Jane Grey

Notes provided by Helen Edwards, who has carried out extensive research on the women who signed Sheet 156, including mapping where they lived. Download pdf of this research here.

Alice Mary Grey [Alice M. Grey, Roslyn] (No. 12) and Jane Kippin Grey, nee Brotherston [Jane Grey, Roslyn] (No.13)

Land description: Allotment 12, Block 1, Township of Roslyn. Address: 15 Bruce Street.

Alice’s age in 1893: 31 years; Jane’s age in 1893: 74 years.

Jean (Jane) Kippin Brotherston was born in Edinburgh in 1819, the daughter of Nicol Andrew Brotherston and Jean Kippen. She emigrated with her brother Charles on the Larkins in 1849, supposedly at the age of 27. In 1855, she married Northumberlandborn William Constable Grey, a farmer and wool broker, at East Taieri. William and his brothers bought 50 acres of land bordering Lake Waihola from John Turnbull Thomson, Chief Government Surveyor of Otago and also a Northumberland man. The Greys’ four daughters were born at Waihola, Alice Mary Grey, the youngest, in 1862. The family moved to Bruce Street, Roslyn, in 1874 and lived in the decorative one and a half storeyed wooden house, which still stands. The property had previously belonged to Anne Mollison, whose son married Alice’s sister, Eliza Grey. Alice’s three sisters married, but she remained at home with her parents. Her father died at Bruce Street in 1892, aged 68. When the Women’s Franchise League canvasser called in 1893, Alice signed the petition first and her mother followed. Jane Grey died on 9 April 1903, aged 84, and Alice was her executor. Two of her sisters were living in Australia, and Alice followed them there. Between 1909 and 1937 she appears in electoral rolls in Victoria, moving to and fro between addresses in Geelong, home of her sister Ellen Gibb, and Maryborough and Dunolly, in Central Goldfields Shire. But she also travelled further afield, visiting Canada in 1913 and England in the 1920s. She died in Maryborough on 28 November 1946, aged 83 and is buried in the Maryborough Cemetery. Her sister Jane Gow, of ‘Bellknowes’, signed Sheet 101.