suffrage_petition
Surname: 
Fraser
Given names: 
Mrs I. C.
Given address: 
Filleul Street
Sheet No: 45
Town/Suburb: 
Central Dunedin
City/Region: 
Dunedin
Notes: 

Biography and image supplied by Clare Gleeson.

Isabella Campbell Fraser (nee Kerr) was born in Melbourne on 22 December 1850 to Angus and Margaret Kerr who had emigrated to NSW as assisted emigrants on the Victory in 1849.  In 1863 Isabella, her mother, brother John and two sisters, May and Kate, followed her father to New Zealand on the Maria Gambrill where they settled in Invercargill.  There her father practised as an architect, designing many of Invercargill’s earliest public buildings and other buildings throughout Southland.  In 1873 Isabella married William Fraser (1847-1878) who had been born in Aberdeen.  They initially lived in Invercargill where their first daughter Kate Anne Kerr (1874-1961) was born and then moved to Victoria where they had two more daughters, Ethel May (1876-1877) and Maud Isabel (1878-1913). In 1878 William Fraser, a sawyer, was killed in an accident and Isabella and her two surviving daughters returned to Invercargill to live.  They later moved to Dunedin.  When her daughter Katherine’s husband died in 1916, Isabella went to live with her and ran the household. Isabella died in Dunedin in 1935 and is buried in the Andersons Bay Cemetery with her sister, Kate Stuart Kerr and her daughter, Maud Isabel Fraser. Isabella’s mother, Margaret Kerr, and her sisters, May Chisholm Erskine and Kate Stuart Kerr, also signed the petition.

Family photograph

Four generations of the Kerr family.  Margaret Kerr, her daughter Isabella Fraser (standing), her daughter Katherine Begg and her son Eric Begg c1900. Credit: Clare Gleeson

Resources used

DCC Cemetery Records
Papers Past
Family Search
BDM New Zealand
BDM Victoria
Ancestry.com
Oral histories

Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.

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