Marion Paterson

Signed family name

Paterson

Signed given name

Marion

Given address

Gore

Sheet number

Town/Suburb

Gore

City/Region

Southland

Notes

Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley.

Marion Hamilton Barr was born on 7 February 1833 in Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, Scotland – the daughter of Samuel Barr, a sawyer, and Agnes Brown.

She married gardener Hugh Paterson on 24 March 1854 in Lesmahagow.

They had four sons in Scotland before they boarded the Sir William Eyre in December 1862 bound for Bluff.

Their son George was born on board the ship on 14 February the same day that his elder brother Hugh died. Hugh was buried at sea.

Hugh turned his hand to railway work and market gardening before they took up a farm at Makarewa.

They had a further four children and around 1875 they bought a farm in the Waikaka Valley which they called The Mains and where Marion was living when she signed the suffrage petition.

In 1896 they gave up farming and went to live in Invercargill, they then moved to Oamaru where Hugh died in 1912.

Marion died on 22 February 1918 in Oamaru – she is buried with Hugh in the Old Oamaru Cemetery.

Her obituary said when they moved to the Waikaka Valley “the land in the upper end of the Waikaka Valley was then in its primitive state, and the late Mrs Paterson cheerfully bore her share in all the hardships and disabilities of those days”.