Martha Lammas!


I am trying to find out how my great grandmother, Martha, made her way to New Zealand from Australia between 1857 and 1865. This is proving difficult because Martha could have been known by any one of three surnames by this time. Her father, Leonard, was born to Harriet Lummis (Lammas) and his official records show his surname to have been LAMMAS, even though he appears to have adopted the surname BROCK for family life when his mother married later on. Leonard LAMMAS married Phoebe PUNCHARD.


Martha LAMMAS, born in 1844 in Norfolk, emigrated to Sandhurst (Bendigo) Australia with her family on the Grand Trianon in 1857, aged 14. They were all listed in the passenger list as LAMMAS, but upon reaching Australia they adopted the surname BROCK or LAMMAS-BROCK.


Most family members stayed in Australia, but Martha, and probably another Lammas relative, came on to New Zealand some time later. I have not been able to find what ship or ships brought them here. They were in Hokitika in the early 1860s before the gold rush began in earnest in 1865 (and BEFORE the imaginary nasties populating Eleanor Catton?s novel ?The Luminaries? arrived, naturally!!)


?People had a confused notion that a goldfield meant a sink of iniquity? . . . ?But on the West Coast, at any rate, there was a remarkable absence of crime and lawlessness. A miner on being asked if he did not think that the Coast was unlike the fields in California in the orderly nature of the Population, replied, ?I?ve got the matter of 25 ounces of gold on me and if I was in California I?d have a couple of revolvers too; you won?t see a weapon here on any miner, and I?ve never yet heard of any case of ?sticking up? or robbery except those Australian bushrangers, who didn?t belong to the place . . . it?s something in the country, and the people somehow. Law rules here, and it don?t there?
(Source The Greymouth Borough Council Centennial Book ? O H Jackson?)


In looking closely at their lives, it is clear that emigrants from Britain left a country where they could see no future. A very large proportion came to New Zealand simply for a better life. They took what work they could get, and that generally included hard work like mining and menial work. All of our ancestors knew the meaning of hard work.


Martha appears to have married either before leaving Australia or shortly after arriving in New Zealand but I can find no record of this. In 1865, she was legally recorded as Martha, wife of T GRIFFIN, formerly Lammas. No mention of the surname Brock in New Zealand.


Martha LAMMAS, after working as a barmaid and singer in Hokitika, moved on to Southland, but her relative remained on the Coast. This relative?s life and family are well documented in Nelson, but I have no actual proof of relationship as yet. It was in discussion with a ninety year old member of this Lammas branch of the family, thirty years ago, that I first found out about a name change. She told me about it, and remembered a cabin trunk that had one name inside and another name on the outside, even though that trunk had only ever belonged to the Lammas family. Unfortunately she could not remember the new name, thinking only that it could have been Randall. Our minds ran riot!


That name-change convinces me of a definite link between the two branches of the Lammas family in New Zealand.


An old Hokitika newspaper clipping revealed that Martha LAMMAS was requested to communicate with her mother, Mrs BROCK, Sandhurse (sic) urgently, in 1868. Eventually we discovered that Sandhurst was an old name for Bendigo, and then we found the rest of Martha?s family there. What this indicates to us is that Phoebe Brock did not know that her daughter had married. Must we therefore assume that the marriage occurred in New Zealand? I can?t find it. Phoebe obviously did not know that Martha had already left Hokitika at least three to four years previously.


So, Martha married firstly T GRIFFIN, secondly(?) James JOYCE (father of her first child William James), and thirdly George MOFFITT in 1868. Our grandfather was raised as William James MOFFITT, and was, according to family legend, the first European child born in Nokomai, Southland, New Zealand, in 1865.


Martha intrigues me. Her early life was clearly varied and colourful, but she was a strong woman who went from strength to strength. Widowed in 1879, she raised her children alone, making sure that they all ?married well?; she ran a farm; she bought and sold property; she managed a shop, and later on a boarding house; all the while fulfilling singing engagements. What a woman!