In Search of the Final Resting Place of my Great,Great GrandUncle,Patrick Dillon

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Our short stay in Gore Bay comes to an end this morning and we head away on the short drive to Hanmer Springs to continue The 50^thAnniversary Top of The South Tour.Sunrise wasn’t quite as dramatic this morning with more cloud on the horizon but there was still a bit of magic that you get with the light seemingly rising in the distance from the ocean.

Our hosts had gone out together in their car so we didn’t get the opportunity to personally thank them for allowing us to stay in their lovely Air BnB apartment.

Before we leave Gore Bay this morning I had a desire to check out the now closed cemetery across the Jed Stream where my G G GUncle is supposedly buried and long suffering Gretchen, who thinks I spend too much of my time on tracing my ancestry, agreed to the search.

Patrick was born in County Clare, Ireland in 1853 and emigrated to New Zealand with his sister Margaret on the ‘Wiltshire’ and arrived in Lyttelton in 1877.On the passenger list his occupation was described as a labourer. I don’t know what he did in Christchurch for his first 20 odd years here but in 1890 he was recorded as a labourer living at Halkett in the Selwyn District. In 1895 he married Elizabeth Garvin at Cheviot and a couple of years later he was recorded in the Electoral Roll as farmer.

I have also discovered an entry on a Victoria University website which featured him owning a farm of 454 acres at Domett.

Recently I had checked Papers Past for a funeral notice for Patrick when he died in Christchurch in November 1936 in the hope that there might be some clue as to where was to be buried.

And thankfully direction was at hand in the funeral notice in the Christchurch Press. Following the funeral in the city Patrick’s coffin was to be taken by hearse north to travel through the streets of Cheviot and onto the Jed Cemetery adjacent to Gore Bay.

The hearse would also have passed through Domett, just south of Cheviot, where Patrick married Elizabeth Garvin also from Ireland and where they had 5 of their 8 children before they moved, for an unknown reason to me, to Christchurch.

As you leave Gore Bay and head inland to Cheviot you can view the Jed Cemetery from the road on the other side of the Jed Stream and to get to it appeared to be from a car park area and across farmland for a few hundred metres.

The first part of the trek was easy enough and then the Jed Stream required a crossing.

Luckily the stream was a mere trickle although about 10 metres to cross.

We achieved this without getting our shoes and feet too wet and walked on towards the track that would take us up to the cemetery on a terrace above the valley.

Then a bigger problem than crossing the stream was ahead of us, more water, and this time in the guise of a lagoon which we couldn’t see the bottom of to know how deep it was.

As we stood there working out the pros and cons of ‘taking the plunge’ and getting wet we noticed a couple of people downstream on the shingle bank between the lagoon and the ocean, walking away from us from the direction of the path to the cemetery. They didn’t look like they had wet feet and we concluded that the ‘wet feet free approach’ should have been along the shingle bank. They were just out of ear shot to catch their attention to check our thoughts but it was clear enough anyway that we had to return to where we started and find our way onto the shingle bank and approach the cemetery from a different direction.

So back through the stream, more water in the shoes, and across the farmland to the car.

While we were doing this we reminded each other that our host at the Air BnB had said the best way to the cemetery was along the beach! Why hadn’t we remembered this when we started out an hour ago!

So we headed out along the top of the shingle bank towards the path that we had seen the couple walking on and despite the stones moving under our feet we made good progress and at least our shoes were drying out.

Leaving the beach and heading up the fairly steep path to the cemetery our thoughts went back to the days when burials occurred here.

For some reason there was no cemetery in Cheviot which was formed into a town in the late 1800’s and people were buried at the Jed Cemetery, Gore Bay about 8 km from Cheviot.

Assuming that the current road was the general area where a dirt track from Cheviot ran, the funeral cortege still had to get the coffin across farmland and through the stream or like where we had just walked, along the shingle bank to the path up the hill to the terrace area that was the cemetery.

Quite an exercise for the pallbearers who would deserve a ‘tot of a stiff drink ‘as a reward for their perseverance.

A plaque at the entrance to the cemetery gave the names of about 25 of those buried here who were identified, presumably from old records.

Some had initials but not for the two Dillon entries.

One I was sure of would be that of Patrick’s 3 year old first daughter Mary who died in 1903.I had already seen a photo taken of what was left of her headstone from a website that provides millions of headstone photos taken from cemeteries all around the world.

We headed to the far end of the cemetery through the long grass that had overtaken almost all of the cemetery area except where the few headstones that remained stood.

We found Mary’s gravesite and her broken headstone. Next to it was another gravesite but without a headstone and we deduced that this was where Patrick was buried.

To see if I can confirm this I have contacted the Hurunui Council to see if they have fuller records of the burial so that I can finally confirm this as Patrick’s final resting place. Their records of burials in their current cemeteries are very good but not so for their closed cemeteries.

There would have been a commanding view of the coastal scene and beach when the cemetery was established in the late 1800’s although more recently a stand of pine trees blocks part of those views.

So 99% sure that this was Patrick’s final resting place we headed back along the shingle bank to the car and drove to Cheviot for lunch in the park observing the large number of people in their caravans and motor homes passing both north and south through the small rural town.

Getting to Hanmer, our stay for the next 4 nights, was just an hour and a bit away along a road we hadn’t been before taking us to the rural township of Waiau which had been the epicentre of the 7.8 earthquake of November 2016.We had driven through there last year when we were heading to the Marlborough Sounds at the start of our April/May trip and the historic hotel, although apparently closed because of damage, had now been demolished and replacement with what one could describe as a ‘pop up ‘replacement bar and small restaurant area.

The wide Waiau River valley was ahead and it was only a short time and we were turning off SH7 and driving into Hanmer Springs village.

Everything we needed was within walking distance of our motel and we ended the day with dinner at O’Flynn’s Bar and Restaurant with our drink of choice being a pint of Murphy’s Stout.

With fine weather predicted for tomorrow we plan to make the most of it and head into Molesworth,NZ’s largest farm.

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