Maker: Kylie King

Panel number: 321

Petition sheet number: 379

Person honouring: Ann Jane Southgate

Relationship to maker: Great-great-grandmother

Ann Williams was the eldest child of Jane Beaumont and Joseph Williams. She was born in Auckland in 1865 – her father had come to New Zealand in 1863 (during the Land Wars) with the 43rd Monmouthshire regiment that had initially been posted to India.

School was not compulsory in New Zealand until the late 1870s. Ann may have been home-schooled; her marriage certificate states she was born on Great Barrier Island in the year they tried to colonise it for mining.

Unfortunately the weather caused too much resistance to growing crops, which made farming healthy livestock difficult too. Life would have been harder than we could imagine. Daily chores would have been the priority before schooling.

The Williams family went on to settle in Mahurangi, north of Auckland.

In 1884, at the Auckland registry office, when Ann was 19 she married a man 46 years her elder – widower John Southgate. He was a notable Warkworth pioneer and well known for his lime burning, and who produced New Zealand’s first hydralic cement in his hand-worked kilns. 

Ann and John had three daughters – Lillian, Rose, and Daisy, who were all under five when the suffrage petition was signed in 1893.

Ann would’ve held true strength, stamina, and perseverance. Her whole life had not been easy. It was about to get harder – in 1893, her husband lay paralysed for nine months with her tending to his side every day, and also looking after three small girls in a town that was quite isolated. 

Somehow Ann managed to find time to fight for a right she believed in by signing the woman’s suffrage petition. How incredible is she? I’m lucky to have descended from a lady with such motivation, determination, and incredible family values.

Her husband passed in 1894. Circumstances meant she had to move immediately, leaving for Auckland with her three girls. Ann never remarried; she lived on treasuring her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come.

Ann died in 1950, aged 84 years.

Panel materials: Cotton, embroidery threads, a panel of my grandmother’s dressing gown, printed fabric from a quilt store in Devonport, sequins, love beads, jewelry pieces, beads, ribbons from recycled bags, crocheted flower piece from Trade Aid store.