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...

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...