The third son of James and Jane CLIMO, George was born at Auckland, where he became the first of their family to be officially registered in the new Colony. At this time his father James was working in the Manakau Kauri forests and the family was living at Te Huia.
The family moved back to Tataraimaka where George was brought up until 1860 when the CLIMO?s moved south to the Marlborough Sounds after war broke out in Taranaki. Together with forestry and sawmilling, George also became well-known as a boat builder. In 1875, at the age of 25 years he married Alice Martha HOLLYMAN in Havelock. Alice, her parents and extended family had arrived in Wellington in 1870 on board the Gertrude from Liverpool, having left their home in Croydon, Surrey.

George and Alice lived in the Canvastown area for a time before following the CLIMO clan to Ormond. George and Alice had had three children when in 1880, they moved to Four Fathom Bay, taking up land which George gradually cleared for farming. This was where the remainder of his and Alice?s family of four sons and five daughters were born. George worked at his farm and his boat-building until he succumbed to a fatal illness caused by a malignant growth in the intestines. He died in Havelock on 25 September 1903 aged only 53 years old and is buried in the cemetery there.

Alice left the family farm in 1904 and went to live and work in Wakamarina, near Canvastown, where her younger children attended Deep Creek School and Sunday school. In 1907, Alice married Walter Frederick POPE, the son of her late husband?s sister Emily and Roger POPE. Walter was twenty years her junior. The marriage took place at the home of George and Alice?s daughter, Jane HOWARD, in Nelson.