Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley
Bertha Jane Lloyd was born in Lambeth, Surrey, England in 1843 – the daughter of Hugh Lloyd, a dock labourer, and Jane Jones.
Bertha emigrated to Otago with her parents about 1863 and she married Charles Frederick Edward Bates on 10 July 1865 at First Church Dunedin.
They had two sons before Bertha’s husband died in 1869.
The following year Bertha married Richard Atkinson; they had four children. In 1874 their son infant son Alfred died and, in 1878, Richard was issued with a maintenance order in regard to support of his two children.
Richard, now in Invercargill, “stated that his wife had forsaken him in order to cohabit with a man named Smith, by whom she had two illegitimate children, and that she had promised not to trouble him in the future on the condition that he would leave her undisturbed in Dunedin”. The magistrate declined to enforce the maintenance order.
Richard married again in Invercargill and Bertha spent the rest of her days as a “widow”.
She died on 28 October 1933 and is buried in a family grave in the Southern Cemetery.
Sources
BDM online NZ https://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/
DCC Cemetery Records http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/cemeteries/cemeteries-search
Family Search https://www.familysearch.org
Free BDM https://www.freebmd.org.uk
GRO England https://www.gro.gov.uk
Otago Nominal Index http://marvin.otago.ac.nz
Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
First Church of Otago https://www.presbyterian.org.nz
Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.
Community contributions