Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley
Jane Porter Brown was born in 1841 in Barnet, Outer London – the daughter of Stephen Brown, a painter, and Mary Noble Brown.
She emigrated to Otago in 1861 with her widowed mother and two siblings on the Lady Egidia. (See 79 Margaret Keay)
Jane married William Vessie Wilson, a storekeeper, in 1861, and they had eight children.
The family lived, at first, in Invercargill before moving to Queenstown where their four-year-old daughter died in 1872.
Later that year their store in Beach St, Queenstown was destroyed in a fire.
They moved back to Southland and, in 1877, William –general storekeeper of Campbeltown, near Bluff, was declared insolvent.
William died in 1885 and when Jane signed the suffrage petition in Bluff her occupation was storekeeper.
She retired from business in 1896 and she died on 14 September 1929.
She is buried with William in the family grave in the Bluff Cemetery.
Sources
BDM online NZ https://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/
GRO England https://www.gro.gov.uk
NZ Yesteryears http://www.yesteryears.co.nz
Otago Nominal Index http://marvin.otago.ac.nz
Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
Invercargill City Council https://icc.govt.nz
Find a Grave https://www.findagrave.com/
Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.
Community contributions