Notes provided by Helen Edwards, who has carried out extensive research on the women who signed Sheet 156, including mapping where they lived.
Margaret Hepburn, nee Marshall; Mrs Margaret Ross [Margaret Hepburn, Roslyn] (no. 41)
Land description: DP 1359. Address: 30 Leven Street. Age in 1893: 54 years.
Margaret Marshall (also known as Margaret Dunbar Marshall) was born in Falkirk in 1839, the daughter of James Marshall, a storekeeper, and Margaret Dunbar. The family emigrated on the Cornwall in 1849. She married businessman George Ross at her father’s home, ‘Gowan Ha’, Halfway Bush, in 1856. She was 17 years old and he was 36. Ross, born in Inverkeithing in 1820, had arrived on the Philip Laing in 1848. He made his second voyage out to Otago in 1854 on board the Clutha, built at the Ross family’s Inverkeithing shipyard for the Otago trade. The Rosses were living at Bellknowes House in the area known at that time as Bellevue, where George had a dairy farm, when he died suddenly in 1860, leaving Margaret with two very young children. She married William Hepburn, a Halfway Bush farmer and auctioneer, in 1863 and had six daughters and two sons. The younger son, William Leslie Hepburn, died in 1916 after falling off scaffolding while painting a ship at the Port Chalmers dock. The Hepburns lived in the Halfway Bush/Wakari area, where Margaret had grown up, until William’s death in 1887. Margaret moved to Leven Street, living in a house built on her Park in-laws’ land, before its subdivision in 1899. She remained there with several of her children until her death from cancer in 1901.
James Kilgour. Evening Star Jubilee edition, 23 March 1898. See also Don Hutton's entry for Margaret Hepburn at: www.northerncemetery.org.nz
Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.
Community contributions