Family recipe - xmas cake

William Henry Williams

MR. WILLIAM HENRY WILLIAMS, Crown Lands Ranger and Land Officer for the district of South Canterbury, was born in 1840, and came with his parents to New Zealand when a boy, arriving at Auckland by the ship “Victory” in 1851. He received his education in Onehunga, and on leaving school, served two years in a builder's office with a view to studying for an architect, but, changing his mind, he took an engagement in the Provincial Government office. In 1861 he went to Otago and entered into sheep-farming pursuits with Mr. F. D. Rich and on his own account until 1867, when he returned to Auckland and Joined in the “rush” to the Thames, where rich gold had been recently found, and was speculating for three years on different parts of the fields. In 1870, he was appointed manager of the Bay of Islands Coal Company's mines at Kawakawa. During his term of management he was successful in getting native coal used for the first time in the Union Company's steamers. He relinquished his position in 1878 to take the management of the Shag Point coal mine (of which he was part owner) in Otago, and was identified with that mine till 1890, when he lost his interest and went in for farming. In 1894 he was temporarily appointed in the Land Office in Invercargill, and after serving eighteen months in that town, was appointed to his present position in Timaru. It was through his influence that the Government were persuaded to use native coal on the railways in the South Island. He is a member of the Oddfellows lodge. He has been twice married, having lost his first wife in 1884, and has seven children, all by the first marriage.

retrieved from the electronic text centre, July 2014

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cyc03Cycl-t1-body1-d7-d1-d8.html

Charlotte Allman

tiny picture representing today's 100 days project post about Charlotte Allman - my great-great-grandmother

will rectify/repost when I have a laptop (ipad problems)

Richard Minnis

Richard Minnis

Man of mystery and all around Oddfellow

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Richard's early life and family are a mystery. I haven't even been able to discover exactly when he arrived in NZ.

Richard died in 1899 at the young age of 45. According to his obituary he arrived in NZ during the 1870s and was an early settler in the Ashburton district. His death certificate records that he had been resident in NZ for 30 years.

He married Lucy Fowler in 1877 and they had a large family (three sons, four daughters), including my great-grandmother, Nesta.

We know he was an Irishman (his death certificate says he was born in Belfast) and my grandad always maintained that the Irish side of his family was 'orange' (Protestant).

Oddfellow

Richard Minnis was the secretary of the Ashburton Oddfellows' Lodge for many years. And what, you may ask, are Oddfellows? Here's what the freemasons say about them:

There are many theories about how Odd Fellows got its name but the generally accepted belief is that they where a group of labouring men involved in odd trades or odd jobs who banded together to form their brotherhood. At that time, there was still no welfare state, National Health Insurance, personal insurance or even trade unions, so these groups of ordinary people found it necessary to group together and contribute some of their hard-earned wages to a common fund which they could use for unfortunate times such as sickness, losing a job and even death. They would work together to help each other and the unfortunate families back on their feet, whether it was rebuilding a barn that had burned or putting in a new crop after a devastating season. Such brotherhood came to be known as “Odd Fellows,” said to be named by the general population who thought they were “an odd bunch of fellows” who would behave in such a selfless and seemingly impractical fashion. The group then adopted the name.

Retrieved from: https://www.freemasons.co.nz/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=38 on 13 July 2014 

13 July 2014

hunting granny day 2 - and the wiki tree

I'm 2 days into the 100-day project.  It's harder than I thought.  Sacrificing content for looks is one issue, along with keeping entries bite-sized.  I think I'll get better as I go along (hope).

Also the various apps I'd hoped to use to patch together images and text are more cumbersome than I'd imagined they'd be.  I've ended up rolling with a pages template.  It's reasonably clean, but hogs space.   Then, today, there were upload issues.  Turns out they're a known bug, and being fixed, but it made the upload process frustrating.

I've also joined wiki tree - the international family tree project.  I like its goals - to be truly free and collaborative, with a lovely honour code encompassing these shared undertakings.  However, there has been quite a bit of grunt work learning about exporting a GEDCOM (internationally accepted file for a family tree database) and then cleaning it up to merge into the wiki tree itself.

Also, I get the feeling that wiki tree is largely a US undertaking - so probably not a huge number of collaborators out there for me.  I suppose only time will tell.

Finally, I seem to have inadvertently dumped my Sarah Pratt journal transcript.  God knows how/when. Am so irritated with myself about that.  Oh well.  Maybe I'll turn up another copy somewhere.

100 days

I've signed up to the hundred days project as a vehicle to push me along with the granny hunt.

I hope to flesh out the dead bones of the family, by looking at 100 different people from the tree.

My question is whether this project might help me to make sense of our family, mainly as groups of NZ settlers, but also finding some narrative threads for me to worry at...

My first subject is most likely going to be Margaret Forbes (nee Cooper) who also features in the DNZB and on the Te Ara website as an innkeeper and land protester.

She and her husband, Robert, ran the New Leith Inn, in Onehunga, during the 1840s.

Six degrees...

I'm increasingly of the view that it's more like 3 or 4 degrees of separation. Just saying...