Research links dress with bride
The earliest dated wedding dress in the Whanganui Regional Museum collection was donated in 1968. As with many past donations to the museum, the information provided at the time was limited. Apart from the donor’s name and address, the only information on the receipt was a rudimentary description of the dress: “One wedding frock (blue checked) worn in 1861”. No information was given as to where the dress had come from, who had made or worn it, or what journey it had gone through to make it into the museum’s collection.
Although little of the dress’s history or provenance was communicated, there is no doubt it was a treasured and wellcared-for item of clothing. The dress is in very good condition, considering it is more than 150 years old and would have gone through several generations. It shows little wear and only a little fading.
From the style of the dress, the date on the receipt seemed plausible. The high neckline, dropped shoulders, narrow boned waist, full bell-shaped skirt, under which numerous petticoats or a crinoline would have been worn, and the pagoda sleeves all fit the style of the early 1860s. The construction, a mix of machine and hand-sewing, fits the technology available. The fabric, a silk taffeta lined with a brown Holland cloth, also supported the date.
So who was the woman who had worn this dress to her wedding in 1861? Finding the answer involved many hours of trekking through ancestry sites, reviewing birth, death and marriage certificates, looking through electoral rolls and passenger lists to find the one branch of the donor’s family that had a wedding in 1861.
Where did the dress start its journey? The answer was in Gibraltar where, in 1861, 26-yearold Olivia Costa married a 30-yearold Scottish-born, British soldier named William Wallace. Olivia was born in Gibraltar, the daughter of Thomas Costa, a Master
Mariner, and a woman whose name is not recorded. As a Master Mariner, Costa could easily have purchased the fabric for the dress at any of the trading ports through Europe.
William and Olivia had two children, William Thomas in 1862 and Annie Theresa in 1864. By the time their daughter was born (Annie is the grandmother of the donor of the dress) they are recorded as living in Canada West, America. At an unknown time they must have shifted to Tyrone in Northern Ireland because when they migrated to New Zealand in 1876, their nationality is recorded as Tyrone. They left for New Zealand on June 26, 1876, from the port of Glasgow and arrived in
New Zealand on September 23, 1876, at the port of Otago. The family lived at Blueskin Bay, Waitati, north of Dunedin, where they settled into a life of farming. A relative of the Wallaces who was a contemporary of Olivia, recorded in their family history that she was a “dark fascinating woman who was a good cook”. Olivia, William and William Thomas are all buried in the Waitati Cemetery.
Annie married James Sutherland, a farmer from Canterbury and they had two sons. The elder, Robert Alexander Wallace Sutherland, married Dorothy Agnes Ashwell, of Whanganui, whose family was associated with the setting up of Virginia Lake. Robert and Dorothy had a daughter who, while living in Whanganui in 1968, came into the museum and donated the wedding dress of which we now know so much more.