Archibald Forbes McMinn, in Carterton ar...

Twenty minutes walk away from home in the Motueka Cemetery is the grave of my 3x great grandfather, Ben Lovell. As I walk along Thorp Street, up Old Wharf Road and down Motueka Quay, I often wonder what Ben would think of the town he helped build. A lot has changed since his arrival here in 1842, over 175 years ago. The "bones" of Motueka are still the same. The major roads across the plain remain laid out in the grid pattern from the 1842 survey by Samuel Stephens. The roads themselves would have been paid for, then built by labourers like Ben and his sons, Ben and Alfred. His son, Thomas, born here in 1845, definitely helped as he is recorded as a contractor for the Motueka Roads Board in the 1870s. Most of the native forest, sadly, is gone and Ben would have been part of that. As a sawyer, he would have cut down those rimu, matai and totara for export, firewood, fencing and building materials. The fertile land, where Maori had grown tons of potatoes in clearings under th...