52 Ancestors - Week 11 - Lucky - Helen (Riley) McMinn
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...