Writings of Janet Angus

Date: 1986
Surnames/tags: Wade Graham Hunter

The goal of this project is to record the family stories written by author, Janet Catherine Angus (née Cowan)

Right now this project just has one member, me. I am Philip Norton, Janet Angus is my wife's second cousin once removed. Many of the people she writes about are her ancestors hence the interest.

Here are some of the tasks that I think need to be done. I'll be working on them and could use your help.

• Janet Angus probably started the idea that Colonel Sir Robert McAra KCB was an ancestor in the McAra lineage. Subsequent research has shown that the person who fills that place is James McAra (1751-1836). Sir Robert, hero of Waterloo, died without issue in 1815. He may be an uncle or cousin but that needs more research.

Will you join me? Please post a comment here on this page, in G2G using the project tag, or send me a private message. Thanks!

The following is transcribed from a pdf of the original. It is pretty much as written barring some punctuation and layout changes.

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MY STORY OF THE FAMILY

by Janet C. Angus (nee Cowan)

1986/7

1. My grandfather - his letters; his goldmining; his parents; his coming to New Zealand; his marriage; Springbank; his children.
2. My grandmother - Her sisters; her parents; the Hunters; Miss Catherine Graham; "Jock" Graham; the death of her parents; her training as a teacher; the Grahams in Scotland; my grandmother as an old lady, and as a child in the Hunter family at Kelvin Grove; her brothers and sisters.
3. The Wades in England - General Wade - our possible relationship; the silhouette pictures; the family tree.
4. Springbank, Blackstone Hill; the Mann Wades.
5. 7 Grey Street - how it became also the Cowan home.
6. The Cowans - marriage of Robert Cowan and Annie Wade; my father at St. Bathans; his parents, and his grandparents in Scotland; my meeting John Cossar, grandson of my father's cousin at Lockerbie; my remembrance of Robert Cowan.
7. Conclusion.

Contents 1 My Grandfather's Letters 2 My Grandmother and her Sisters 2.1 Her Parents 3 James and Mary Hunter and their family 4 The Wades in England 5 Springbank, Blackstone Hill 6 The home at 7 Grey Street 7 The Cowans

My Grandfather's Letters

My grandfather, Mann Wade, must have been a whimsical, warm-hearted man judging by his letters to "his absent one", "his own", "his darling Nance" written to my mother, his daughter Annie.
She had left home when she was 16, it seems, to help in various homes, at first in Oamaru and then with the Arthur family where the children, Maurice, Hattie, and Isobel learned to call her Nanna, and where Mrs Arthur, a teacher herself, encouraged her to train as a school teacher. She said very little about her training to me, but she did talk about teaching at Blacks (Ophir), once about having to go early to light the fire on the cold mornings and sometimes begin the classes herself because the headmaster was a heavy drinker and often late. She told of the visit of the inspector, Mr. Goyen, who took her workbook to read early in the day and came back with it after school when she was sitting at her table. He slapped it down beside her suddenly and she leapt up with a startled scream. He was surprised at this sign of nerves, but it perhaps made him realise that she found that school situation rather nerve-wracking because he gave her a very good report. The only other school she taught at was St. Bathans.
In one letter written when she was 16 in 1896, Mann Wade tells of a visit of the Rev. Alexander Don. Late at night he arrived on foot and was treated like an honoured guest once he had woken the sleeping household. In another letter, farmer though he was, he complains of having "been bothered a bit, get the promise of a little gold but always turning out no good - I suppose I will find the right spot by sticking to it". Perhaps he was using the cradle which I was allowed to use years later by Uncle Will where he was washing the soil on top of the Home Hills. I still have the tiny amount of gold I washed out that day. My grandfather had owned a farm for 20 years by 1896 but still lived under the spell of gold. His eldest son Will would be 18 then and Bob 14. They would do the farmwork increasingly because their father was already 62; nevertheless, it proved to be the youngest son Tom who was the farmer of the family, my mother told me.
In 1898 Mann Wade wrote to "his own Nance" who had joined the church, to his joy: thank God this day for innumerable blessings but more for my, as I thought, sorrows, for it is out of those very sorrows that the "Peace be still of my life has come". He was to have his further sorrows when his two fine sons Bob, the schoolteacher who had put himself through High School (O.B.H.S.), Teachers College and University during his twenties, and Tom; engaged to Daisy Black of Dunedin and ready to take over the farm, did not come back from World War I.
Mann Wade was born in 1834 in Liverpool the son of Dr. William Wade a surgeon of Castle Street, Liverpool and Mary née Manifold. The story we have is that Mann fell foul of a teacher at the Liverpool Grammar School when he was 17, and sought a passage (or work?) on a sailing ship bound for the port of Melbourne. In fact, he ran away to sea. I expect he left a message at home. His father looks very dignified and quite debonair in a photo taken in Liverpool; his mother is elaborately dressed and I can see the large brown eyes and heavy eyebrows inherited by her sons in her photograph taken in Paris. There is not much likeness to either of them in a white-whiskered Mann Wade who looks reposeful and good-humoured and surprisingly young despite the whiskers. He has the round bald head that you see in his son Bob. I guess those two were alike.
How long young Mann stayed with his ship is not known. Gold was discovered Victoria in 1851. Perhaps he went gold-mining immediately and maybe he did write home; but it wasn't until his father died in 1857, that the older son William returned from St. John's Newfoundland, where he had been working in a bank. Possibly to please his mother who had become blind and was being cared for by his sister Anne, William set out to find Mann. According to Auntie Ella (William's daughter) he worked his passage out to Australia but it was a year or two before he found his young brother. They must have experienced some hard and lonely times, both of them, but they were confident, mid-nineteenth-century Englishmen. They had been well educated, and they were ready for adventure. Once they found each other they stayed together, and both became gold miners. A search in Ballarat or Bendigo might reveal their moves. One thing is certain, they joined the rush to New Zealand when gold was discovered at Gabriel's Gully. Their names appear in the Daily Telegraph: "William Manifold Wade and Mann Wade of Waipori preferred claims on 26 September 1861 at Tuapeka". William was then 31 and Mann 27. Surely correspondence was maintained with their brother Robert in Liverpool and their sister Annie Old Auntie" who went later to live with Robert and look after his children.
The next I know of the brothers is helping to build the road near their claim Pennyweight on the Blackstone HiII - St. Bathans road. Their names appear in Road Board and County records. Then there were the notices of their marriages (Mavis Burgess of Middlemarch has the Newspaper references). William married Agnes Hunter in Dunedin a few days after Mann married Catherine Hunter at Blackstone Hill on January 17, 1876. I have one willow pattern vegetable dish given by Mann and Catherine to the other couple. I gave the other to Lila Burgess on her wedding day. It was Auntie Ella who had given them to me.
I don't think either brother made a fortune in gold-mining although it is certainly a fine tweed suit that my grandfather is wearing in his photograph and a beautiful silk tie. My grandfather took up a small farm at the southern end of the Howe Hills and called it Springbank after James Hunter's home place in Campsie. The clay brick house with its four rooms is still in use. The similar shed across the cobblestone yard was called the boys' house. Poplars and willows and pine trees were planted. The house was stepped down from the slope of the hiII and therefore warm and sheltered. Up the slope were the sun dried brick farm sheds, and from here there was a wonderful view down the valley to the Old Man Range. The water from a spring over the rise of the hill was piped to a tap in the yard. I remember washing there as a child, but there was usually hot water at the range and of course a basin and jug in the bedroom. Trees were planted up a rocky gully beyond the house and here a tennis court was laid out as the family grew older. Later Uncle Will planted willows up all the gullies.
Catherine and Mann had seven healthy and clever children, but World War I played havoc with their lives. Beautiful, attractive Auntie May (who was a clerk in the D.I.C. [the Mutual Stores it was called at first] from 1910 or 11 until she retired) never married. Nor did Auntie Till until after she became Matron of Greenlane Hospital. She'd be 50 when she married her old schoolmate David McKnight in 1935. Uncle Dick, the teasing charming policeman, had the light banished or at least subdued in his life when Edith, his wife embraced the grim life of the Cooneyite religion. I remember visiting them in Addington (Christchurch) where he was Senior Inspector. There were no children. Mann had only 8 grandchildren, the four William Wades, the three Cowans, and one son of Bob Wade. There were 23 great-grandchildren.
There is a letter to be treasured written by Mann Wade to "his own Nance” from Home 14/08/06. when she must have been teaching at Blacks or already at St. Bathans. "Nance, I feel there must be a lump of love hidden in this note; may you have the luck to find it". No wonder my mother kept these letters.

My Grandmother and her Sisters

My grandmother, Catherine Hunter, was the schoolteacher at Blackstone Hill - the "fair preceptress" of the inspector's report - when she married Mann Wade, and her sister Agnes, who was housekeeping for her, married William. She was 25 and Agnes was only 18. Two other Hunter sisters were snapped up by "Central" men: Mary married John Eagle a miner of St. Bathans (there was quite a family Victoria, Bessie, Richard, Jack, Frank) and Jane married John Matheson of Hawkdun Station. She died aged 24, on July 8, 1886. ( Her children were Dave Matheson of Pembroke, Margaret Dungey (" Granny Dungey") of Moeraki and Kate Morrison). John Matheson was a son of John Matheson, a pioneer of Shag Valley. I remember visiting Davey Matheson at Wanaka with my mother and also Mrs Dungey at Moeraki as a small child and I remember Kate Morrison visiting us at Palmerston.

Her Parents

Catherine Hunter treasured some letters also, one to her father from Dr Stuart of Knox Church when her mother died in 1868 after the birth of her 10th child, and one to herself two years later (29th September 1870) when her father died. Enclosed was a "wee bit prayer". I treasure them now, and wonder who will value them after me. Catherine had come to Dunedin with these same parents on the ship Columbus in 1852. Her father James Hunter, a farmer and vet from Kelvin Grove, Stirling, "then resident at Springbank, Campsie", and her mother Mary Graham the daughter of a landowner at Beath, "then working in Kirkintilloch" were married on July 1, 1850. Catherine was born on April 11, 1851. They went via London to New Zealand probably paying their own passage. It was always a matter of pride to her family that "mother had been taken as a baby to see the Crystal Palace!". The second child John was. born at "Kelvin Grove", the farm in North East Valley taken up by the Hunters on their arrival, on November 12, 1852. There were eight more children at approximately two yearly intervals.
A sister of Mary Hunter's, Miss Catherine Graham, also came out on the "Columbus". I do not know whether it is her photo or that of my great-grandmother which I have. It was taken in Dunedin by the photographer Clifford Morris & Co. Fleet Street, Dunedin and is of a very beautiful lady. "Aunt" must have helped Mary with the children, but she also had a private school in North Dunedin. My mother remembered having to be on her best behaviour when visiting the old aunt, and one dare not mention old Jock Graham her brother who had also come out on the "Columbus" in 1852. After helping on the Hunter farm for a while Jock (or John) married a Miss Margaret Marchbank and bought a farm in Caversham in 1856, with a legacy which had come from Scotland on the death of William Graham, their father. I came across the birth notice of his first child, Catherine McAra Graham. His wife took over the farm from him and forced him out. He became quite eccentric and rather notorious, at first as the postmaster to the goldfields (Redcoat) and then as a seller of meat, a freelance writer, a lecturer. He won the admiration of some, but Aunt Catherine was not happy about his reputation. He died in the Benevolent Home on November 23, 1904. A granddaughter of his, Catherine Macintosh, married Mr Warrington Taylor of Dunedin. Aunt Catherine died in 1896. I am pleased that I wrote an article about Jock for the Early Settlers' Magazine. When Mary Hunter died in 1868, it seems that the children were separated. Aunt Catherine brought up Tom and Andrew. The four girls must have stayed together, perhaps with their father who lived for another two years only. He sold the farm almost immediately and for some reason was living at Hampden or at Moeraki · when he died. Dr Stuart's letter was sent to my grandmother at Hampden. Somehow my grandmother must have trained as a teacher in the early 70's. The inspector's visit to Blackstone Hill school was reported in the Mt. Ida Chronicle in 1875. "The tuitional management of this young seat of learning is spoken of as quite creditable to the fair preceptress". This was Miss Catherine Hunter, my grandmother. I simply had to include this quotation in "Down the Years in the Maniototo" p.147.
I hope something can be found out about what happened to Mary Hunter's children during those years following her death, and why James Hunter died so soon after and why at Hampden. Surely my great-grandparents, James and Mary Hunter must lie side by side in the Northern Cemetery in Dunedin.

James and Mary Hunter and their family

Mary Hunter had kept three samplers worked by her mother Kate McAra, aged 10, and a music book mended with newspaper which reported the Napoleonic Wars. · The cameo brooch is of a McAra ancestor and was given to Aunt Catherine, and I think the red cockade may have been Colonel McAra's.
The Grahams were well-to-do and there are some good stories to show their independent spirit. A cousin Thomas was a famous scientist Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow. His statue stands in George Square. An uncle was moderator of the Church of Scotland in 1850 (James Graham?). This same uncle, Dr. Thomas Graham's father, bought the " Hall (Ha') Ballewan" and his descendants still own it according to a magazine article sent to Nancy Brooker.
The Hunters were tallish, with blue eyes, oval faces and definite chins. I'm sure my grandmother took after the Hunters. She used to give Mann the round of the kitchen, so he said, but she was gentle and much loved by all who came to see her when she was an old lady. She was rather like Queen Victoria then, sitting with a long black dress and lace jabot amidst the family properly waited on by her daughters - and holding the various descendants together with her letters and her kind interest. As a teenager, I remember her devastatingly sharp tongue on occasions and feel sometimes it is a family trait which has descended upon me! But I wish I had asked her about her childhood at Kelvin Grove. She may have been prepared to tell me.
Dr Stuart called the James Hunter family "a happy crowd of children". A legacy of £500 from Scotland in 1856 would be a considerable boon. None of the children died in infancy but the eldest boy and the youngest died when they were young men, John who had been mustering in Marlborough in 1872 when he was only 20, and Robert living in Port Chalmers in 1896 when he was 18. One son James went to Wanganui, married a widow and was taken over by her family, it seems, for they did not come south to visit. Mary Eagle lived in Dunedin before the First World War and then moved to Napier but there was much correspondence and visiting between the Eagles and the Wades while Victoria Eagle was alive. I visited Frank Eagle's ·chemist's shop in Waipawa when I was 18 and staying with the Roslyn Tods at Otane, and tried also to visit Jack Eagle in Palmerston North.
We have kept in touch with most of the Tom Hunter family; but William who was 5 when his mother died is lost completely. He went to Australia (Charters Towers) - "never married". I remember the visits of Uncle Andrew and his wife from Auckland, but he had no children. The family of Agnes - the William Wades - stayed in Otago and we have had close association with most of them. William Wade continued as a gold miner, and it seems that after he died Agnes Wade and her daughter Ella moved to Palmerston where they lived in District Road in the house where the Kelly family lived later. Here Auntie Ella was known as "Queenie" Wade, one can imagine why. We know a little about Jane Matheson's descendants; I am delighted to have made contact with Dungeys and a daughter of Kate Morrison.
The parents would see that the children had a good education, coming as they did from a Scottish Free Church background. The Hunter children went to school in Dunedin North in grounds behind the museum where the Normal School was situated later. Their teacher was Mr Alex Stewart. I have tried to look up any records of this schooling. Only one story came to me from those early days at Kelvin Grove. My grandmother remembered being sent out to the roadside with a bucket of milk from the dairy and a cup to give a refreshing drink to the emigrants as they tramped from Port Chalmers over the hill and along to Dunedin. I'd love to know where the Kelvin Grove farmhouse was, but remember being told it was near where Chingford Park is now. The name Kelvin Grove has been given to the district. Recently I gazed excitedly at a large and beautiful painting by O’Brien - painted in the early 60's, of North East Valley looking down into it from the north-east. Whose house was the one pictured? The Ryans ("Floss and Ev") were friends from those days. They farmed near the Brown House.
My grandmother wrote well with no spelling mistakes. I remember, however, our amusement when a letter came to us at Palmerston saying that Dunedin had had "dam cold weather". Obviously she'd left the "p" off by mistake. She was not amused when we told her about it, which seems to indicate that she was more austere than her fun loving daughter. Perhaps some future research will tell us more about James Hunter, farmer and vet, her father.
I helped keep the night watch over my grandmother when she was very ill. Just before she died on 1 7th December 1934 she saw her son Tom coming to welcome her.

The Wades in England

On the other hand, much is known about the Wades, partly because Mann and William's brother Robert and his family eventually became New Zealanders after the 1914-18 War and brought some ancestral history with them. The most famous Wade was General George Wade 1673 - 1749, the road-maker of Scottish history whose grandfather was William Wade of Bath. He is claimed as an ancestor by the Wades of Liverpool although no one appears to have explained the relationship. Perhaps it was because General Wade "had two sons" though "he never married". It is possible that the Liverpool Wades (Cheshire Wades really) are descended from his brother William's family - the brother who was a Canon at Windsor Palace and is buried in St. George's Chapel there - or from the other brother Jerome who inherited the estates in Ireland (Killavalley) which had been given to Major (later Sir) William Wade by Oliver Cromwell.
Linda Cowan took notes from all the old silhouette photos which I had inherited from cousin Nan Wade of Timaru (most of them are now returned to Jessie Home in New Plymouth, but I have kept two, my great, great-grandparents). Then she and I worked out a family tree, which has been added to more recently. Dr William Wade (my great-grandfather) had an older brother called Samuel who lived at Wilkington Hall, Torporley, Cheshire. Perhaps some time his family history can be found by us. Their father, we know, was Robert Wade of Knight's Grange, who was born at Storton or Wirral possibly about 1760. (Was his grandfather General Wade's son? This also is possible). Auntie Ella insisted with some resentment that she was christened Eleanor, that was really her name, not Ella, and she was called after a daughter of Robinson Wade, a brother of Robert Wade of Knight's Grange. There are connections with two fa mi lies of Manifold, well clarified by Cousin Nan's careful explanations. These Manifolds were not related. The Manifolds who went to Victoria were brothers of my great-grandmother. The "family" date for Peter Manifold's departure was March 28, 1838, but Victorian history has the earlier dates of 1836 and names Thomas, Peter, and John Manifold. Fiona Turner (nee Wade, of Perth) has visited the Manifolds at Purrumbete, out of Melbourne. There is a small addition to the family tree which looks like another branch of the Robert Wade - Ann Mani fold fa mi ly. I can't remember where I was given that information.
It is a pity the silhouette pictures do not have dates. I remember how when I was 18 I stayed with Cousin Jessie (Mrs Rosslyn Tod of Otane) and was introduced to the ancestors who occupied a wall in the big entrance hall with their "legends" printed below each silhouette.

Springbank, Blackstone Hill

Family ancestry was treated with good humour and some slight interest by the Wade family growing up at Springbank in the happy free days before World War I. Gradually all left home. Uncle Bob in his 20's sat with the senior forms at O.B.H.S. to get his matriculation and worked rabbiting and farm labouring to put himself through University and Training College. I once saw a photo of him as President of the Teachers' College Students' Executive for his year. How he met Dolly Wilson of Oamaru I don't know, but she was his wife and they already had a little son at Balclutha, where he was teaching in the High School when he went to the war. Auntie Til trained as a nurse and helped nurse the wounded soldiers in Dunedin and victims of the influenza epidemic 1 920 before going to New Plymouth Hospital where she eventually was Matron. Uncle Will, the eldest, was mining for John Ewing at Cambrians before he was out of his teens and soon was a mine manager. He was a miner rather than a farmer, but he moved with his family of 4 back to Springbank during the war when old Mann and Catherine moved down to Dunedin. 1918 was a sad hard year for this happy family - two sons wounded, one in prison camp, both dying just at the end of the war. My mother never could bring herself to attend an Anzac service. The old father died in 1920 (on January 4 aged 86 ) just as his brother Robert arrived in Wellington from Liverpool, hoping to see him (he was 82). Then Grandma Catherine and her daughter May moved from Grove Street (St. Kilda) to Number 7 Grey Street in Musselburgh (now Rugby Street). This house was eventually left to me and sold by me.

The home at 7 Grey Street

We had good times in that house, coming and going to it as home from the time my mother sold our home in Palmerston, after my father died in 1931, and moved in to look after Grandma Wade so that Auntie May could continue to be bread winner, earning a good salary as indent clerk in the D.I.C. Office. It was a good solution for us because my mother's allowance was now £31 annually, very inadequate after my father's good superannuation which had kept us going while we were at school. For a year or more she kept a boarder at Palmerston and then leased part of the house to a schoolteacher and his wife, but she hated that. It was the time of the Depression. Both the boys went to work in offices at 16. When my grandmother became ill she gladly packed some china and linen into the old wooden chest, sold the lovely ornate tapestry chairs and couch which I loved, and most of her household goods and she and I went to live at 7 Grey Street. There were too many compensations for her to grieve too much about giving up her own home. She soon had all three of us at home again. She kept my father's chair and the polished dining room table and the seagrass seated chairs. We ate round that table for years, often 10 to 12 of us on a Sunday night for "potted meat" tea with mustard cauliflower pickle and hunks of the "coffee cake" baked on Saturday. Auntie May was good fun enjoying all the family happenings and the student or Bible Class visitors. She kept going to St. Andrew's Church where she had joined in her teens, but increasingly she found the hill hard to climb. I walked often with her in the evening. She had some wonderful friends whom we all shared - Miss Annie James, the Bottings, Daisy and Rene Purves, the Rutherford Waddells, Daisy Black, Beth Williams. It was she who started the needlework club - the Girls - Ida McConnachie, Isla Clark, Dot Strong. We swotted away in the front room, me "in the fire", and gradually got our degrees. Frank, that bright one, got two degrees.
The Grey Street - Rugby Street house was known to our own children, too, for our mother continued to live there until she died in 1962.

The Cowans

I wish I could remember the exact words of old blind Mrs Wilson at St. Bathans. "Your mother was married from this house", she said, as if she had wanted to tell me for years and at last was able to share the love and excitement. "It was so romantic and she was so happy . .. It all began when she would find bunches of violets in her school cupboard when she opened it in the mornings".
A few years ago I climbed to the ruins of the old St. Bathans school and stood in each of the two classrooms. I brought home a piece of coping stone from the roof and a blackened stone from the hearth in the master's room. I have them still. Someone has since found a curling medal labelled R. Cowan 1891 U. M. Curling Club (Upper Manukerikia?) in the ashes of that fireplace. 1891 was 21 years before my father, Robert Hastie Cowan, and his assistant Annie Catherine Wade were married so romantically. He was 54 on that day, January 17, 1912, and she was 31.
When she first went to teach at St. Bathans she boarded with some Roman Catholic people and felt rather an intruder. Then, I believe, she boarded with Mrs Wilson in a stone house just above McConnachie's store. My father boarded in the Vulcan Hotel. But now they were to live in the little stone schoolhouse, still in use in St. Bathan's main street. It was not until late in 1916 that they moved to Weston.
There is a good history of St. Bathans written by Mrs G.M. Garrett in which a record of my father's years at school is given, much of it taken from school committee minute books. Considering that he was Headmaster for 30 years, "Old Boots" as he was nicknamed certainly must have had an effect on the town. It is suggested that he did not get the promotion which he would normally have got until nearly at retirement age because he had had "fisticuffs" with an inspector who had disciplined one of his pupils unfairly. This censure must surely have been true because he was a good thorough strict teacher according to any ex-pupils I have spoken to. But maybe he didn't apply for other positions!
Not many years ago, I was shown in the Vulcan Hotel some prints from old negatives which had been found. One showed my father at the head of a school parade. The bigger boys were carrying a small coffin, and the procession was on its way to the St. Bathans' cemetery. I have been given the date 1 902 for these prints, but have not traced the name of the child. It's a poignant snapshot. It is easy to recognise my father, for he hadn't then the beard which he has in his later studio photo. No one, not even Doris McConnachie could name any of the children, but after all, Father McDevitt and Doris McConnachie were over 70 by the time I got the print. Eyesight and age made them give up easily.
I have a silver cup which was presented to the Central Otago Curling Clubs by my father in 1896. It had been won by W. McConnachie whose daughter Doris returned it to me when I lived at Grant's Braes manse. I have very little else that belonged to my father - a mason's book, a sliver salt dish, the Crosbie christening robe (in which his grandchildren were baptised although it would not meet across their solid N. Z. chests), a fine silk handkerchief and one or two classics with his neat pencil annotations. I remember a snapshot of his brother George and a photo of his cousin Mary Cowan in England, but they are gone. My father was, as far as I can find, born in Lethbridge, Victoria, on October 23, 1857. His father Matthew Cowan was a storekeeper there. It is strange that I don't remember him talking about his home, but it must have been a sad household, for the second and fourth sons both died possibly as babies and the adored little girl "Jen" met with a fatal accident when she was 4 years old. George, the eldest, was 32 when Matthew Cowan died; living at Lethbridge also he probably took over the shop. He did not marry. I can remember when news of his death came to my father in the late 20's. The property was left in December 25, 1886 to Matthew's wife Janet. I have no record of when she died. She and Matthew had been married at Lockerbie Scotland in 1853. She was Janet Crosbie of Lockerbie. He was 30, the son of George Cowan, a hotel keeper of the village of Gretna, married to Janet Johnstone. How important for me to be called Janet!
Col and I did not know all this when we went to Scotland in 1980. (We applied for Matthew Cowan's death certificate in Melbourne in 1981). I saw the name Johnstone as we approached Lockerbie, and remembered that Professor Don Cowan, whom my brother Tom had met at Ann Arbor University (their mail was being confused), had said that his relatives had come from "the edge of the great Johnstone estate", and were buried in the Johnstone K irk churchyard, St. Anne's Bridge. His great-grandfather was John Cowan.
We did not pursue this on June 2nd, 1980 for I was armed with Mary Cowan's last letter to our family, written in 1926, in which she gave us the address of her sister's son, Edward Cossar, and mentioned their baby John. I hoped to find that John, now about 55, I reckoned. I hurried into the Lockerbie P.O. at 10 to 5 and showed the address. " They've moved into town, but if you go now you will find Mr John Cossar in his draper's shop. It's near closing time". I found him, but he was not nearly as excited as I was. I realised that I had reforged the family link after two generations; he didn't know what to make of me, and it took more than a little. persuasion to get him to promise to write to New Zealand if I wrote to him. He was married but had no family - I assured him he had quite a growing collection of Cowan relations in New Zealand. He handed the letter writing over to Mrs Evelyn Cossar, the wife of his nephew. I have had two letters only from her. I wish we could go back and visit Gretna village. The Cossars of Lockerbie had lost touch with any Cowan relations.
My father was the one who made good in his family. He trained as a school teacher and taught possibly at Ballarat because he gives Ballarat as his former residence in his marriage certificate. He came over to New Zealand when he was 24 in 1881 and immediately went on to the staff of Arthur Street school. I have a copy of the Jubilee magazine with a picture of him seated in the front of his former pupils. I wonder if he told my mother why he had come over to New Zealand. I can't remember him talking to us much about Australia though we did have the stories of " The Gumnut babies" and "We of the Never Never". I remember him down on his hands and knees and giving us "piggy backs". He helped us constantly with our lessons so that we won the prizes of the Boys' Own and Girls' Own Annuals at Palmerston school regularly, and also gained top marks in the Sunday School exams. It became embarrassing at prize-givings as we grew older. He worked in the garden, tended the hens, played bowls, smoked his "plug of dark Havelock", and read the Daniel stories to us with gusto on Sunday evenings. Although his strictness irked at times, it was mainly an ingrained habit from the long years of schoolteaching. I remember a great sense of loss when he died suddenly (he had had angina) at the age of 75. I was sixteen. My mother was shattered. She must have loved him dearly.
We three Cowans had a fascinating and very happy childhood, at Weston until 1922, and then at the home in Stour Street, Palmerston for 10 years. I have so many memories. They'll be written down some time and will give me some satisfaction. Maybe they will be readable for someone else.
In the meantime my family story stands complete as far as I want it. I have gathered all that has been given or told to me into it. It is salutary for us to know our roots. It brings self-knowledge and provides that necessary quality - self respect; but I hope my story, list of facts though it may be, will introduce me and my feelings of pride and joy. ---

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