Maker: Susan Harper

Panel number: 207

Petition sheet number: 250

Person honouring: Mrs Macfie

Relationship to maker: Paternal 4x great grandmother to my great-nephew

Sarah Webb was born in 1840 and had three husbands.

She emigrated from Bath in the United Kingdom, to Dunganville on New Zealand’s West Coast, arriving in 1864. She had had four children by the time she arrived in New Zealand although one died before leaving Bath and one died during the journey. 

Benjamin Larcombe, her husband, abandoned Sarah and went to Australia about 1870. Sarah then married John McGinity, although she was still married. She and John had two children, but he also abandoned Sarah for Australia soon after.

Lastly, she married John Macfie in 1880, and had another two children, one died at five months. Sarah ran a sweet shop in Dunganville, in the hotel where her husband worked and which burnt down in the 1880s.

Sarah signed the petition at Dunganville, and then enrolled to vote in 1893 and 1896.

She died at her son’s home in Greymouth, in November 1903, aged 63. Sarah was remembered in the local paper: “she endeared herself to every miner in the district by her kindly nature”, and during a special church service at St John’s Presbyterian church.

Panel materials: Tatting about 90 years old, made by a friend’s grandmother. Ribbon embroidery, in purple and green, representing suffrage colours. Sarah’s signature and location in her handwriting. Fabric represents houses and horses in UK; at base the tiny house, and possible surroundings Sarah lived in, in NZ. 46 beads to represent people that signed the sheet. Photo of Sarah Macfie supplied by a descendant Jenny MacKie, and the death notice in the Greymouth Argus in 1903.