 | BENISTON FILE |
Names in this file automatically link into associated files such as SPANHAKE, de WAAL, EVANSNZ, WAGENER.
| BENISTON FILE |
Names in this file automatically link into associated files such as SPANHAKE, de WAAL, EVANSNZ, WAGENER.
Husband: Thomas Hansen
Born: 1785 at: Married: 25 DEC 1815 at: St. Johns Church, Paramatta, NSW, Australia Died: 1874 at: Father:Thomas Hansen Mother:Hannah Coats
Thomas was 29 years old at this time, and unmarried, a fact that the catankerous missionary Samuel Marsden felt had to be corrected, and undertook to make a match between Thomas and a Miss Elizabeth Atkinson Tollis, daughter of Corporal Thomas Tollis of the New South Wales Regiment. Samuel Marsden married them himself, then oversaw their transport back to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, where they settled for the rest of their lives in the small settlement of Te Puna. There Thomas made use of his carpentry and woodcraft experience and also worked in the surrounding Kauri forests which were subsequently stripped from the hillsides. In spite of the fact that the Hansens were involved with the missionaries, they were not formally part of the planned missionary developments, and as such their children were not automatically accepted for education, a fact that inevitably created a gulf of illiteracy between the two societies. Elizabeth Hansen died at Te Puna on 25 March 1867, aged 69 years, and Thomas at Russell on 8 March 1874. Thomas was buried alongside Elizabeth's grave in a wooden enclosure in the first European cemetery in New Zealand, the old Church Missionary Society's burial ground at Te Puna, although all traces of these graves have long disappeared.
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