Talk:Jessie Yvonne Hazel Copeland/@comment-120.136.4.67-20130403024038/@comment-4013722-20150428225204

Fossicking among family papers turns up tales of a super-great-gran (by adoption). More on Rachel Preston.
The recent tragic death of a close friend of my late mother, who shared a set of great-grandparents with her, had me delving into a packet of family-related material that I hadn't previously gone through. It contained not only birth and marriage certificates, but short written accounts of some of some family members, including the military career of my Uncle Frank, whose photograph is my current profile picture. It also had a hand-typed obituary, probably copied from the Taranaki Herald of June 30, 1930, of Mum's father's father, George Alfred Adlam.

Most fascinating of all was a hand-typed copy of a couple of excerpts from an Eltham centenary publication with stories of Mum's mother's mother, Rachel Preston—a lady of whom I had heard no family anecdotes at all, but had received a very brief snippet about her from an anonymous source online. My aunts and uncles used to talk about her husband, my great-grandfather James Preston. None of them had ever met him, but he carried the reputation of being a tyrant and a bully, and the story was told of how, when my grandmother was a child, he would punish her by sending her to her room without her dinner. Her soft-hearted stepmother would sneak a meal in to her, and when her father found out, he would beat the stepmother.

From this tale of the stepmother, I concluded that Great-grandma Preston had died when Grandma was a child. But after my mother's death, I received the above communication from an (unfortunately) anonymous relative in response to family material I'd included in an obituary of Mum online. This read:

"Thank you for posting this - I too am a descendant of James and Rachel Preston (Born Spence), they married in 1864 in county Armagh and arrived in NZ on The Ganges in Auckland during Feb of 1865. Rachel left James and died in Auckland 26th Sept 1910."

This showed that in fact Grandma was 24 when her mother died. So presumably James and Rachel had divorced, and James had remarried. I extrapolated from this and the family stories that James's violent behaviour had probably driven his first wife out. But after finding these pieces from the Eltham centenary publication, I am left wondering if that could even have been possible.

My mother used to tell the story, which she presumably had from Grandad Adlam himself, about the first time he saw Jessie Preston, my grandmother. He belonged to a family of relatively small men, and when he saw Jessie, he said to himself, "Here's where we get some size into the Adlam family!" Grandma was apparently a physically imposing young woman. She was 18 when they married. Grandad was 29.

And from the typed accounts, it appears that Great-grandma Preston was even more imposing, and evidently quite a legend in the Eltham district. The centenary publication contains the following excerpt from the Eltham Argus, September 26, 1910:

OBITUARY... DEATH OF OLD IDENTITY

The death occurred at Auckland on Saturday, of an old Eltham identity, in the person of Mrs Rachael PRESTON, wife of James PRESTON.

Deceased was well known around Eltham, and was one of the pioneer settlers.

She was a woman possessed of enormous strength, and it is said that with her husband, she assisted to fell nearly half the bush around the town. Incidents are recorded of the heavy tasks she undertook and invariably accomplished, and one prominent Elthamite states that Mrs Preston could swing an axe into a tree with the best of bushmen.

Latterly, her health had not been of the best, and she removed to Auckland for treatment. A few weeks back, she became worse and died as stated above at 4 p.m. on Saturday. Deceased will be buried at Auckland.

The other is apparently a historical piece from a supplement to the Eltham Argus of March 4, 1959:

Most of the bush on the site of the town was felled by Mr PRESTON, assisted by his wife, a woman possessing enormous physical strength, which enabled her to more than hold her own with the strong men of those days. It is related of her that she thought nothing of carrying a sack of potatoes on her back from her residence in the vicinity of Collingwood Street to the railway station, and of doing jobs beyond the strength of men accustomed to really hard work.

Mr T.C. Stanners told the story of one such case while he and his brother were engaged in the butchery business. He had gone along to the Preston residence to collect a pig which, following the usual procedure, he had grabbed by a hind leg. The animal kicked violently and rapidly, and he was unable to hold it. In his words, 'It was just like a strong electric shock in my arm, and I could do nothing with it.'  'Here,' said Mrs Preston, 'I'll show you.' And climbing into the sty, to the astonishment of onlookers, she had the pig lying helpless in a matter of moments.