Dagmar Laugesen

Dagmar Laugesen
Dagmar, my great aunt, whom I remember well, was the older sister of my grandfather Louis Emil Laugesen. She looked after her brothers and sister for her father, Christian Louis, a sawmiller, when mother Emilie was ill and incapacitated from tuberculosis before her death in 1880. Similarly she looked after the children for the second wife Sophie who had come out from Denmark before she died after giving birth in 1884. She moved to Kaikoura with the family around 1890. In Christchurch in 1892-93 she ran a book shop in Colombo St just south of Tuam St. In 1895 she married Ben Saville, a cycle maker, two doors along Colombo St. They did not have any children. She and Ben went on a trip back to Europe in the 1920s and to see her father’s birthplace in Soro, Denmark. Ben died in the 1930s. She was a great lover of poetry, and met with like minded women at her home Laugville, a name combining hers and her husband’s surnames, at 93 Hackthorne Rd, Cashmere. On the day I called they were discussing New Zealand authors. That was in the 1940s and 1950s. She died after a few weeks illness in January 1960, aged 92.

This will be Dagmar Laugesen
Birth 22 Mar 1869 in Tuelland, Denmark
Death 13 Jan 1960 in Cashmere Hills, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand.
My cousin three times removed. Her family lived at Oxford, NZ and Kaikoura.