Readers solve mysteries
Answers found to photos in our Manawatū Mysteries column
The house is in Russell St and the couple were Pearl and Frank McCready. And the group of men were students at Massey Agricultural College.
Manawatu¯ Guardian readers have solved these mysteries for Palmerston North City Library and the information has been added to the photo captions on the Manawatu¯ Heritage website.
Three members of the Standish family emailed library staff separately to report they used to live in the house featured in Manawatu¯ Mysteries November 9 edition.
The house at 101 Russell St was their home from the mid-1990s to about 2014.
Judith Dudson (nee Wackrow) emailed to say it used to be her family home too, heritage team leader Tracey Armstrong says. The Wackrows lived in the house before the Standish family.
Jean Sherrard identified her parents as the couple in the October 12 edition. The photograph shows Frank (Francis Henry) McCready snr (1908-1988), founder of Elmar Studios, and his wife Pearl Mary McCready (1907-1995). It was taken in the late 1930s or early 1940.
As a result of seeing the photo, Sherrard browsed other images on the website and saw a photo of herself on her First Communion Day in 1946.
“We have sent a high-resolution image of this to Jean, to hang beside her communion dress that she has kept all these years,” Armstrong says.
Elizabeth Hill identified the large group photo published on November 2 as students who attended Massey Agricultural College in the 1940s. The man seated in the front row, 10th from the left, is her father, Walter Herbert Hill.
“She was delighted that we could zoom in on her dad’s face — she’d never seen him with a head of hair,” Armstrong says.
Hill has an identical framed photo of the group, which she inherited after her father died. He farmed until he was 90.
Armstrong says she is stoked with the response to the unidentified photos.
A photo of a rugby team prompted Alan Horsfall to visit the Manawatu¯ Heritage website to see if he could identify any images.
He found one of the Huia Rugby Football Club based at Rangiotu. The team photo was taken at Awahuri in 1934. The team was coached by Tui Larkins Te Awe Awe.
The photo appeared in the Rangiotu centennial book History of Rangiotu by Maren Dixon and Ngaire Watson.
The weekly Manawatu¯ Mysteries column has also prompted other people to check out the collection to see if they could assist with information.
This has included phone calls and visits to the heritage floor on level 2 of Central Library.