Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley
Catherine Donnery/Donery/Dunery was born in the Shotover district near Queenstown in April 1867 – the daughter of Michael Donery, a miner, and Alice.
Two years previously her mother had been charged with labouring under 'mental derangement and likely to endanger the safety of herself and family'.
Alice had shortly before given birth to Catherine’s brother James, she was admitted to the Lakes District Hospital.
Her father disappeared from the records after the mid 1870s and Catherine was adopted by Thomas and Margaret Livingston of Dunedin.
Margaret Livingston died in 1887 and when Catherine signed the suffrage petition she was living with Thomas Livingston in Hanover St, Dunedin.
She married Robert Allan, the verger of Knox Church, on 9 January 1900 and they had four children.
The family left Dunedin in 1905 when they took up 'a large sheep run in Central Otago'.
Robert died in 1922 at Taieri Lake Station, Rock and Pillar and Catherine died on 10 January 1952.
They are buried together in the Middlemarch Cemetery.
Sources
BDM online NZ https://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/
DCC Cemetery Records http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/cemeteries/cemeteries-search
Family Search https://www.familysearch.org
Otago Nominal Index http://marvin.otago.ac.nz
Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
Presbyterian Research Centre https://www.presbyterian.org.nz/archives/