Ann Sarah was the eldest child of Henry Harvey, an agricultural labourer, and Mary Anne Ham. She grew up in Woodham Walter — a village of a few dozen cottages, a forge, a shop, and a church at the end of the lane. The Harvey and Ham families had lived side by side in this village for generations.

By 1861, when Ann Sarah was twelve, there were eight children in the Harvey cottage on Woodham Walter Street: Ann Sarah, Sampson, Titus, Lucy, twins Thurza and William, Edward, and Joseph. Her father Henry worked other men's land his entire life. Her mother Mary Anne had signed their marriage certificate with her mark — she could not write.

Ann Sarah married William Webb at St Michael the Archangel Church, Woodham Walter, on 7 March 1868. She was twenty. He was twenty-one. The church had been standing since 1563 — already three hundred years old on their wedding day. Her brother Titus Harvey was one of the witnesses.

Six years later, Ann Sarah and William left England forever. She was pregnant. She had buried her infant daughter Lucy just five months before they sailed. She made a 110-day ocean voyage with two young children, and gave birth to her son Henry Thomas Webb — our great-grandfather Harry — in Pakuranga, Auckland, six weeks after they arrived. She never went back to Essex.

She died in Whangārei in 1928, aged seventy-nine. She had been in New Zealand for fifty-four years.

William was born in Purleigh, three miles from Woodham Walter. His father William Webb Senior worked at Hoe Mill Barns on the edge of Maldon — the same mill where Ann Sarah's brothers would later lodge as boys.

By 1862 William had moved to Hatfield, working as a labourer. He returned to Woodham Walter to marry Ann Sarah in 1868. In 1874 he and Ann Sarah left London aboard the ship Waitangi as assisted immigrants. His occupation on the passenger list: ploughman.

He died in Whangārei in 1926, aged eighty — having spent more than half his long life in New Zealand.

When Ann Sarah left for New Zealand in 1874, her parents Henry and Mary Anne were still living on Woodham Walter Street. They would live there for another twenty years. Henry died in 1893, nineteen years after his daughter sailed away. Mary Anne lived until around 1902, eventually moving fifty-eight miles to Isleworth in Middlesex to live with her youngest son.

Ann Sarah's brother Titus — who witnessed her wedding — stayed in the area. Her brothers William and Edward had already left home as teenagers to work at Hoe Mill. The family that had lived in this village for generations slowly scattered.

Whether Ann Sarah ever knew when her father died — whether any letter reached Whangārei — the records don't say.

Sarah grew up in Dunstable, a town famous for one thing: straw hats. In the early nineteenth century, Dunstable and the surrounding towns were at the heart of England's straw bonnet industry. Women and girls plaited wheat straw into fine decorative lengths at home, then hand-sewed them into bonnets. Children learned to plait as young as six or seven.

Sarah's older sisters were straw bonnet sewers. Her brother was a straw plait teacher. Sarah herself was trained in millinery and fine hand-sewing by the women in her family. She was, by all accounts, extraordinarily skilled.

She brought those skills to New Zealand. She made her husband's suits by hand. She sewed all twelve of her children's clothing — underclothing to winter coats. She altered her bonnets each year to make them look new. The only gift her husband ever gave her was a silver thimble. It was well used.

She lived to the age of ninety-six. Her grandchildren remembered her with great fondness.

William's father Joseph was a gamekeeper on the estates of the Dukes of Bedford — managing forests and farmland, keeping poachers out, working for one of the most powerful families in England. William grew up in that world, and by nineteen was living as a boarder in Bedford and working as a police constable.

He resigned from the constabulary on 9 September 1862 — the day before his wedding to Sarah Ward. He did not transfer to any other force.

In 1865, William and Sarah emigrated to New Zealand aboard the Lancashire Witch, sponsored by Captain William Crush Daldy, an Auckland merchant who needed reliable settlers to help survey his land near Kamo. Their daughter Anne died on the voyage and was buried at sea. Their son William died soon after arrival. Their third child Edward was born three months after landing and died at eight months.

Sarah lost all three of her first children within twenty-seven months of leaving Dunstable.

There is more. Sarah had not wanted to leave. The family story — passed down by her great-granddaughter — is that William took their children and boarded the ship, leaving Sarah no choice but to follow. In 1876, after years of ill-treatment, Sarah went to court. William had threatened to knock her head off with an axe. The neighbours, who called him 'miserly and pernicious,' crowded the courtroom and hooted when he was fined five pounds.

Sarah had six more children with William after the court case. She outlived him by thirty-three years. She was ninety-six when she died.

Their youngest child was Isabel King — your great-grandmother.

Joseph King, William's father, worked as a gamekeeper his entire adult life — first at Ham Lodge in Ridgmont on the Duke of Bedford's estate, then at Woburn. A gamekeeper's job was to keep poachers out, manage fox populations for the hunts, and control rabbits across large areas of aristocratic woodland. It offered security and respectability that labouring did not — but it also meant living in tied cottages and working at the pleasure of men who owned the landscape for miles around.

Joseph is buried at Woburn. We will visit his grave today.

James Attwood was born in the village of Bishops Itchington in Warwickshire. His father was also James Attwood; his mother was Anne Greenway from the nearby village of Butlers Marston. By the time James was in his early twenties, both parents were dead. He and his brother Joseph were orphans.

In 1874, aged twenty-five, James left England alone as an assisted immigrant. The ship was the Loch Awe — and it made history on that voyage: 76 days and 6 hours from England to Auckland, a record passage. He is listed on the passenger list as a farm labourer. His passage cost the government £14 10 shillings — equivalent to about $29 today. He arrived knowing no one.

He settled in Newton, Auckland, and built a life from nothing. By 1881 he was a contractor, with a property on Eden Terrace worth £250. On 7 July 1881 he married Elizabeth Barton — the marriage notice appeared in the New Zealand Herald:

"ATTWOOD-BARTON — On July 7, 1881 at the residence of the bridegroom, by the Rev. Allen Webb, James, youngest son of the late James Attwood of Warwickshire, England, to Elizabeth, youngest daughter of the late Joseph Barton Esq. formerly of Gloucestershire, England."

Two orphans — one from Warwickshire, one born in New Zealand to Gloucestershire parents — finding each other in Auckland. Their children Bill, Percy, Fred, Ethel and Bert (Arthur Gilbert) were all born in Auckland. In the 1890s, the family moved north. Their son Alf was born in Whangārei in 1894. In 1896 James took up 146 acres of land at Riponui.

James died on 1 August 1905, aged 56. Elizabeth died on 6 December 1908, aged 46. They are buried side by side in Hukerenui Cemetery. Their son Alf is buried next to his father. Bert — your great-grandfather — was eighteen when his mother died.

Elizabeth Barton's family had been in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, since the sixteenth century — Bartons appear in Thornbury parish records from 1592. They farmed, owned property on the High Street, and were woven into the fabric of that place for three hundred years.

Elizabeth's grandfather was John Barton of Kington, Thornbury — a farmer who died in 1827. His wife was Susannah Cornock, who died in 1855. Their son Joseph Barton — Elizabeth's father — was farming in Cromhall by 1851, where the census records him aged 35 with Mary aged 34, leasing 200 acres from the Earl of Ducie with two servants. He was prosperous — a gentleman farmer.

In 1859, Joseph and Mary Limbrick Barton and their five children boarded the ship Nourmahal at Gravesend. They were cabin passengers — not assisted immigrants. They chose to go. The voyage was reported as comfortable; the 846-ton vessel left on 20 August, crossed the equator on 29 September, and arrived in New Zealand with one birth and two marriages on board. Joseph gave his new address as Great Barrier Island and listed his occupation as Farmer.

Elizabeth — their only New Zealand-born child — was born on 28 October 1862. She never saw Gloucestershire. She grew up knowing her family came from there, and married the Warwickshire orphan who arrived with nothing.

Inside St Mary's Church in Thornbury today, there is a memorial tablet on the chancel wall with the names of John and Susannah Barton and three of their sons carved in stone. It is the oldest physical evidence of our family's presence in England that we will find on this entire journey.

There is a story told about Lockerbie. A beggar came down the road one day, hungry and thirsty, and knocked at every door asking for a bannock or a cup of buttermilk. At every door he was turned away. When the last housewife closed the door in his face, he cried: “What kind of a place is this? Are there nae Christians in it?” She paused, then replied: “Na, there are nae Christians in Lockerbie, just Johnstones and Jardines,” and closed the door.

We have both Johnstones and Jardines in our whakapapa. My great-great-great-grandfather was Samuel Johnston who married Marion Jardine. Their daughter Mary Johnston married Andrew Lockerbie. Their son was John Carrick Lockerbie — Nana Webb's father. We should be right at home in Lockerbie.

The town itself was named long before our family. The name Lockerbie comes from Old Norse. People were more likely to be named after the town than the town after the people. Nana always told us the town was named after the family. We were very impressed as children.

Jacobina was the daughter of William Swan, who owned Swan's Hotel on Bank Street in Dumfries — a busy, prosperous establishment that hosted sales, concerts, town meetings, and lectures. Her father was a public figure in the town. Education mattered in the Swan household.

In July 1855, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard published the prize list for the Dumfries Academy's English Department. Jacobina Swan received first prizes in English Writing and Grammar. She was nine years old.

Her father William died in 1869. He is buried in St Mary's Churchyard, Dumfries. His headstone, still legible, reads: Sacred to the memory of William Swan, late wine and spirit merchant, Dumfries. We will find it.

Jacobina married John Carrick Lockerbie in St Mary's Church, Dumfries, in October 1869. They lived in London for some years before sailing for New Zealand in 1879. She educated her daughters in New Zealand herself — the way her father had educated her. Her daughter Marion, Nana Webb, never attended school a day in her life. But she had the most beautiful copperplate handwriting, and she was known for it until the end of her life.

John Carrick Lockerbie grew up in the parishes around Dumfries. He appears in the 1851 census as a scholar, aged seven. By 1861 he was sixteen and already a draper's apprentice. By the time he and Jacobina married in 1869, he was a merchant in Stepney, London.

In the 1871 census, he and Jacobina are living in the East End of London — John a draper employing one man and one boy, Jacobina's widowed mother living with them. He was still in London in 1887 and 1888, running his business from 310 Commercial Road East.

Why he finally left for New Zealand — after seventeen years in London — is not fully known. He and Jacobina arrived in Nelson on 4 January 1879. Their daughter Marion Lockerbie — Nana Webb — was born nine months later, on 1 November 1879, in Nelson. She was the first of the family born in Aotearoa.

John died in Whangārei in 1906. Jacobina died in 1918. Marion lived until 1973 — ninety-four years old. She outlived her husband Harry Webb by forty-one years.

Nana Webb always told us she and her sister Tish had no relatives in New Zealand. For a long time, this was accepted as true.

Then a search through Papers Past — the National Library's archive of old newspapers — found the obituary of John Carrick Lockerbie. At the very bottom, one sentence: Mr Lockerbie leaves behind him a wife, two daughters, and an unmarried brother, Mr James Lockerbie. The latter gentleman followed his brother to New Zealand in 1879.

James Lockerbie, eight years younger than John. He arrived in Dunedin five months after John and Jacobina. Electoral rolls show him following the family — Nelson, the Northland coalfields, gum digging, labouring. He died in Whangārei in 1914. Nana was thirty-five. She knew him. He was her Uncle James.

The cause of death on his certificate: alcoholic poisoning and cardiac arrest. No family member is named. That Nana never mentioned him is, in the light of this, entirely understandable.

After Nana's death, among her papers in an old handbag, were letters from 1930 — from an ageing uncle in England with a failing memory, and from a cousin named Nellie Lockerbie in Enfield — about inheritances from 'Uncle James' and 'Uncle Jas. Johnstone' that were probably too small to be worth claiming after legal expenses. Nana kept those letters for over forty years.

This whole region — Torthowald, Mouswald, Tinwald, Lockerbie, Dumfries — was the heartland of Clan Johnstone for centuries. Our ancestors the Johnstons and Jardines were part of this clan world. The clan motto is Nunquam Non Paratus — Never Unprepared. The tartan is green, blue, and yellow.

The Border Reivers — families who raided cattle and defended their land in the centuries before the Union — included the Johnstones. In 1593, the Battle of Dryfe Sands was fought near Lockerbie, after a hundred years of feuding between the Johnstones and the Maxwells. The Johnstones won. Seven hundred Maxwell clansmen were killed.

We carry both sides of that old battle. The Maxwells of Maxwelltown — now part of Dumfries — are also in our whakapapa, through Auntie Davika's line.

Torthowald is a small village about five miles east of Dumfries. The castle ruins there are atmospheric and ancient — a fifteenth-century tower house of the kind the Border families built for protection. The churchyard holds graves connected to our family.

The correct pronunciation, by the way, is Torthorral — not how it looks. The locals will correct you. Mouswald is Moosal. Tinwald is Tinnal. I found this out the hard way in 1995.

This is the most important site of the whole Scottish visit. John Carrick Lockerbie and Jacobina Roan Swan were married here on 21 October 1869. The church sits on Buccleuch Street beside the River Nith.

In the churchyard, we are looking for the headstone of William Swan and Jane Affleck — Jacobina's parents. The inscription reads: Sacred to the memory of William Swan, late wine and spirit merchant, Dumfries, who departed this life 21st June 1869, aged 69 years. Also Jane Affleck his wife who died at Egremont, Cheshire on the 13th January 1881 aged 71 years.

We are also looking for: Lockerbie (Andrew), Swan (William, John), Johnstone (Mary, Samuel), Affleck (Jane, James), Black (Helen), Jardine (Marion), Roan (Jacobina).

Dumfries in the nineteenth century was a lively market town on the River Nith — a modest inland port, an administrative centre, a hub for local commerce. Streets like Bank Street, where William Swan's hotel stood, would have been busy with carts, deliveries, foot traffic, markets.

Robert Burns lived his final years in Dumfries and is buried at St Michael's Church nearby. His presence loomed large in the local imagination throughout the nineteenth century — Jacobina would have grown up knowing his name and his work.

Dumfries Academy, where Jacobina won her prizes at nine years old, is still a school today. Swan's Hotel on Bank Street is gone, but the street is still there.

The town of Lockerbie — small, solid, stone-built, in Dumfriesshire — is where the Lockerbie family name comes from. Not the other way around, despite what Nana always told us. The name in the family is carried deliberately: Andrew Lockerbie Webb, Russell Lockerbie Webb, Ben Lockerbie Webb.

In 1988, Lockerbie became known to the world for a different reason. Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb over the town on 21 December, killing 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history. The memorial is at Dryfesdale Cemetery.

The town deserves to be seen as more than the disaster. It is a place with a long history — our history. But the memorial matters and deserves acknowledgement.

Edinburgh Castle sits on a plug of volcanic rock 130 metres above the city — the same volcano that formed Arthur's Seat, the 251-metre hill you can climb in the middle of the city in about 45 minutes. The Castle holds the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Stone of Destiny, on which Scottish kings were crowned for centuries.

The Royal Mile runs from the Castle at the top to the Palace of Holyroodhouse at the bottom — one kilometre of the most historically layered street in Scotland. The narrow alleyways running off it are called closes. They go back centuries. Mary King's Close, underground, is one of the most famous.

Victoria Street — the curved, colourful street that curves down from George IV Bridge — is said to have inspired J.K. Rowling's Diagon Alley. The Elephant House café on George IV Bridge is where she wrote early chapters of Harry Potter.

Robert Burns is buried in Dumfries, where we have just been. But Edinburgh has its own literary giants — Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde) was born here. The character of Deacon Brodie, a respectable Edinburgh cabinet-maker who led a double life as a burglar, is said to have inspired Jekyll and Hyde. There is a pub named after him on the Royal Mile.

Greyfriars Bobby — the small Skye Terrier who reportedly guarded his owner's grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard for fourteen years — has a statue on George IV Bridge. The kirkyard itself is famous partly because J.K. Rowling found several character names there, including McGonagall and Tom Riddell.

Scotland has its own traditional language: Scottish Gaelic, called Gàidhlig. About 60,000 people still speak it — mostly in the Highlands and the Western Isles. It is related to Irish Gaelic and to Manx.

The Scottish government supports Gaelic through schools, media, and community programmes — similar in some ways to the revitalisation of te reo Māori in Aotearoa. There are Gaelic-medium schools, similar to kura kaupapa Māori, mostly in the Highlands and Outer Hebrides but also in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

You will see Gaelic on road signs, in museums, and on television. Many Scottish place names come from Gaelic — the landscape carries the language even where it is not spoken.

Halò — Hello. Fàilte — Welcome. Madainn mhath — Good morning. Tapadh leat — Thank you.