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...

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...

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 wh...