M. Wilson Jenkins

Signed family name

Jenkins

Signed given name

M. Wilson

Given address

Tryphinia Gt B.

Sheet number

380

Town/Suburb

Great Barrier Island

City/Region

Auckland region

Notes

Biography contributed by Bernadette Siebert

Maggie Wilson was born about 1850 in County Derry, Ireland. In 1885 in Belfast she married David Jenkins. The next year they immigrated to NZ, arriving in Port Chalmers in July 1886 on board the SS Ionic. On the same ship was Maggie’s sister Agnes Elizabeth Wilson.

In 1887 the couple were living on Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf where David was the sole teacher at Tryphena School where the average attendance was 21, and with a salary of 80 pounds per annum. They remained there for several years and by 1893 David’s salary was 100 pounds and Mrs Davidson was assisting him for the sum of five pounds per annum.

Newspapers reported in 1894 ‘we understand that Mr David Jenkins, late of the Great Barrier Island, has been appointed to the Karamu school …Mr Jenkins has a good record for his work at the Barrier, and should prove an acquisition to the staff of Waikato teachers.’ David and Maggie worked at Karamu for about five years. For the first couple of years, David’s salary was 100 pounds and his assistant Miss Barker was paid five pounds. From 1896 to 1900, the school’s average attendance was 19 and David’s salary dropped to 80 pounds and Maggie received 5 pounds.

In 1900 David and Maggie were moved to another Native School – Pakaru, in Northland. He was to receive 108 pounds and Maggie five pounds. But the1901 Teachers' Selection Committee recommended that the following appointment should be authorised by the Board: Mr. D. Jenkins, to be teacher of Pakaru and Whangape schools half-time. These two schools were about 15 kms from each other. For this he was paid 144 pounds and Maggie was paid five pounds for 1901 only.

The chairman reported that resignations had been received from Mr D. Jenkins (Pakaru and Whangape) from March 31 1904. The couple moved to Devonport where David was recorded on electoral rolls as a gentleman.

On Wednesday, February 6, 1907 at the private hospital, Onehunga, Maggie, the dearly beloved wife of David Jenkins died aged 57 years. Private interment. (of Devonport). She was buried in the Waikaraka Cemetery, ‘Asleep in Jesus’.

In our obituary columns today appears a notice respecting the death of Mrs David Jenkins, which will be read with regret by Waipa residents, and especially by residents in Karamu where, in former years, Mr Jenkins had charge of the district school. In this he was ably assisted by his late wife—herself a trained teacher from Belfast, Ireland—and who was much loved and respected by the children and their parents. The deceased lady had only one sister in the colony, Mrs S. McKnight, of Hamilton, to whom much sympathy will be extended. (Maggie’s sister Agnes married in 1891 at Hamilton to Irishman Semple McKnight.)