I’ve said that I’m trying not to “comment or pass judgment” in telling these stories, but it’s impossible not to notice the change in the role and even visibility of women. “Mrs J.N. McCarroll”, not “Mrs Sarah McCarroll”. Or “A daughter was born to Mr and Mrs T. McCarroll”. I’m from a farming family and I know that my parents were an effective partnership. And I know that in working class families like my coal miner grandparents’ it was normal for a man to hand over his pay packet to his wife, who’d give him a little back for “beer and cigarettes”. So I’m not commenting either way about the “patriarchy”, just saying that back then there were clearly defined roles — provider and home maker — and it never even started to change until the First World War. Nor did those (to us) weirdly formal ways of identifying women, or men for that matter. You’ll find plenty of references to John and Jane McCarroll’s daughters in Papers Past — social occasions, sporting events, community activities generally — but the reason I am saying all this is that I know very little about the McCarroll girls, and some of what I do know is tragic. ~ Ian
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Mary 1870-1948 married Douglas Hill in 1909. Douglas was described in the electoral rolls the previous year as a carter from Paparoa. They had three children and seem to have moved to Auckland.
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Elizabeth 1877-1886: Jack McCarroll went to Auckland to buy a horse, and was nearly home when his young sister came up the road to meet him, and she asked him to let her ride the new horse. He put her up and she said “Give me the stick”, and she hit the horse and away it went and ran away with her. As her feet were in the stirrups she fell off and was dragged some distance, and was killed when the horse stopped at the house. She was about ten years old and her name was Elizabeth.
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I don’t know who wrote that account, but this was a far from happy time. Nine-year-old Elizabeth died in December, just two months after the Symonds Street fire. She must have only just gone north to Mareretu.
The same writer tells of a second fire:
I remember some time after that the McCarroll family built a beautiful ten roomed upstairs house close to the site of the old house and they cut all the timber for it on their own property & there was some beautiful mottled kauri in it & it all went up in smoke. Two 600 gal. tanks at the back of the house full of water were boiling when we got there. It started upstairs. There was a Concert & Dance that night in the school and Willie McCarroll left a candle burning on the dressing table when he left his bedroom & thought of it when he was having his first dance. He went outside to go home when he saw the house was on fire & the flames coming through the roof. The only thing they saved was the Piano for the old folk & the servant were in the front room and did not know the house was on fire until Willie got home. They got the piano outside & that is all they saved for they could not get to their bedrooms upstairs where their chest of drawers were with their valuable jewellery & they lost all their goods, clothing, furniture, bedding & everything. They had to build another house on the same site and go back into the old house to live.
That fire was reported in the NZ Herald in October 1896, but the Herald tells of an earlier fire, in June 1893, which began in the house chimney and took two hours to quell. Fortunately the property wasn’t completely destroyers thanks to the wind blowing away from it.
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Jane 1880-1880 died in infancy
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Sarah Adeline (Addie) 1890-1981: I know very little about Addie either except that our mother Dorothy loved “Aunt Addie”, with whom she’s pictured here, aged five. Addie would have been 45. As far as I know Addie never married. She seems to have remembered the entire family in her will. We bought our first new dining room suite with what she, my Great Aunt, bequeathed us. We’d just come back from three years in the Solomon Islands and were settling into a new home.