Agnes Gray Bannerman

Notes provided by Helen Edwards, who has carried out extensive research on the women who signed Sheet 156, including mapping where they lived. Download pdf of this research here.

Agnes Gray Bannerman [Agnes Gray Bannerman, Roslyn] (No. 11)

Address: Bruce Street (a rental property, probably 17 Bruce Street).  Age in 1893: 27 years.

Agnes was the youngest child of Jane Burns and the Rev. William Bannerman. She was the granddaughter of Dunedin founders, the Rev. Thomas Burns and his wife Clementina Grant, who emigrated on the Philip Laing in 1848. Her father was one of the first three ministers of the Otago Presbyterian Church. He emigrated on the Stately in 1854 and married Jane Burns in 1856. Agnes was born on 23 Sept 1866, at the Puerua manse, in the Clutha area of South Otago where her father spent most of his working life. The family moved to Roslyn in 1884 following a bad accident, which led to her father’s retirement. They lived at several Roslyn addresses before his death in 1902, but in 1893 were in Bruce Street. In 1905 Agnes married John Reid Wilson, son of Dunedin railwayman, James Campbell Wilson, whose family had missionary connections with the Otago Presbyterian Church. Agnes and John lived in Halfway Bush until the late 1920s, then took up farming at Tawanui, in the Clutha area. Agnes died there on 1 April 1951, predeceasing her husband, who died in 1958. She is buried in the Romahapa Cemetery. Her sister Ann Wilhelmina (Minna), married to Spencer Richards, lived two blocks away in Hart Street, and signed Sheet 105.