PETHERICK, Sarah Jane née HAMILTON
Born 1885, died 24 November 1918; buried 25 November 1918; age 33
Sarah’s grandparents were James WATERS and Emily TAYLOR (b Oddington, Gloucestershire) and they married in 1854 in Oxfordshire, England (i). They raised three sons and five daughters in Dacre Parish, Milton under Wychwood between 1854 and 1872. The 1871 England Census shows the eldest, Frederick, was 15 and an agricultural labourer like his father. His siblings were Sarah, 14, Mary 12, Benjamin 9, Emma (or Emily) 6, Fanny 4, and Alice 2. A boy named James was born in 1872.
When James senior was 42, he set off with his family for New Zealand in 1874.
The Halcione with 337 passengers and a general cargo including railway iron, sailed from the East India Docks in London on 24 March 1874. (The family sailed as assisted migrants, costing the New Zealand Government £123.15.0d). The ship dropped anchor in Hawke’s Bay on 4 July 1874 (ii).
The trip lasted 105 days, during which the master, Captain Wright, died as did three others, while two babies were born. The chief officer, J Croker took command after the captain’s death. Three men fell overboard even before the voyage got under way when the gangway ladder slipped – the second officer, carpenter, and a seaman, Arthur DAVIES. Davies was never seen again (iii).
Emily Waters died soon after the family arrived in New Zealand. She was just 40. Her husband James lived another 30 years, until he drowned in the Tutaekuri River in the Hawke’s Bay on 10 December 1905 while an inmate of an old person’s home (iv).
Emily and James’ fifth child Emma, (in some records called Emily Walters), married James HAMILTON, a labourer, in New Zealand. They had two daughters and four sons and lived at first in parts of Canterbury. Sarah Jane, the main subject of this obituary, was their first child, and was born early in 1885 and registered in Rangiora (v). She attended school from 1890 in Southbrook and was followed by Ellinor Grace (b1886), Joseph Thomas b1887, William James b1889, Hugh Henry b1892, and Isaac John b1894. By 1896 the family had moved to the North Island to live in Takapau, Hawkes Bay as both James and Emily appeared there on the Waipawa electoral roll in that year.
Sarah Jane later married Albert Leonard Roser PETHERICK, in 1907. The couple lived in Wellington, at 36 Webb Street, Te Aro, and he worked as a railway yard shunter. Sarah’s husband was the second child of George and Charlotte Petherick (née TASKER) (vi). He was born in Waipawa in 1883 and it may have been there or through their connections with that place that the couple met.
Sarah and Albert had five children in Wellington between 1908 and 1916. Their first were twins born in 1908, Frederick George and Norma Caroline. A daughter followed in 1911, Dora Charlotte Emily. Albert James arrived in 1913 and Elma Alice in 1916 (vii). They attended school close to home at Mt Cook Infants, and then Mt Cook Boys or Girls in Buckle Street. (Norma transferred to Gisborne, perhaps when her father moved there for a time to work before 1915) (viii).
The children also belonged to the Rising Star Juvenile Temple, a lodge order known as the Independent Order of Good Templars or IOGT. Promoting the temperance cause among the young (ix), it met in Taranaki Street at St Peter’s Mission Hall (x).
Their mother Sarah caught influenza in November 1918. She was taken to the temporary hospital at the St John’s Church schoolroom in Dixon Street, not far from her Webb Street home, and was 33 when she died there on 24 November 1918. She was buried the next day in the Public 2 section of Karori Cemetery in plot 318 I (xi). Her plot, however, was never purchased and the grave is not formed. No one else was buried with Sarah in later years.
Three memorial notices were published in the Evening Post a year after her death. The first was placed by the superintendent and members of the Rising Star Juvenile Temple, IOGT while a second from her husband, children and Uncle Jim, (perhaps James Waters) recorded:
Oh could we have raised her dying head
Or heard her last farewell
The blow would not have been so hard
To those who loved her well.
The third notice was inserted by some family friends, the FJ Robbins family from Napier, sustaining the link her grandparents had maintained since arriving in New Zealand back in 1874.
Sarah’s eldest son Frederick left school at the end of 1919 for work, the same year his twin sister Norma achieved proficiency. It is not known how the children managed without their mother as their father did not remarry until 1930, by which time Sarah’s youngest child was nearly grown up. A lot of work probably fell on to Norma in caring for her siblings in Webb Street.
By 1928 Sarah’s widower husband Albert had moved to Montgomery Street in Waipukurau, closer to his older brother George and his family in Waipawa. Albert continued to work there as a railway shunter. He remarried in Wellington on 26 November 1930, to Myrtle Emma Elizabeth McDIARMID. He died in Auckland in 1957.
Researched by Penny Holden (whose daughter-in-law is a descendant of Charlotte and Albert Petherick through their son Charles) and Jenny Robertson. Written by Jenny Robertson
Grave Information:
Section PUBLIC2
Plot: 318 I
Sources:
(i) Taken from passenger record on Family Search.
(ii) Ibid
(iii) Taken from http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bre01Whit-t1-body-d26.html See also Evening Post 7 July 1874, page 2.
(iv) According to a report in the Bush Advocate of 11 December 1905, page 8, James was seen to walk deliberately into the water and shortly afterwards was found to have drowned in a deep pool.
(v) https://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?db=NZLBirthIndex&h=1932125&indiv=try&o_vc=Record:OtherRecord&rhSource=8950
(vi) When he was 19, George Petherick was an early New Zealand migrant arriving in Wellington on the Aurora in January 1840. See http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bre02Whit-t1-body-d1-d1-d7.html for a description of the ship and the voyage. To this day the name of this ship is remembered in Petone as a street name (along with other ships of the time such as the Cuba, the Oriental, the Tory, the Adelaide, and the Bolton, all of which brought new settlers to Petone). George’s wife Charlotte had arrived in New Zealand at 17, a servant who travelled from Sussex to Hawkes Bay on the Halcione in July 1874, on the same voyage as the Waters family. In November 1874, she married George Petherick or Pethrick and began a family in Waipawa.
(vii) Dora, Charlotte, Albert, Frederick, and George were of course family names from the Petherick and Tasker sides of the family while Emily came from Sarah’s Taylor grandmother.
(viii) NZSG KiwiDisk v2, 2015, school records
(ix) Young people were encouraged by many different groups to sign a pledge that they would not drink alcohol when they grew up. People who did in excess sometimes took scarce resources away from supporting their families, which left them short of necessities such as food, education, clothing, and rent etc, but the counter view is that especially in New Zealand and Australia, total abstinence supported/demanded by the churches meant that young people were deprived of the opportunity to learn to drink safely and what their limits were. This is considered to have contributed to the binge drinking culture we are still addressing today.
(x) The Evening Post reported many youth branch IOGT weekly meetings over 1917 and 1918 with the Petherick twins in attendance at St Peter’s Mission Hall. One example was 27 August 1918, page 4.
(xi) The plot summary shows Sarah was buried by Flyger’s funeral service, records of which are not known to now exist, at least in the public domain. These might have showed who paid for her funeral for example or, if no one had been able to, whether the funeral director received the standard Public Health £7 grant for completing the burial.
Born 1885, died 24 November 1918; buried 25 November 1918; age 33
Sarah’s grandparents were James WATERS and Emily TAYLOR (b Oddington, Gloucestershire) and they married in 1854 in Oxfordshire, England (i). They raised three sons and five daughters in Dacre Parish, Milton under Wychwood between 1854 and 1872. The 1871 England Census shows the eldest, Frederick, was 15 and an agricultural labourer like his father. His siblings were Sarah, 14, Mary 12, Benjamin 9, Emma (or Emily) 6, Fanny 4, and Alice 2. A boy named James was born in 1872.
When James senior was 42, he set off with his family for New Zealand in 1874.
The Halcione with 337 passengers and a general cargo including railway iron, sailed from the East India Docks in London on 24 March 1874. (The family sailed as assisted migrants, costing the New Zealand Government £123.15.0d). The ship dropped anchor in Hawke’s Bay on 4 July 1874 (ii).
The trip lasted 105 days, during which the master, Captain Wright, died as did three others, while two babies were born. The chief officer, J Croker took command after the captain’s death. Three men fell overboard even before the voyage got under way when the gangway ladder slipped – the second officer, carpenter, and a seaman, Arthur DAVIES. Davies was never seen again (iii).
Emily Waters died soon after the family arrived in New Zealand. She was just 40. Her husband James lived another 30 years, until he drowned in the Tutaekuri River in the Hawke’s Bay on 10 December 1905 while an inmate of an old person’s home (iv).
Emily and James’ fifth child Emma, (in some records called Emily Walters), married James HAMILTON, a labourer, in New Zealand. They had two daughters and four sons and lived at first in parts of Canterbury. Sarah Jane, the main subject of this obituary, was their first child, and was born early in 1885 and registered in Rangiora (v). She attended school from 1890 in Southbrook and was followed by Ellinor Grace (b1886), Joseph Thomas b1887, William James b1889, Hugh Henry b1892, and Isaac John b1894. By 1896 the family had moved to the North Island to live in Takapau, Hawkes Bay as both James and Emily appeared there on the Waipawa electoral roll in that year.
Sarah Jane later married Albert Leonard Roser PETHERICK, in 1907. The couple lived in Wellington, at 36 Webb Street, Te Aro, and he worked as a railway yard shunter. Sarah’s husband was the second child of George and Charlotte Petherick (née TASKER) (vi). He was born in Waipawa in 1883 and it may have been there or through their connections with that place that the couple met.
Sarah and Albert had five children in Wellington between 1908 and 1916. Their first were twins born in 1908, Frederick George and Norma Caroline. A daughter followed in 1911, Dora Charlotte Emily. Albert James arrived in 1913 and Elma Alice in 1916 (vii). They attended school close to home at Mt Cook Infants, and then Mt Cook Boys or Girls in Buckle Street. (Norma transferred to Gisborne, perhaps when her father moved there for a time to work before 1915) (viii).
The children also belonged to the Rising Star Juvenile Temple, a lodge order known as the Independent Order of Good Templars or IOGT. Promoting the temperance cause among the young (ix), it met in Taranaki Street at St Peter’s Mission Hall (x).
Their mother Sarah caught influenza in November 1918. She was taken to the temporary hospital at the St John’s Church schoolroom in Dixon Street, not far from her Webb Street home, and was 33 when she died there on 24 November 1918. She was buried the next day in the Public 2 section of Karori Cemetery in plot 318 I (xi). Her plot, however, was never purchased and the grave is not formed. No one else was buried with Sarah in later years.
Three memorial notices were published in the Evening Post a year after her death. The first was placed by the superintendent and members of the Rising Star Juvenile Temple, IOGT while a second from her husband, children and Uncle Jim, (perhaps James Waters) recorded:
Oh could we have raised her dying head
Or heard her last farewell
The blow would not have been so hard
To those who loved her well.
The third notice was inserted by some family friends, the FJ Robbins family from Napier, sustaining the link her grandparents had maintained since arriving in New Zealand back in 1874.
Sarah’s eldest son Frederick left school at the end of 1919 for work, the same year his twin sister Norma achieved proficiency. It is not known how the children managed without their mother as their father did not remarry until 1930, by which time Sarah’s youngest child was nearly grown up. A lot of work probably fell on to Norma in caring for her siblings in Webb Street.
By 1928 Sarah’s widower husband Albert had moved to Montgomery Street in Waipukurau, closer to his older brother George and his family in Waipawa. Albert continued to work there as a railway shunter. He remarried in Wellington on 26 November 1930, to Myrtle Emma Elizabeth McDIARMID. He died in Auckland in 1957.
Researched by Penny Holden (whose daughter-in-law is a descendant of Charlotte and Albert Petherick through their son Charles) and Jenny Robertson. Written by Jenny Robertson
Grave Information:
Section PUBLIC2
Plot: 318 I
Sources:
(i) Taken from passenger record on Family Search.
(ii) Ibid
(iii) Taken from http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bre01Whit-t1-body-d26.html See also Evening Post 7 July 1874, page 2.
(iv) According to a report in the Bush Advocate of 11 December 1905, page 8, James was seen to walk deliberately into the water and shortly afterwards was found to have drowned in a deep pool.
(v) https://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?db=NZLBirthIndex&h=1932125&indiv=try&o_vc=Record:OtherRecord&rhSource=8950
(vi) When he was 19, George Petherick was an early New Zealand migrant arriving in Wellington on the Aurora in January 1840. See http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bre02Whit-t1-body-d1-d1-d7.html for a description of the ship and the voyage. To this day the name of this ship is remembered in Petone as a street name (along with other ships of the time such as the Cuba, the Oriental, the Tory, the Adelaide, and the Bolton, all of which brought new settlers to Petone). George’s wife Charlotte had arrived in New Zealand at 17, a servant who travelled from Sussex to Hawkes Bay on the Halcione in July 1874, on the same voyage as the Waters family. In November 1874, she married George Petherick or Pethrick and began a family in Waipawa.
(vii) Dora, Charlotte, Albert, Frederick, and George were of course family names from the Petherick and Tasker sides of the family while Emily came from Sarah’s Taylor grandmother.
(viii) NZSG KiwiDisk v2, 2015, school records
(ix) Young people were encouraged by many different groups to sign a pledge that they would not drink alcohol when they grew up. People who did in excess sometimes took scarce resources away from supporting their families, which left them short of necessities such as food, education, clothing, and rent etc, but the counter view is that especially in New Zealand and Australia, total abstinence supported/demanded by the churches meant that young people were deprived of the opportunity to learn to drink safely and what their limits were. This is considered to have contributed to the binge drinking culture we are still addressing today.
(x) The Evening Post reported many youth branch IOGT weekly meetings over 1917 and 1918 with the Petherick twins in attendance at St Peter’s Mission Hall. One example was 27 August 1918, page 4.
(xi) The plot summary shows Sarah was buried by Flyger’s funeral service, records of which are not known to now exist, at least in the public domain. These might have showed who paid for her funeral for example or, if no one had been able to, whether the funeral director received the standard Public Health £7 grant for completing the burial.