Payn-Scettrini-Heneberry NZ Descendants

 Recently we started a Payn-Scettrini-Heneberry NZ Descendants Facebook page. It's for descendants of Giuseppe Scettrini & Catherine Heneberry, and Frank Payn & Johanna Scettrini. It'll hopefully become a place where cousins from different lines of the family can share information and ask questions about our shared family history. It's a private group, but all descendants are welcome. 

The address is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2186077118570688. You have to apply to join but we are pretty quick approving people usually. At the date of this post, we have 37 cousins as members.

 Our Facebook header photos show- Giuseppe Scettrini, Catherine Heneberry, 
Frank Payn and Johanna Scettrini.

John Burke (1844-1895)

John Burke was a brother to Martin Burke (my 2x-great-grandfather). He was born in Co Mayo in 1844, moved to Perth, Scotland with the family around the time of the Famine, and then emigrated to New Zealand around 1883. He died at the residence of his brother Martin in Burnham in 1895, and is buried in the Darfield Catholic Cemetery.

The first time we come across John is at his baptism. He was baptised on 2 June 1844, in Aghagower Parish, Co Mayo. His baptism entry reads:     June 2^nd John Michl Biddy Burke Derrycraugh   Richard Jennings Cathy(?) Flynn 

John’s parents, Michael Burke and Bridget Flynn, later moved to Perth, Scotland with the family. We also see those with the  sponsors’ surnames, Jennings and Flynn, in Perth. Bridget’s mother’s name (discovered from Scottish records) was Derrig / Derrick.

Aghagower (Aughagower) is a rural village, 8km from Westport, Co Mayo, that was once the site of a powerful medieval monastery on the pilgrimage route from Ballintubber to Croagh Patrick. It still has a round tower, and an extensive graveyard. This whole area was severely impacted by the Famine.

The rural townland of Derrycraugh was listed as the location of the family at the time of John’s baptism. Burton cousins who have visited report that there is nothing much to see there now, other than a few ruined buildings scattered in the rural landscape.

Within a few years of John’s birth, the family had left Aghagower Parish behind, and were next found in Perthshire, Scotland. Whether they left solely because of the Famine, and/or whether there might have been an eviction by the landlord, is not known at this stage. It's also not known whether they went directly to Perth or perhaps stopped somewhere else first.

By 1851 the Burke/Flynn family are established in Perth though I haven’t found them there in the 1851 Scottish Census. However, in April 1851, Mary, another daughter for Michael and Bridget Burke, was baptised there, and in 1852 we see that Patrick Jennings, a son of Richard Jennings and Mary Flinn, is also baptised there. (Richard was a sponsor for John’s baptism.)

At the time of the 1861 census we find the family living at 134 High St, Perth (having a room with 1+ windows). At home on census night is Michael Burke, aged 52, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Bridget aged 49. John is listed as being unmarried, aged 16, and a cabinet maker apprentice. Their son Martin is described as married aged 19, and a ploughman, while John’s unmarried brother Thomas is listed as being aged 20, and also a ploughman. His younger sister Mary is listed aged 9, with her birthplace given as Perthshire, Perth. She is the only family member with a birthplace other than Ireland.

In the 1871 census, the address of the family appears to be 129 High Street, with Bridget listed as head of the household, her husband Michael having died in 1868. John Burke is said to be aged 26 and a labourer. His older brother Thomas, younger sister Mary, and nephew Michael Burke are also living there.

In the 1881 Scottish census, we find just John and his brother Thomas sharing a household, and this is the last census in which we find mention of John Burke in Scotland. The brothers are both described as unmarried, and they are living at 126 High St  with their residence described as having two rooms with one or more windows. John is said to be head of the household and a railway porter. Thomas’s occupation is listed as waggon wright.

John emigrated soon after this census it would seem, as he was said to have been in New Zealand for 12 years at the time of his death in January 1895. He must have arrived in New Zealand around 1883, but I have found it very difficult to find out anything much about him here. (John Burke is a common name in South Canterbury, which doesn't help!) 

 In 1893, the first year in which women could vote, four members of the Burke family are enrolled to vote on the Selwyn Roll- including both Ann and Martin, and their two adult children, Thomas and Ann. These are John’s sister-in-law, brother, and nephew and niece. John, however does not appear. Perhaps he was living and working elsewhere? Or perhaps he simply never enrolled.

If I later find out more about John’s life in New Zealand, I will update this document, but for the time being I am going to skip to John’s death and burial.

A death notice appeared for John Burke in the Lyttelton Times on 7 January 1895, saying that he had died at his brother’s residence in Burnham on January 5^th, aged 52 years.

 There was a funeral notice the same day saying that Mr Martin Burke informed friends that the funeral of his brother John would leave his Burnham residence for the Darfield Catholic Cemetery at 8.30am on Tuesday 8^th January.

John’s death registration says that his occupation was a labourer, and that he died of cancer of the liver with a duration of six months illness. It is stated that he had been in New Zealand for a period of 12 years. His funeral was conducted by Fr Chataigner, a French Marist priest, and he was buried at Darfield Catholic Cemetery 

It is easy to find John’s grave, as his headstone is one of four tall similar ones, on the far right as you walk in the main gate of Darfield Catholic Cemetery.

The first headstone in the group was erected in 1892 for his niece Mary Riordan née Burke, who died aged only 29 of consumption. Alongside him is a headstone for his sister-in-law Ann Burke née Philp, who died just over two months after him. The last plot amongst the four was filled in 1911 when Patrick Riordan, husband of Mary Burke, died. (Ann was also said to have died of cancer of the liver, which makes me wonder whether something else like typhoid or hepatitis might have been the culprit for both her and John's deaths- just supposition though.) 

John Burke's headstone reads:
Of your charity pray for the soul of
John Burke,
who died 5^th Janry 1895,
aged 52 years.
R. I. P.
Have pity, have pity on me, at least you my friends.”

John Burke, late of Burnham, farm labourer, died intestate, and Letters of Administration had to be granted through the Supreme Court, Canterbury District to settle his estate.These were awarded to Martin Burke, ‘brother and next of kin of the said deceased’. Martin had to give an oath, and one of the things he stated was that John Burke was unmarried,  and that he believed the estate effects and credits would be under the value of two hundred and fifty pounds.

John, we don't know a lot about you and your life, but you are remembered as one of our family.  Rest in Peace.

My Aunty Mary Riordan as a nurse

 It's often trickier to find out more about our female relatives than our male ones. I have been trying to find out more about the career of my Aunty Mary as a nurse for a while, and more recently I was searching (unsuccessfully) to find a NZ Gazette that had a Nurses' Register with her name in it. Instead I published an article in our local genealogy newsletter about the NZ Gazette, and the range of 'name' lists I had found in it. Once I had finished that I turned to Papers Past and did a deep-dive for any "Riordan Nurse" kind of snippets- quite successfully in the end as it turned out. I must have wiggled my nose correctly and sent a proper message to the genealogical ether!

Previously I had actually found an electoral roll entry from 1935 where a Mary Margaret Riordan was living in the Timaru Nurse's home.

 

I doubted that could be my aunty though, as why would she go that far away from home (in New Plymouth) for her training? Perhaps at that time in the 1930s, there simply weren't enough training positions around. And she did have Riordan cousins in Christchurch. I had in fact been told many years earlier by one of the Christchurch cousins that Aunty Mary had helped nurse her mother Bridget (Ryan) when she was dying in 1935.

As it turned out, my Papers Past rabbit hole soon threw me lots of bits and pieces. The earliest was this extract from November 1931 saying that M. M. Riordan of New Plymouth had been placed on the waiting list of probationers. You can see that people were applying from all around the country, and in fact Aunty Mary was the only applicant listed from Taranaki.

I soon found lots more snippets. The fact that my aunty was living away from the family home in New Plymouth seemed to lead to bits in the newspaper every time she came back to or left home. In January 1936 was the following information. And this confirmed that the entry in the 1935 electoral roll was actually my aunty.
 

And finally, something I had been searching for, a date that showed when Miss M Riordan became registered as a nurse. Her success in the Nurses' State Registration examinations  was recorded in the Taranaki Daily News on 15 July 1936.

More details were found in Papers Past as her early career continued. She did maternity training, as well and midwifery training and a Plunket stint. She was mainly in Auckland, but also Hamilton and Karitane. She even had a very brief stint in Palmerston North before she moved to Auckland to start her maternity training at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital. 

A marvellous thing  happened as I was doing this research. Because of an article about his NZ Ancestor Search Helper that I had included in our newsletter, I had sent the magnificent Luke Howison a copy of our May newsletter. He saw what I had written about the NZ Gazette, and replied to me with a copy of the register page from the 1931-1940 Register of Nurses (R22227911) at Archives NZ, that included the entry of my Aunty Mary Margaret Riordan as a registered nurse #8627 in Timaru, on 6 July 1936. Also written on her entry were her qualifications as a midwife, postgraduate diploma, a Plunket Certificate and as a Maternity Nurse.

This of course is just the 'preliminary' to Aunty Mary's career as a nurse. She spent many years as a Public Health Nurse in New Plymouth. But I'll finish with this one piece. Vaccination was obviously an issue then as now. She was being quoted as giving advice for the whooping cough inoculation in 1944.

Baptisms of my 3x-great-grandparents

 I have started looking closely at the Corippo parish register on Family Search, and have been writing up the entries along with translations of the bits I can manage. Here are the baptisms of my 3x-great-grandparents, Maria Johanna Scilacci, and John Scettrini.

Maria Johanna, like most family members, was baptised in Corippo. However John was baptised in Vira Gambarogno, which was a pasturage area at a lower altitude, closer to Locarno. All parties to his baptism were from Corippo though.

 

My Dad- writing things up

I have decided that one of the things that I need to do this year is 'write up' and check the information I have about my New Zealand family. I have started with my father, James Kevin Riordan (Jim). I have quite a lot of information about him as it happens, as he was a Railway worker, and went to the Middle East in WW2. Men tend to give rise to a more detailed paper trail than women.

This is my father with his mate Curly, somewhere at a camp in the desert in 1941.

 

 

 

 

Dad was born in 1917 in Omata, just outside New Plymouth, to Martin Riordan and Margaret Malone. At the time of his birth, the family was living on a dairy farm in Hurford Road. One of the things I would like to find out sometime is where exactly on Hurford Rd the family lived. I know it was somewhere not too far from the Royal Oak factory which his father Martin supplied. If I can find some old maps, I will hopefully be able to narrow the location down a bit.

Dad obtained Proficiency at primary school, and by 1938 was working with the Railways, firstly as a junior porter, and by 1955 he was a Guard. When men were sought for the War, he joined up serving in Railways Operating and Construction Companies, after entering Egypt in September 1940. In a chance meeting at a genealogy conference in the early 90s, I met a man who served in his unit, who told me Dad was much in demand in the canteen of an evening, where he sang Irish folk songs.

Dad moved to Waitara at some stage after his war service, where he was a guard. As a single man, he was boarding at the Masonic Hotel. It so happened that my mother, Katherine Lalor, was working there doing 'domestic duties', which I know included cooking. There was a courtship, and in 1956, my parents married, when my father was 39. Just under a year later, their first daughter was born, to be followed by three more in succeeding years.

From a moving company receipt, it was clear we moved into our Waitara home in July 1960. Dad clearly enjoyed being a husband and father, and making our house a home. (Back then, lower income people could still buy homes, through State Advances home mortgages.) I have many happy early childhood memories of Dad working hard around the property. He had a huge vegetable garden, planted fruit trees, and also numerous flower gardens. He had magic green fingers. He laid the concrete paths, dug drainage, and made a fence.

There was a day that I remembered walking down to the Railway Station with my Dad, to find the steam train was in its shed, with a wagon in front of it. I was only four at the time, but I still knew that wasn't 'normal'. I asked Dad why the wagon was there, and he told me it was so nobody could steal the train. I thought he was being silly! But it turns out that is exactly why the wagon was there. In the very early hours of 3 March 1962, shortly after my father had come home from work, he heard the locomotive AB.817 going past our house, when he knew it should have been in the loco shed. There was a chase with cars up to Big Jims Hill, but the train was by then returning to Waitara. Newspaper accounts appeared in various papers, and are all collected up in a file at Archives NZ, as are copies of 'official' documents. My father received a letter of commendation for his part in the incident. There was even an editorial in the Christchurch Star about the event on 10 March 1962.

Excerpt from editorial in Christchurch Star, 10 March 1962

 I have many idyllic memories of my early childhood. But in early June 1966, my childhood came crashing down, when Dad collapsed at work, and died not much later, of a sudden heart attack. I missed him acutely. 

Over the years, I have written various pieces about him, from the heart. The posters above are ones I prepared for the genealogy conference in the 90s in Palmerston North, when Anne Carian was organising the wall displays. The conference theme was 'Tracking the Lines' with Railways being one of the sub-themes.

Requiescat in Pace my dearly loved father.

 

 

Corippo Ancestry- using Images on Family Search, 2025

In the 1990s when I first started researching my Scettrini ancestry, I was able to order a Corippo parish microfilm into the Family History Centre here in Palmerston North. 

I spent many evening/weekend hours going through that microfilm, writing out entries that I thought might be relevant, using my School Cert Latin to work out the basics. It wasn’t possible though to get very many images of the entries. Later I wrote out ancestral names and dates on numerous pieces of paper, and sorted them on the lounge floor so I could put together a family tree.

I was reasonably confident with my tree, and thought I had been careful in what I put together. But the parish register was all in Latin, and there were a few things I wasn’t sure that I had completely right. One of those things was that I thought my Giuseppe Scettrini’s grandfather, also a Giuseppe, had two marriages, both to a Maria Caterina Gambetta, but each of those women had a different father. The other confusion was that my 3X-grt-grandparents on the Scettrini-Scilacci line seemed to sometimes be using the name Beneda as part of their Scettrini surname, or even to replace it.

I was very fortunate quite a few years later to be contacted by Rae Codoni, from California, who had done extensive research into his Codoni family from Corippo, and as part of this had drawn up a huge draft Scettrini tree. He was able to confirm that yes indeed, there were two different women named Maria Caterina Gambetta who married Giuseppe Scettrini senior. And indeed, there were so many Scettrini families in Corippo, that some did start using other names with their surname to differentiate themselves from each other.
Rae Codoni was actually descended from the first marriage on 4 Feb 1788, of Giuseppe Scettrini to Maria Gambetta, daughter of John Jacob Gambetta. Our family is descended from his second marriage to Maria Gambetta, daughter of Joseph Antony Gambetta.

Then at some stage it was no longer possible to access microfilms via a Family History Centre, and none of the parish register information was available online. It was magic for me to find out the other day that these images from the parish register are now available via Family Search in the images search section!

The images from the parish register can be found on Family Search at: 

https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/search-results?place=3057713

In images search, you put in Corippo, Ticino, Switzerland, and then use the image group number 008342031 (Item 6 of 8) to find most of the records below.

However, the people from Corippo sometimes migrated to a pasturage level at a lower altitude closer to Lake Locarno and those records might be found at Vira (Gambarogno) https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/search-results?place=3060031&page=1

I found a baptism I was looking for in 008191155 (Item 3 of 6) which had baptism records from 1774-1826.

I intend to spend some time this year going through the images and documenting our Scettrini ancestry using them. Just as a taster- this is the baptism of my 2X-grt-grandfather, Giuseppe Scettrini- Joseph, son of John Scettrini and Maria Johanna Scilacci.

Full-Text images- Jeremiah Malone

The buzz in the genealogy world is all about Full-Text images, where for some record sets on the FamilySearch website you can now search through documents for specific words or phrases. Several people told me that it was possible now to search for Irish Deeds this way, so I thought I might have a 'quick look'. 

And a 'quick look' was all it took.  Jeremiah Malone, my great-grandfather, has a reasonably distinctive name, and a record turned up for a land conveyance to him in Ballynadrideen quite easily, in 1887.  https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSKS-2YN?view=fullText

Jeremiah was able to purchase the land at Ballynadrideen on which he was the tenant farmer, from the vendor Standish Henry Harrison Esquire, of Castle Harrison. The purchase, for £705, was made possible with an advance to Jeremiah from the Irish Land Commission. This happened under the provisions of the purchase of Land (Ireland) Act of 1885.

There is another document for Jeremiah Malone, dated April 1904 in which Maurice Malone (his son) is described as also being a subscriber to the deed. I don’t know enough about the legalities of this, but perhaps this was part of the process of Jeremiah passing his interest in the land over to his son more fully? https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSKS-2S2L-7?view=fullText

At this stage in April 1904 both parents of Maurice Malone were alive, though Margaret Malone née Riordan died a few months later on 11 July 1904. Jeremiah Malone himself died two years later on 22 July 1906, with probate being granted to his son Maurice Malone. Probate applied to his Effects, £143 5s 0d, and did not mention the land. 

 I don’t understand all the complexities of the history, but in the 1870s/1880s in Ireland, there were legal moves made to help tenant farmers take ownership of their land from the large landlords who had had control of them. In 1870 a Land Act was passed that gave tenants some very basic rights including a right to compensation for improvements in case of eviction. In 1871 in Cullane, John Riordan became one of the tenant farmers facing eviction when the landlord hugely increased the rents. Cullane became a test case for the power of the new Land Act.

By the way, I tried a similar Deeds search for John or James Riordan in Ballylanders/ Cullane South- but there was a lawyer called John Riordan, so much more diligent searching will be needed to filter and find what I am sure must be there!

Family Search have made it very easy to download the full document as well as the AI-generated transcription. You can then find the url link and citation text at the end of the download.

Of course I then had to delve more deeply into this rabbit-hole, which wasn't on my Priority List for 2025 in any way! I found something about the history of the great house that was Castle Harrison on Wikipedia. It was demolished after 1956, but Wikipedia had a photo of it.

And I also then looked for an Ordnance Survey map on the National Library of Scotland's Map website. Ballynadrideen, where the Malone farm was, was quite close to Castle Harrison. (It's interesting looking at earlier maps before the railway ate into the Great House's land.

I'm unlikely to ever find my way back to Ireland now, but you never know, one of my nieces or nephews might, or perhaps a cousin's child. It would be good if someone can go back and stand on the land.