H - Hammond

Mary Hammond was my great-great-great grandmother. She was born in Andover, Hampshire on 8 June 1808 and baptised three weeks later at St Mary’s church. She was the fourth child in her family and the first daughter. Three more sons were born before another daughter, Elizabeth in 1819.

Her father John had been married before he married her mother Sarah Knight in 1800 and had two children from that marriage, a son & a daughter before his first wife had died.

Mary married George White on 24 June 1827 in Andover and they had two children Ann and Henry before George’s death on 20 April 1834. At the time of the 1841 census, Mary was living with her widowed mother and both were described as Silk Weavers. Her children were also there in New Street, Andover now aged 8 & 10 and a Confectioner named Edward Laney also lived at the address. Possibly as a lodger – the 1841 census doesn’t identify relationships in the same way that later census’ do. (A confectioner makes fancy cakes not sweets, as I always thought.)

Five months later, Mary remarried, to Edward Laney. Their first child had been born four months earlier. Just nine months later the little blended family was on board the Olympus, bound for Nelson, New Zealand.

But, Mary wasn’t the only member of her family to take the opportunity to leave England and emigrate to the colonies. I was vaguely aware that some of her brothers had emigrated to New Zealand as well, but I have never really looked at them to piece it all together. DNA matches are making me do that.

Three of her brothers came to New Zealand as well. Although one later settled in Auckland, all three emigrated to Nelson like she did, Two of them, David and James travelled with their wives and children on the Lord Auckland arriving on 23 February 1842.

Her brother Joseph followed with his family a few years later in 1852 on The Rapid arriving in Auckland and making their way to Nelson. Or did they ? The Rapid is mentioned in the obituary for Joseph’s daughter Rose which also mentions her surviving sister in Nelson. However articles reporting on the 100^th birthday of that sister in 1938 say the family arrived on the Lord William Bentinck. Some investigating to be done here I feel.

DNA matches have identified other emigrating family members too. A cousin of Sarah and her brothers who emigrated to Utah and her sister who went with her husband and children to Launceston, Tasmania in about 1853 and lived in Deloraine before moving on to Melbourne.