Anne Taylor

Anne Taylor (nee Adamson) (1832-1900)

Anne Adamson, born in 1832 in Ireland, was the only child of James and Ellen Adamson. She was a mix of protestant Irish and Scottish parents. Ellen Adamson (nee Conner) was Irish and her father, James Adamson, was from Scotland. James had gone to Ireland in search of work.

Immigration records to Australia would show James’s occupation as a “gardener” and Ellen a “dairymaid”.

In 1840 Anne’s parents took advantage of the “bounty” immigration scheme to Australia. The “bounty scheme” was set up to encourage immigration to Australia. The New South Wales Government would pay ship owners to find suitable people of good character and then to ship them out to Australia.

A newspaper at the time described the beginning of their arduous journey from Ireland to Australia. Anne was eight years old:

.......the whole number (of passengers) having been collected from the South and West of Ireland and carried over, like so many pigs, by the Cork and Dublin steamboats, to meet the Glenswilly (ship) in Plymouth Sound.

The Glenswilly, with 310 passengers, left Plymouth on 23 November 1840 and made good time arriving in Sydney on the 11 March 1841. The “bounty” for Anne was 10 pounds and for her parents, 19 pounds each.

However, they very quickly left Australia for New Zealand, arriving in Auckland sometime in 1842 or 1843. The exact date they left and why is still unknown. Auckland Police Census record James Adamson as leasing 10 acres in the Tamaki in 1842/3.

Aged only 17, Anne Adamson married William Innes Taylor (1821-1890) in 1849. William, who was born in India but educated in Scotland, chose a career in farming and immigrated to New Zealand, arriving in November 1843. William farmed his Glen Innes property in the Tamaki for over 45 years. His father and many of his siblings would also establish homes in New Zealand over the next decade. 

Anne and William had 12 children, of which 11 reached adulthood (six sons and six daughters). They lived all their married life at what is now 172 West Tamaki Road in Glendowie. William died in 1890 as a result of pneumonia. Annie passed away in 1900. They are buried at a small cemetery in Pt England (Auckland). 

The Glen Innes farm was sold piece by piece and eventually the Government of the time, around the 1940s,  took the remainder under the public works act for schools and housing. Where the Glen Innes homestead once stood is now the site of the Glen Taylor Primary School.

Anne’s mother, Ellen, lived long enough to see her first grandchild born but died in March 1850 aged 45. At this point her father James seems to disappear. The family can only speculate that he may have returned to Scotland but they still do not know.