Feet Up; Time to Think

 Recently, I was doing some research into my 3x great aunt, Mary Ann Seldon Buck née Salmon and her husband George Green Buck. They arrived in Wellington on the Birman in 1842   and were among the earliest settlers in the Hutt Valley. Mary Ann died at Taita aged 50 on 4 July 1867. On the 15 October that year, her nieces, Alice and Mary Ann Grey, left London for Wellington on the Wild Duck, and as I had never checked the exact dates, I assumed the young women had come out to New Zealand to support their uncle in The Travellers' Rest at Taita after their aunt's death. The dates suggest this is unlikely to be the case. News like this would have taken two months to get to the United Kingdom even by mail steamer .  On their arrival, they would have had the double shock that not only had their aunt died, but also their older brother, William, had drowned some weeks later. These deaths must have been an horrific shock for their mother, Sarah Grey, in Bath who lost...

And still this disease is with us, though we in New Zealand have it very easy stuck on our waka in the middle of the Pacific. Life fairly much goes on as normal - unless you want to go on an overseas trip or have family who can't get home.  We've had a few glitches along the way though. An Auckland outbreak in August saw us return to Level 2. Auckland was on Level 3 for some weeks, and sadly three more lives were lost: two brothers and a well-respected Cook Island doctor. So what did that mean for us in Motueka? Not a lot really. There was supposed to be only one person from each family in the supermarket, we had to sit at an assigned table in a hospitality establishment and have table service, we continued to use our Covid Tracker app. The bubble buddy asked yesterday where it kept our visits recorded and I showed him. Back at level 1 now, the biggest concern is a group of several hundred Russian seamen who have been imported to work on fishing vessels. Despite a number of pre...

The days roll slowly by. Each one feels just the same as summer turns slowly into autumn. The forecast today is for rain; the sky keeps threatening it, but as yet, there has only been a smattering of drizzle. For that reason, I walked with my umbrella early this morning, straight after breakfast rather than after lunch. I was struck by the quiet once again. A few garden projects in my neighbourhood are coming along, and a local painter is re-doing the outside of his house - I wonder if he has just been too busy before now. Walkers outnumber cars on the road and it's heartening to see children out on bikes trying to race their parents. Without any traffic, that is considerably safer. Over the last week, nothing much has happened at home though. The grapes are nearly finished and the feijoas, very small this year, continue to fall off the tree. The last of the peppers are ripening. On the virus front, there have been four deaths and yesterday alone there were two. All deaths have...

The sun is shining again. Yesterday was damp and cool and our weather seemed to reflect the mood of the country. We've had our first Covid-19 fatality, an elderly woman in Greymouth. How she contracted the disease seems somewhat of a mystery although she had attended a funeral with a number of people. As someone with COPD, she was very much in the target group, unfortunately, and though she presented with influenza symptoms, it was not expected that she would be carrying the disease. The biggest issue seem people not complying with the directive to stay home. A group in a backpackers' in Queenstown decided a party was appropriate - the stereo has been confiscated by police. There are also people who think it is acceptable to go to the beach, or bike for more than 70 km around Auckland! The police report that after an initial increase, family violence reporting appears to have lessened. Fingers crossed that it continues. On the home front, it's quiet as usual. My bubble ...

Today is my bubble buddy's 75th birthday. He was born toward the end of WW2 and this is the strangest birthday he has ever had. In other years, we've always made a point of spending it with our son, but this year that is impossible. The only travel allowed is the short drive to the supermarket. We haven't been there for 5 days, I think, which is most unusual for us. This afternoon, as a birthday treat, the buddy, by himself, went to the supermarket to get a few things we needed - some bananas, a festive dessert, some beer and wine. He said the queue was reasonable, about 4 minutes, and he wore gloves so his hands didn't pick up anything nasty. On his return, his purchases have been well washed down or sprayed to keep us as safe as possible. That's us at home for another few days. The thing that strikes me about lockdown is how quiet it is. In the morning, we are usually awoken about 6:50am when the garage over the road is opened and a Hi-lux heads out - it's q...

I sit waiting for the Prime Minister's 3pm update. Hearts cascade up the screen although she has not yet reached the podium. A minion adjusts one of the side banners. Stay home. Break the chain. Stop transmission. This has become part of the daily pattern: a numbers report from Ashley Bloomfield at 1pm, Jacinda Ardern at 3pm. Not surprisingly, the number of cases have increased. The worrying aspect is that there is a man in his seventies on a ventilator in Nelson Hospital. The update has nothing especially new. The Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, reiterates that employers must pass the subsidy they receive on to their workers, ideally to 80% of their usual wage. It sounds as if not every employer is doing this. Otherwise, the day has slowly ground on. I spent the morning on Messenger with Spark sorting out our Netflix account. Let's hope I've done it correctly and don't end up paying twice. On my neighbourhood walk, things seemed much quieter than yesterday. H...

Since 11:59 last night, New Zealand has been on lockdown. The only places we can go by car are the supermarket or to get medical attention. It's a coolish autumn day here; the days are definitely drawing in so even at 7:30am it isn't quite light. Looking across the road, I could see Kelly already hard at work in her home office. It was a slow morning: the shower is clean, biscuits have been baked. My bubble buddy went out on his bike and noted the number of people talking across streets to each other. Lunch is therefore a little later too, finished in time to hear the latest statistical update. There are now 283 cases. Today a number of travellers showing symptoms have been put into quarantine in Auckland, and 160 others have been helped by police to find a place to self-isolate. It is disappointing to hear that some businesses have decided they are "essential services" and are still operating. Others locally, like Milk and More and Victoria Gardens, somehow don...

We're all set, my bubble buddy and I - at least for the next few days. A trip to the supermarket yesterday morning allowed us to buy some perishables like bread and milk, and a couple of cakes of chocolate. Life has to offer some pleasures. We also managed to get three bars of soap. It set an alarm on the till just like alcohol. As there had been no signs up restricting numbers, I was allowed all three. Lining up at 7:30am was strange. We had a game plan and separate shopping lists to minimise our time in store. Only a few people were admitted at one time. I suspect, only one of us will be allowed in next time. After rushing back home, I waited for my doctor's phone appointment. It was quick as I knew exactly what I wanted; an asthma preventer just in case. I was surprised to learn that I hadn't had one since 2014, and none regularly since 2009. Getting the actual medication was a little more of a challenge. After lunch, I decided to stroll up to the pharmacy, during my a...

"This is history. It’s that simple. Before you nod and click on to the next article, just take a quick moment. Take a few seconds to let it sink in. What you decide to do in the next few days, weeks and months is something that will become family history. It is something that academics will study. And this isn’t just in general terms. I am talking about what you choose to do tomorrow, or next week. What some of you decide to do  tomorrow  could be something that a great-grandchild asks about. It could be what schoolchildren learn about in a hundred years. Our voices and thoughts, our hopes and expectations and our petty arguments will be on a wall in Te Papa, along with those dank memes we’re all posting." This comment rolled through on my Facebook feed yesterday from  The Spinoff  and it made me think. This IS history - maybe my great-grandchild might like to know what we did get up to during the first national emergency in my lifetime. (I am 61; one of those...

Some time between 18 December 1863 and 9th January 1865, Charles Woolcock arrived in New Zealand, a place far, far away from Cornwall and his wife and child. The name of the ship or ships he sailed upon is proving rather elusive and I've always wondered if he either came via Australia or under an assumed name to hide his whereabouts. You may be wondering how I can be so accurate about the dates. Some years ago, the UK National Archives made available files from the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. I assumed it was a divorce document to dissolve the 1853 marriage of Charles Woolcock and Betsy Lawry that took place at Perranzabuloe, Cornwall. When it was finally transcribed, I was able to piece together the nature of a Victorian marriage and work out approximately when Charles arrived in New Zealand. The May 1865 document in the archives is not a divorce or even a deed of separation. Instead it is a petition from Betsy for the protection of her earnings. It clearly o...

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...

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...

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...