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.
Matilda Jack nee Irwin [M. Jack, Roslyn] (No. 24)
Land description: Allotment 9, Block 3, Township of Roslyn. Address: No. 20 Hart Street.
Age in 1893: 39. Religious denomination unknown
Matilda Irwin was born in Ireland about 1854. She married Andrew Jack, a tailor, born about 1850 at Strabane in County Tyrone. Andrew came to New Zealand about 1862, possibly as part of a family group. It is not known when Matilda emigrated, or where they married. They seem not to have had children, but Matilda’s sister Sarah Irwin lived in Manakau, in the Horowhenua District, and Andrew had sisters elsewhere in Otago. In 1880 Andrew purchased the Hart Street property where they lived until their deaths. Matilda’s name appears in newspaper accounts of community and wartime activities. She died in 1920, aged 66 years, and her headstone at the Andersons Bay Cemetery laments: ‘My home is bare without you. I miss you all the days’.
As Andrew grew frailer, he employed a housekeeper, Elizabeth Armour, and on his death in 1942, aged 92, bequeathed her a significant sum, with which she bought the house. He left legacies to social service organisations of all denominations. David Parker, Labour Party M.P., spent some of his childhood years in the house in the 1960s.