Rebecca Hobbs (nee Williams) geni.com/Rebecca-Hobbs Rebecca Williams Hobbs, Born 1854. Died 12 Feb 1896 (aged 42) Christchurch City, Canterbury, New Zealand. Burial Linwood Cemetery, Linwood, Christchurch. Plot, Block 27. Plot 115
Rebecca Williams was only six years old when her mother, Ann, collapsed and died in the doorway of the Timaru Hotel. Left with her little brother William and their restless whaler-turned-publican father, she grew up in the rough beginnings of a coastal town still finding its place between Māori history and European settlement. Hers was a life shaped by loss, movement, and resilience — from a childhood in a cottage by the sea, to marriage with a blacksmith, to raising eight children across the South Island and Wairarapa. She lived long enough to see New Zealand women win the right to vote, but like her mother before her, she was buried in an unmarked grave...
Rebecca Williams (1854–1896) was born in 1854 at Ballarat, Victoria, during the height of the Australian gold rush. She was the daughter of Samuel “Yankie Sam” Williams, an American whaler turned publican who had been in Timaru as a whaler and gone to Australia with the lure of gold, and Ann Mahoney, an Irish immigrant born in Cork 1823.
By 1856, the family had moved back across the Tasman to South Canterbury, New Zealand. They settled in George Rhodes’ 1851 shore cottage at the foot of George Street in Timaru — the town’s very first permanent European house. It was there, on 22 September 1856, that Rebecca’s brother William Williams was born, remembered as the first recorded European baby born in Timaru. His cradle, the story goes, was nothing more than a gin crate, a symbol of the rough resourcefulness of those early years.
The cased and coloured ambrotype pictured here. ... shows Rebecca and William Williams, the children of one of our earliest settlers Samuel and Ann Williams. Rebecca Hobbs born 1854 Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, and died 1856 buried in Linwood Cemetery, Christchurch. It would have been a relatively rare and expensive item for a working man like Sam. His story, which also mentions his son William Williams, born 1856 in Timaru, was the first European child born in Timaru and used a gin crate as his crib. - Courtesy of the South Canterbury Museum 3438.
Rebecca was only six years old when tragedy struck. In November 1860, her mother Ann collapsed suddenly in the doorway of the newly built Timaru Hotel and died of apoplexy (stroke) at the age of 35. Ann’s grave was never marked, and her final resting place remains a mystery so far. Within a year it looks like Sam had employed a goveness, and two years later, in 1862, married her. Rebecca gained a half-sister when her father Sam remarried Mary Ann Gardner. Their daughter Emily Williams was born in August 1862, though the marriage later broke down. And Mary Ann Gardner moved with her daughter to Hokitika.
After Ann’s death, Rebecca’s father Sam tried to keep going. With the backing of George Rhodes, he had opened the new Timaru Hotel in 1860, owning the chattels while Rhodes owned the building. But in March 1862 the hotel was destroyed by fire. Everyone escaped safely, but Sam lost nearly everything. Three years later, in February 1865, Sam transferred the licence and chattels of the Timaru Hotel to John Melton and left Timaru.
In the years that followed, it seems that Sam moved restlessly. He was licensee of the Beach Arms Hotel at Birdling’s Flat, later operated the old Hotel Wellington in Christchurch, and by the late 1870s was working as a ganger on the Canterbury railways. He eventually returned to Timaru, where he died in June 1883, aged 64. His friends erected a headstone at Timaru Cemetery to mark his grave — a lasting memorial to a man whose life had carried him from American whaling ships, to the Ballarat goldfields, to Timaru, where he raised Rebecca and William.
For Rebecca, I think this would have given her instability growing up. I can imagine the early loss of her mother, a father trying to pick him self up from the challenges. I think her childhood could have been shaped by both hardship and resilience. By the time she married at sixteen, she had already lived through fire, loss, and upheaval...
Rebecca herself married on 26 September 1870, at 16, to George William Hobbs, a blacksmith and farrier, in Timaru. Together they raised a large family whose lives reflected the restless movement of New Zealand’s settler years:
- Emily Olivia “Hettie” Hobbs (31 Jan 1872–1952), born in Timaru, later married Leonard Mansell Durell Cummins in Christchurch 1893 and lived to 80. Buried Ruru Lawn Cemetery, Bromley, Christchurch, Block 21. Plot 98. She had four children Edward Durell Cummins 1892–1972, Roy Mervyn Cummins 1894–1980, Leonard Mansell Durell Cummins 1900–1951 Mavis Rowena Cummins (married George Robert Hipson) 1909–1979.
- Frederick Alexander Hobbs (6 July 1872–1909), born in Timaru. Buried Linwood, Christchurch. Block: 27, Plot: 115, Age: 37 years, Occupation: Bricklayer, died from Cardiac failure. (Another record suggests he was born in 1874)
- William Gilbert Hobbs (14 Mar 1873–1939), followed his father into trades work, remaining in Canterbury. St Peter's Anglican Churchyard, Upper Riccarton, Christchurch.
- Florence Eleanor Rebecca Hobbs (6 Sep 1877–1939), born in South Dunedin, later settled in Christchurch. Linwood, Christchurch. Block 46. Plot 329.Her first husband James Peattie died 1898, three years after they married. Second marrage was to James Carson in 1899. He died 1917.
- Edith Rose Hobbs (14 Mar 1880–1965), married 1898 to William Earnest Woodham. Died 28 December 1965, aged 85. (I think she is buried at Bromley Cemetery, Christchurch).
- Frances Grace Violet Hobbs (25 June 1885–25 June 1929), died, aged 44, Buried Linwood, Block: 36, Plot: 321.
- Francis Wilfred Hobbs (3 Jan 1889–?), lived into the 20th century.
- Ina Winifred Hobbs (later Campbell) (Jun 1891–1976), born in Featherston, died in Christchurch. lived a long life and carried the family line forward well into the modern era.
Rebecca’s father Samuel Williams died in Timaru in 1883, when she was 29. By then, her own young family was moving between Timaru, South Dunedin, Featherston, and Christchurch, following George’s work as a blacksmith.
Rebecca’s final years were spent in Christchurch. In February 1896, she died of typhoid fever at Christchurch Hospital, aged just 41 or 42. Typhoid was a deadly disease at the time, claiming many lives in the city during outbreaks linked to poor sanitation and contaminated water supplies. She was buried at Linwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave — a sad echo of her mother Ann’s unknown resting place in Timaru.
Rebecca died 12 February 1896 and is buried in an unmarked grave at Linwood cemetery, Christrchuch on 15 February 1896. Block number: 27, Plot number: 115, Age: 42 years, Born 1854 in Ballarat Australia to Sam Williams and Ann Mahoney.
Her husband, a Farrier, George William Hobbs (1849-1912) remarried Ada Mary Lavina Shimmield Hobbs in 1903. When he died in 1912, aged 63, he was laid to rest at Linwood Cemetery with his second wife, beneath a handsome headstone that still stands today. Rebecca, meanwhile, lies nearby in an unmarked grave, her contribution to Canterbury’s early settler story easy to overlook.
And yet, Rebecca lived through one of New Zealand’s most important milestones. In 1893, three years before her death, New Zealand women won the right to vote — the first country in the world to do so. Rebecca would have seen that moment and been alive for the very first election in which women participated. She died just ten months before the second general election with women voters, in 1896.
Rebecca’s story is bound tightly with her mother’s: both women bore children in frontier conditions, both shaped the beginnings of Timaru, and both rest without a marker. Together they represent the many settler women whose lives were vital in building communities but were seldom remembered in stone.
Visit to the Linwood Cemetery to find the grave of Rebecca Williams. She married William Hobb, but when Rebecca died, he remarried. So William Hobbs is buried with his second wife. Rebecca Hobbs nee Williams is buried in section 24 an unmarked grave. The cemetery was damaged in the Christchurch earthquakes and it was sad to see the destruction. I guess it is too mammoth a task to restore the headstones, and make sure they didn't fall down again.
My reflection of what I have learned about some of Rebecca’s story:
My reflection of what I have learned about some of Rebecca’s story:
Rebecca’s legacy didn’t end with her unmarked grave. Through her eight children — from Hettie in Christchurch to Ina in Featherston — her line stretched across Canterbury, Otago, and the Wairarapa, weaving into the fabric of New Zealand’s growing towns. Her descendants carried forward the resilience of a family that had begun in a rough whaling hut by the Timaru shore, lived through the goldfields of Ballarat, and endured the heartbreak of early loss.
When we pause at Linwood Cemetery, where Rebecca lies without a headstone, or at Timaru Cemetery, where her mother Ann is also unmarked, we’re reminded that stone markers are not the only way lives are remembered. Their names live on in family trees, in the lives of their children and grandchildren, and now in the stories we tell about them. Rebecca and Ann may not have monuments of their own, but they helped shape a community — and their legacy endures every time their story is spoken aloud.
Ann Williams, born Ann Mahoney in 1823, died suddenly in Timaru in 1860 of an apoplexy stroke, leaving behind six-year-old Rebecca and four-year-old William — the first European child born in Timaru, remembered for his gin-crate cradle. Rebecca grew up in the shadow of that loss, but her own life was to follow a tragically similar path. In February 1896, at the age of forty-two, she succumbed to typhoid fever in Christchurch Hospital. Though separated by a generation and by circumstance — one claimed by a sudden stroke in a fledgling settlement, the other by infectious disease in a growing city — mother and daughter were bound by the cruel symmetry of early death, both buried without markers. Their story stands in contrast to later families such as the Hobbs siblings, many of whom lived into their seventies and eighties, reflecting how within a generation life in Canterbury was beginning to shift toward longer lives and greater continuity.
Rebecca’s children themselves lived lives that spanned this range of hardship and resilience:
- Emily Olivia “Hettie” Hobbs (1872–1952) – 80 years
- Frederick Alexander Hobbs (1872–1909) – 37 years
- William Gilbert Hobbs (1873–1939) – 66 years
- Florence Eleanor Rebecca Hobbs (1877–1939) – 62 years
- Edith Rose Hobbs (1880–1965) – 85 years
- Frances Grace Violet Hobbs (1885–1929) – 44 years
- Francis Wilfred Hobbs (1889–?) – lifespan unknown, but into the 20th century
- Ina Winifred Hobbs (1891–1976) – 85 years
This record of her children’s lifespans shows both the fragility of life in that era and the remarkable endurance of some lines of the family, stretching Rebecca’s legacy well into the modern age.
Thank you to the descendants for sharing their family histories and stories with me. Enormous amounts of time and financial investment have gone into pulling this information together, for people like me to come along and connect to
https://www.ancestry.com.au/family-tree/person/tree/191766038/person/302485069857/facts
Nola Towgods family history book on the Williams Family at the South Canterbury Museum, compiled from 20 plus years of research. Nola is a descendant from Ann and Sam Williams. She passed away peacefully in Tauranga on Friday 27th March 2015 aged 85, married to Iam Towgood, mother of Jenny and Chris Wilson, and Rob and Helen. Nana to her grandchildren, Sonya, Rhys and Libby, Craig and Mitzi, and Mark; Kylie and Russell, Blake and Chelsea, and Alice. And very special nana to her twp great grandaughters, Ava and Tilly.
View of the Government Landing Services at the foot of what is now Strathallan Street, Timaru. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1691-114. No known copyright restrictions