K. Begg

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.

Katherine Begg [K. Begg, Roslyn] (No. 28)

Land description: Sections 15 and 16, Block 2, Roslyn. (31) Ross Street. 27, 29 Ross Street and 36, 38 Michie Street. Age in 1893: 25

Katherine was the daughter of Katherine Clarke, who was born in Perthshire, and Alexander Campbell Begg. Alexander, born in 1839 at Liberton, near Edinburgh, emigrated on the Alpine in 1859 and married in 1867. He was a clerk, farmer, and stock and station agent; a member of the Roslyn Roads Board and its successor, the Roslyn Borough Council, and mayor of Roslyn for nearly ten years; a staunch Presbyterian and prohibitionist. Katherine, the eldest child, was born in 1868 in Russell Street. Members of the large and distinguished family went out into the world to make their mark; Katherine made hers from the two-storeyed stone house on the lower corner of Ross and Michie Streets, where the family lived from about 1870. She was active in the community: secretary of the Patriotic Association of Roslyn during World War One, secretary of the motor circle of the Otago Women’s Club, and member of the Victoria League. Keen on golf, she was a foundation member of the Balmacewen Ladies Golf Club. In later life she had family living close by—her brother James bought Robert Chisholm’s house on the upper corner of Ross and Michie Streets about 1918, and other family members lived round the corner in Hart Street. The City Corporation’s Ross Street widening project met an obstacle with Miss Begg’s house, and for two decades the road remained narrow at that point. On her death in 1957, at the age of 88, the house was demolished and the project finally completed. She is buried in the Northern Cemetery with her parents and other family members.

Obituary: Miss Katherine Begg. Otago Daily Times, 30 March 1957.