Cathie Matthews and Bill Roxborogh
My parents, Cathie Matthews and Bill
Roxborogh, were married in January 1944. Cathie was a teacher from
Morrinsville and Bill a storeman from Devonport recently repatriated
home from the NZ Army. I was born in 1945 and Bill left home not
long after, something I would one day discover that his own father
had also done. My grandparents, Ernest and Mary, and my uncle Doug were important parts of my
early life and I discovered Bill's story somewhat later.
This photo,
taken in Hamilton, dates from around the time of the wedding in the
registry office, in Te Aroha. Doug is in his uniform as an
Aircraft Technician, my grandfather in a suit and one of the ties of
which he seemed to have a large collection for a dairy farmer. My
mother Cathie, my grandmother Mary and my father, Bill.
For many years Cathie worked on her own family history, the
stories of her father from Devon whose real name was German, and her
mother from the Highlands who was a Robertson descended from a group
of Mckenzie crofters from north of Ullapool in Western Scotland who migrated to New Zealand in the 1870s. The
Auchindrean McKenzies became a major project culminating in a large
family reunion in Feilding in 1990. For my sake, and also for her
own curiosity, she
also tried, sometimes in correspondence with her ex-husband which I
only discovered years later, to get
to the bottom of the mystery of Bill's family name with its
strange spelling.
A substantial section of this website is "the book" the story of
the Mckenzies and Robertsons that Cathie kept working on after the
reunion. To this I have added an account of the mystery of Bill
Roxborogh's father and where his name came from, and outlined a
little of the Chapman and Woolley connections. As I continue to
process the piles of family papers, there will also be more of
Cathie's own story and that of her parents, Ernest and Mary, and of
her brother, my uncle Doug, and some of my own.
John Roxborogh
January 2019.