Mrs Chammen

Biographical information provided by Dawn Chambers for the He Tohu exhibition:

Adah Pickard was born at Heaton, Yorkshire in 1846, the daughter of William Pickard, a stonemason, and Mary Barker. She was the youngest of seven children and the only child known to have come to New Zealand. She spent her young adult life with her family in Heaton and learnt how to spin and weave worsted.

In 1871 Adah married Martin McNulty and they had three children. About 1879 she left her family and departed for New Zealand. Using her maiden name she married James Chance Chammen, an ex-imperial soldier of the 2/14th Regiment and a New Zealand Wars veteran, at the Christchurch Registry Office on 07 February 1880. 

A descendant believed that Adah sent for her two daughters in 1882-1883. By this time she had already started her second family of four sons. Her daughters arrived and married here, all three woman signed the petition on the same sheet - Mrs Chammen, Mrs Nixon, and Maud Taylor.

Adah died at 101 Coleridge Street on 30 April 1915 and was buried in the Sydenham Cemetery. She was survived by two older siblings in Bradford, Yorkshire, her husband, five children and at least 20 grandchildren.