It is not easy to lose your mother. At least I didn’t find it easy, even at the ripe old age of sixty-nine. I found myself, after she died in 2022, trying to fix a mental picture of her and of Dad that might give me some solace as I came to terms with their absence in my life. 

I began to sift through all their papers, journals, scrapbooks and photograph albums that she and Dad had left behind. I told myself I needed to do this anyway – to digitise it all and put it into some semblance of order before handing the originals to grandchildren for safekeeping. However, there was likely also an unconscious element at play that had something to do with keeping my memory of them alive.

Individually, their ‘stuff’ was mostly just mementoes of their lives, their ancestors’ lives, and those of their own family and friends, and the things that interested them. There were documents like great-grandparents’ marriage certificates randomly stuck into scrapbooks cheek by jowl with newspaper clippings and old train tickets, and their journals gave only a brief glimpse into some of the more adventurous periods of their lives. In short, they didn’t, on their own, tell a coherent story.

As I read them, I became increasingly aware of the gaps in their stories, of the ones this material did not tell or at least only half told. Increasingly, I felt the need to plug the gaps and tell a fuller story. 

So, I have mostly written this history for myself, if I’m being honest. Still, I do hope that I have managed to tell a story of two wonderful people and their families that is worth telling. I hope that somewhere in these pages, members of their family might find a little of themselves reflected in their story and the stories of their ancestors.

Mum and Dad were, in many respects, very ordinary people – they were not great scholars or leaders; they did not alter the course of human history – they were just two people who came together in that extraordinary web of human connection and created a life together. However, no one has ever had a life quite like it, and they have left behind a unique and special legacy that will live on in the lives and memories of their descendants. For this reason alone, they deserve to have their story told.   

I have used material from various sources, including their eight scrapbooks, journals, boat logs and notebooks, letters, and photograph albums. I have also relied heavily on ancestry websites to trace back family members, and I have made good use of the extraordinary repository of information that is now available on the internet if you know where to look. Where I have used printed sources, I have tried to reference them, but in some cases, I have had to rely on anecdotal information from long conversations I had with Mum before she died, from family, and my own memory. I can’t, therefore, guarantee that I’ve got the story completely right, so those who were a part of this story, please let me know if you spot any errors or inaccuracies.

An essential source of information for the period of their own lives was Mum’s diaries and travel journals. She wrote in the beginnings of a letter to me (left in a journal and never sent) in about 1998,

‘… it has often occurred to me that phone calls are a poor substitute for letters. When we’re all gone, there won’t be that wad of voluminous correspondence that previous generations have left behind. There is the point though, that 99% of what was written will be of no note whatsoever.’

She did leave wads of correspondence behind, but I’m thankful that she did, as it has given this story more character. Consequently, many of the stories recorded here are of experiences they had as seen through her eyes, providing an inevitable slant toward what she saw and what she felt.  There are boat logs, letters and Dad’s observations on life in his Little Red Book, but these were relatively limited in comparison to Mum’s writings. So, the occasional focus on Mum was not deliberate; it was simply a function of the material I had at hand.

I have, of course, also described both Mum and Dad as I knew them, looking through my lens. Those who knew them might have quite validly described them differently, so the reader may need to remind themselves that this is just my take and that there may be others. 

I have split this history up into a series of posts in the hope that it makes the reading a little more palatable. These are:

1. John Hollis Murray (1926-1998). This covers his childhood and then attempts to characterise the person that he was.
2. The Murray Ancestry. This explores their ancestry back to Freskin in the 12th century and introduces some of the more recent and interesting ancestors.
3. Beverly Margaret Murray (nee Aitchison 1930-2022). As with Dad, this describes Mum’s childhood and then describes the person that I knew.
4. The Aitchison Ancestry. This goes back to the Aitchisons of the lowlands of Scotland, who lived cheek-by-jowl with the Murrays. It digs into their papermaking past and explores their blacksmithing and farming history.
5. Their Early Years Together. This takes us from the time they met to soon after their marriage.
6. The Farming Era. This covers their time at Kaiaua, Pigs Head Road in Whakapara, Waikaraka, Ladywell at Kaharoa, and on Waiti Station on Waiheke. Be prepared to jump about a bit as these don’t all follow chronologically with other periods in their lives.
7. Shoes and Fish. This takes us through their two periods of selling shoes and commercial fishing, their time at Algies Bay and at Leigh.
8. Off-shore Adventuring. This takes us through their two Pacific cruises and also their North American and United Kingdom tours.
9. Explorations of Home. This describes the period after they came back from their second Pacific cruise through to Dad’s death but excludes the United Kingdom trip.
10. Mum alone. This takes us through the last twenty-four years of Mum’s life that she had without the company of her mate.

I’d like to acknowledge Linda Rooney and Alice Murray for their invaluable help with making sense of and navigating around WordPress and making the website look vaguely presentable. I’d also like to acknowledge all those whanau members who have helped to jog my memory about family stories and pin down dates of when things happened.