DEATH OF AN OLD IDENTITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1872, 3 September 1918, Page 3

DEATH OF AN OLD IDENTITY.

Mrs J. F. Wills, an interesting Wellington personality, lias been removed by death. She was a. “mother” of Wellington, one of llio.se pioneering women who had bravely met and borne responsibility in those days that are becoming at once a distance and a romance. She was well over the borderland of 00, having been born in the year 1825, and she remembered, as a child, seeing Queen Victoria crowned. Mrs Wills came to New Zealand in the Phoebe Dunbar, and she'could recall very many interesting details and events of the early life of Wellington. With a three-weeks-old baby in her arms, she had sat outdoors (be whole of one night, during a series of almost (onlinuous earthquakes; she remembered when (here were no street lamps in Wellington, no roads, only rough tracks through I lie hush, and when the waters of 1 ho harbour hipped the shore in the vicinity where Lambton Quay now is. In spite of her advanced years, Mrs Wills was almost to the last remarkably bale, brisk, alert, chatty, and bright, not a faculty impaired, and she possessed many old-fashioned virtues, seldom met with in these days of luxurious civilisation and in the bustle and rash of our modern everyday life. Her husband predeceased her by twenty-three years. Of her family of nine (five sons and four daughters), seven are living. There are also thirty-eight grandchildren and seventy great-grandchildren.