family history

A visit to Ireland over 20 years ago sparked Pat’s interest in family history and led him to set up O’Kiwi, a heritage website for Kiwis with a Celtic connection. One posting was inspired by a documentary on the late Shane MacGowan, the Pogues front man whose family came from the same part of Tipperary as his Martin forebears.

Pat has been to the villages and towns where all eight of his great grandparents are from—five Irish and three English—and is currently writing the story of his maternal grandfather, WW1 veteran Richard White (pictured left in 1915 when he married Pat’s grandmother, Margaret O’Neill, five weeks before sailing off to war).

Over the years he’s read old letters and notebooks, visited distant relations in New Zealand, Ireland and England, studied family trees, examined electoral rolls and censuses, travelled to battlefields in Flanders, Italy, Tunisia and Egypt, completed a Massey University history paper on this country’s involvement in war, talked to historians and researchers, visited libraries and joined New Zealand’s Genealogical Society.

Central Otago 1930s

Pip’s memoir, Song for Rosaleen, incorporates the family history of her maternal forbears, the Waigths and Kearneys, who arrived in New Zealand from Ireland in the 1860s and 1870s.

It includes the memories of Pip’s mother Rosaleen and her younger brother Des (pictured), captured in an oral history interview, of growing up in the small central Otago town of Roxburgh in the 1930s. They were were the children of local mayor and orchardist John Harry Waigth and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Kearney.