Maker: Sarah Teesdale-Spittle

Panel number: 415

Petition sheet number: 504

Person honouring: Janet Margaret Teesdale

Relationship to maker: Unknown

Janet Margaret Linwood was born near Kirkcudbright in Scotland in May 1864, to Elisabeth McKay and William Linwood. Janet had two brothers and one sister born in Scotland; five more siblings were born in New Zealand. The children’s birth dates suggest the family arrived in New Zealand about 1868.

Electoral rolls show Janet’s father lived at Taieri in 1875 before apparently heading for gold and farming near Arrowtown by 1880. Her parents both died there.

In 1883 Janet married Thomas Teesdale; she already had her first child, Sarah. Five more children followed before Thomas died in 1893. That New Year’s Day he had been picked up in an ‘insensible condition’ after the Woodville races; he died about six weeks later and was buried at the Mangatainoka cemetery, Pahiatua, along with two infant sons – Robert and Samuel.

The Woodville Prohibition League’s bylaws included women’s suffrage for continuing or suppressing licensed houses. In early 1893 local women decided to meet to push for women’s franchise in the government’s next session. Janet signed sheet 504 of the 1893 suffrage petition along with 60 other women from the Tararua area. Two future family members, Jane and Mary Perfect, signed sheet 503.

Janet married again in November 1895, to Thomas Perfect, whose family had arrived from Kent in England and settled in the Woodville area in the 1870s. Janet had another four or five children with Thomas. Electoral rolls have them in the Woodville area until about 1906, before moving to the Hutt Valley.

Janet was just 51 when she died and was buried at Taita cemetery in December 1915. Her second husband joined her there in January 1950.

Panel materials: Unknown