Mary T. Farra

Biography contributed by Helen Edwards.

Mary Torrie Fraser was born in Amhurst, Victoria, Australia, in 1861. Her parents, Margaret née Biggar and James Muir Fraser, a master mariner, married in Australia in 1856, and had five children. They sailed to New Zealand on the Leonidas in 1864, and three sons were born here. Mary Torrie was 23 when she married James Fawcett Farra in Knox Church on 27 June 1884. The marriage was celebrated at her father’s house in Cumberland Street, just south of the old Nurses’ Home. James Farra was born about 1859 in Victoria, Australia, to Joseph Fawcett Farra and Janet Porteous. He immigrated on the Aldinga in 1862. Mary Torrie Farra had four children between 1886 and 1892. The Farras lived in Church Street (later called Nairn Street), Roslyn, from about 1893. James was a tinsmith, and partner in the firm of T & J. Farra with his brother, Thomas Porteous Farra. The firm became Farra Brothers in 1897 when Charles Joseph Farra joined the partnership. Mary’s son, Edward St Clair Farra, enlisted in WW1 and died of disease in France on 2 April 1918. James died in Dunedin in 1914, aged 55. In 1928, Mary was 7 living in Ōamaru, but died in Dunedin on 2 June 1935, at the age of 75. They are buried together in the Andersons Bay Cemetery, Dunedin.

Main sources

ancestry.com
Births death & marriages online. Dept. of Internal Affairs
Cemeteries search. Dunedin City Council
Electoral rolls on microfiche and ancestry.com
Knox Church, Dunedin. Presbyterian church marriage registers : Knox Church, Dunedin, 1860-1920 [prepared by] Eleanor Leckie, 1988.
Military personnel files. Archives New Zealand, on Archway
OASES. Toitu Otago Settlers’ Museum
Papers Past. National Library of New Zealand
Stone’s Otago and Southland commercial, municipal and general directory … Dunedin: Stone & Co., 1884-