Leaves, buds in a family tree

There are few things more deadly than looking at other people’s family trees. Myriads of names and dates and places hitherto unheard of and, finally, the digger’s triumphant cry that ‘‘we are now back to Jasper in 1777’’.

Said Jasper must have been a busy lad because at least two seemingly unrelated people I know claim him as their furthestback ancestor.

How much more believable, clever, interesting and readable the family trees of the Hopcrofts who settled at Milton Farm, Gummies Bush, Riverton in 1860 and, after 150 years, became in the year 2010 named one of New Zealand’s National Heritage properties settled a century and a half back, farmed by the same family ever since.

When the fifth generation organised a 150th reunion in 2013, they asked members of the fourth generation to put their thinking caps on and write their chapters of the story they all share.

John Hopcroft and his sisters Beth Wilson and Janice Templeton put out the word through the generations, and met with a wonderful response and loads of family photographs came.

Some were from very early days on the family farm, others showing different generations’ weddings and birthdays.

The text is so good, each generation speaking with real affection of their forbears and the hists of cousins with whom they shared Christmas and other big gatherings still at Milton Farm, which today is a progressive dairy unit.

The Hopcrofts have anticipated changes, moved with the times, sent their children to university, accepted a changing world with equanimity.

We say the Hopcrofts but we mean the Bryces, the Templetons, the Wilsons, Robins, Collies and Blairs, families curating an old time flax mill, flower barns, running early childhood centres, once struggling to save the Kingston Flyer.

The Milton Farm book is a wonderful book of memories of a pioneer Southland family who really do show the rest of us, the best of us. Tomorrow I will return this book to the Invercargill Public Library. You can find it there or contact Janice Hopcroft Templeton at Milton St, at Riverton south.