item details
Overview
This photograph shows four generations of the Randell family. Sarah Randell is seated on the left with her first great-grandson Noel on her lap. Sarah’s daughter Annie (née Randell) is on the right, and her daughter Edith Newson is standing in the centre. (Annie was the sixth child in Sarah and William’s family.)
In 1867 William Randell, a bricklayer and mason from England, built a small wooden cottage in St Mary Street, in Thorndon, for his wife Sarah and their growing family. The couple raised their ten children there. William died in 1880 but Sarah managed to keep the cottage and feed the family with financial help from her three eldest unmarried children. One by one the children grew up and moved away from home, but Sarah stayed in the cottage with daughter Harriet until 1912.
In 1994 William and Sarah’s great-granddaughter Beverley Randell and her husband Hugh Price purchased the cottage at 14 St Mary Street, and with their daughter Susan Price they set about restoring it. Over the course of the restoration, with their architect Martin Hill, they discovered a number of everyday objects such as clothing, ceramic fragments, discarded tools, children's toys, buttons and bottles, hidden in the walls, under the floorboards or in the attic. They donated these items to Te Papa in 2008. This photograph, and others in the collection, allow us to put faces to the names of some of those whose treasures and trinkets we care for.
References
Randell, Beverley. 1992. A Crowded Thorndon Cottage: The story of William and Sarah Randell and their ten children. Wellington: Gondwanaland Press.
Randell, Beverley, and Susan Price. 2022. Unpublished research notes provided to curator.