suffrage_petition
Surname: 
McLachlan
Given names: 
M.
Given address: 
Palmerston
Sheet No: 130
Town/Suburb: 
Palmerston
City/Region: 
Otago
Notes: 

Occupation added next to her signature: 'Household duties'.

Biographical information provided for the He Tohu exhibition:

Martha Isabella Thompson Anderson was born in Tweedmouth, Durham in May 1830 to John and Martha.

When she was twenty in 1851 she was appointed postmistress at Richardson Stead which may have operated from William’s grocer shop as had become the custom in the early years of the Penny Post.  As postmistress, she would have been a person of some standing in the community, holding a responsible position.  

Seven years later she gave birth to a son, John James at Bell’s Court, Newcastle on Tyne, 55 miles south of Richardson Stead. His father, William Thompson was for some reason unable to marry her – possibly he was already a married man. He appears in the Bastardy Bonds of Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1858 where he is ordered to pay two shillings a sixpence a week towards the boy’s upkeep.

Martha was back up north three months later in Berwick on Tweed where she may have already been passing herself off as ‘Mrs Anderson.’  It appears that Martha had little John boarded out while she set about earning a living. By the age of three he was boarding with a Mrs. Gibson. 

Advertisements encouraging emigration to Southland were placed in over 80 newspapers in the United Kingdom in 1863 and Martha decided it was time to make a new life for herself and her child.  She appears on a list of assisted immigrants where she describes herself as Mrs. Anderson, widow.

However, she left five year old John in the care of her elderly Aunt Jane and set off for New Zealand on the Helenslee on 3 July 1863.

After her arrival in Invercargill in September 1863 the next five or six years are a blank until in 1869 she married the bootmaker, Donald McLachlan.  He was a bachelor, ten years her senior and had arrived in New Zealand at the same time as Martha.   

One can’t help wondering if after her arrival in New Zealand, she ever came clean about her marital status. Her son may well have been in blissful ignorance about his father and Martha may have not even told the man whom she eventually married about her earlier life, or even told their subsequent children. Why would she? It was Victorian times after all, and having an illegitimate child would hardly be something she would want broadcast.

By 1870 Martha and Donald had moved to Palmerston and in 1873 they received a Crown Grant of two lots of land on the corner of Mull and Birsa Streets in the northern part of town.

Martha and Donald had three children, all born in Palmerston.   After the birth of their first child, Martha’s thoughts turned to the little lad she’d left behind in England and she arranged to have her son sent out to New Zealand on the William Davie in 1871.  His £6 fare was guaranteed by Donald.  Having not seen each other for 8 years, we can only hope that it was a happy reunion for them both. John was quickly apprenticed to a wheelwright.  His stepfather wouldn’t have wanted a fit young teenager with a healthy appetite hanging about idle for too long.

Although Martha was busy with a growing family she was sufficiently interested in the politics of her adopted country to go with her recently married daughter Flora Galloway, to sign the petition to Parliament in 1892, supporting the Vote for Women.

Donald died in 1906 and Martha died six years later in July 1911 at the age of 81 and is buried at Palmerston.  

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Flora Galloway

Martha's daughter, Flora Galloway, nee McLachlan, seems to have signed the 1892 suffrage petition but not the 1893 one. This short biography and image of her has been submitted by Leanna Menchi.

Signed sheet 66 of the 1892 petition as F.C.A. Galloway of Dunrobin.

Flora Galloway

Flora Catherine Ann, was born in Palmerston, Otago on 13 May 1870. Her parents were Donald McLachlan, a shoemaker from Ballachuilish, Scotland, and Martha Isabella Thompson nee Anderson from Tweedmouth, Durham.

She had a brother Ewen Alexander, and a sister Martha Mary Isabella, a 'hospital nurse' who married Dr. George Gabites in 1904 in Palmerston.

Flora married William Beckett Galloway in 1891. He was from Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, born in 1863 and  emigrated to New Zealand in 1884.

Flora and William began their married life farming at Dunrobin.   They had three children, Tui born 1892, Geoffrey born 1901 and Randolph born in 1903. The Galloways later moved to Tiverton Street, Palmerston after allegedly  having  been driven off their farm by a rabbit infestation.

Both Flora and her daughter were much involved in the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers, and Flora and her mother signed the Women’s Suffrage Petition together in 1892.

Flora died in 1949 at the age 79.

Sources

New Zealand Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages

John Galloway, Flora’s grandson

Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.

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