“When we tell stories about the family without judgement and without instant analysis, the literal persons turn into characters in a drama and isolated episodes reveal themselves as themes in a great saga. Family history is transformed into myth.”
                                                Thomas Moore, in “Care of the Soul.”



This site is titled after the my great-grandparents, whose ancestry I share with my cousins on my father’s side. Some of the branches of our tree have been well researched by several  relatives, notably Ron Gibbard and Elaine Batt who have comprehensively documented the ancestry of Anders Jensen, and for whom Margaret Bird contributed several photographs. Doug McGaw, our American cousin, has shared with us many details of the McGaw branch, most of whom emigrated from Ireland to Massachusetts. More recently Gary and Elaine Williams  have guided me along the DNA pathway to  clear the clouds around Johnny Duffield's ancestry, and Alison Hadfield  has provided a wealth of detail on both our Hampton and Duffield forbears, while many others have provided photographs  and documents.
  
However I want to acknowledge the two who stimulated my interest in preserving  our shared whakapapa: firstly my maternal  grandmother, Eva White, who made her early days in London and the south of England so interesting for me, and secondly my uncle, Samuel Graham Duffield, who obligingly not only trimmed my hair during my university days in Christchurch, but who also enjoyed sharing his  knowledge of the Rossiter/ Duffield/ Jensen/ Hampton story woven in the early days of the colonial Canterbury settlement (you can view Graham’s first version of our tree, in his stylish handwriting, in the photo attached to his name).

I have two other big “thank you’s” to make: firstly, to my sister Lynne who shared dozens of photos of the Duffield branch, and  secondly to my cousin Wendy Telford who supplied both photos and data, and in her role as Administrator has gently pointed out where facts needed checking. To Lynne and Wendy  and everyone who have contributed data and stories and  photos, I am immensely grateful; this shared story has been viewed in many places round the world, and by dozens of friends and relatives.

The stories of our ancestors are lost in the patterns of time, and the diaspora of the tribes who moved across Europe and other lands in search of a different world. Often they were travelling in search of a more clement climate and landscape, or perhaps the need to find a home with security for their religious beliefs, but they also moved as part of the English colonizing forces in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Britain was peopled early by the Celts, but the Germanic tribes, the Danes , Vandals, Goths and Saxons all contributed to our heritage. And the Nordic influence of the Vikings left a lasting impression on the British gene pool. DNA tests provide a partial, and frustrating glimpse of these migrations, only to leave us guessing at the reasons for their journeys. It would be interesting to compare DNA results of several of our cousins. The DNA for example of Danielle Duffield reveals a likely 11% French or German influence. The German link is not area- specific, but the French result initially had a likely link to the region closer to Germany, which  is consistent with the story of our Rossiter, or perhaps Huguenot origins.

 
 
For those of our whanau who are interested in our forbears, Anders Jensen has long been a person of fascination. His personal details have been thoroughly researched, and shared by Ron Gibbard, who travelled to Denmark to verify many of his findings. (Ron’s report can be viewed in the “ Stories” section of “People”.) Although some of Anders’ grandchildren thought he came from Copenhagen, we know that Anders in fact emigrated with his older brother Jens ( James) from the village of Hellested,  where their family had lived for several generations. The two brothers  paid £8 each for their passages to participate in the Scandinavian Settlement Plan, which was centred near Mauriceville in the Wairarapa. After clearing their quota of bush, the brothers joined the West Coast gold rush, where they must have been successful, as they traversed the Southern Alps and bought the first of  three farms at Coopers Creek near Oxford in Canterbury. It was here that he met  Martha  Rossiter, and despite her family’s reluctance  to their engagement (because they thought of Anders and his brother as “swaggers”), they married and together farmed and milled the native forests and eventually became financially very successful.
Although we have much data on Anders and Martha, we know little of their personalities. We know they were a couple with immense energy, raising a large family together while establishing a successful milling business and a succession of expanding dairy farms.  Martha was a  woman whose activities centred round the home and family. Caroline Wright recalls in her memoir the beauty of the plants in her grandmother’s conservatory. And there is a telling anecdote about Martha’s skill at needlework and crochet. Caroline recounts how Martha stayed outside a Christchurch shop window, until she had completely memorised, row by row, the crochet pattern of a butterfly. Anders’ character and personality are somewhat elusive. Almost all his photos ( mostly in his later years) show him with a stern countenance. In fact their lives were dogged by several tragedies: their son Edward died when only a year old, and later their daughter  Alice when retrieving a hat, fell into a water race, and contracted a fever, and died. As well, Anders brother, Jens, with whom he had travelled and worked for many years, was killed in a milling accident.
Jens and  Anders had a younger brother Peder,  who remained in Denmark. Peder and his wife Bengta  Larsdotter, had two daughters, Hanne, who came to Aotearoa to marry  Anders’ son, and Karen, who had three children, one of whom later became the distinguished painter Knudsen Peter Larsen Eel, whose works are displayed in galleries in both Denmark and Finland.

The migrations and travails of our Rossiter ancestors were mostly rooted in the often brutal subjugation of Ireland by the English. Ray Rossiter’s booklet  “From Devon to Dannevirke“ states there were 35 spellings of the Rossiter name in England and Ireland, over  a period of six centuries after the Norman invasion in 1066, including the name “de Raucestre”.  Rossiters are mentioned in early records in Lincolnshire, London, and Somerset, as well as different counties in Ireland. Several of the Rossiter branches in different parts of the country have similarities in their coat- of-arms which link to their Norman  ancestor. 
Margaret Bird  has supplied many of the details of our Rossiter and Jensen forbears, but her research into our Paignton ancestors reveals that the first Anglo-Norman Rossiter was Lambert de Rossei who lived in Rosei de Roseto in Bellencombe Dieppe, before sailing with William the Conqueror to England, and taking part in the Battle of Hastings. For his services he was granted lands at Castle Acre in Norfolk. (See the photo from the book on Paignton attached to Martha Rossiter and Margaret Bird). The Rossiters were clearly a family of Norman influence as they are associated with the establishment of Slevoy Castle, Rathmacnee Castle, and Bargy Castle in Ireland. The Irish Rossiters maintained their Catholic faith, and fought against Oliver Cromwell, thereby losing their estates in the subsequent confiscations. 

Richard and Dorothy Rossiter, our great (x 5) grandparents moved to England from Wexford, Ireland, with Sir Edward Blount. They also worshipped secretly as Roman Catholics, so it is quite possible their migration was motivated by the  need to avoid the unrelenting Protestant/Catholic conflict in which Ireland was embroiled. Family records show they were joining other members of the Rossiter family in Paignton, near Torquay in Devon. Their great- grandson, Peter Piller Rossiter and his wife Maryanne, née White, emigrated from Plymouth aboard the “George Seymour” to the colony  in Canterbury, Aotearoa in 1850, and their second son William was the first European child born in the new settlement. William had seven siblings, including our great- grandmother Martha. The family established themselves farming and milling timber in the Oxford district. 
In January 1898, a huge fire, swept by nor-west gales,  devastated the area and virtually sounded the death knell of the timber industry. Three mills were completely destroyed and 29 families lost their homes. Subsequently, many of those involved in the timber trade moved to the  central North Island. The book, “Oxford, the First Hundred Years”, states that in the great fire of 1898, among those who lost heavily were Anders Jensen and John Rossiter (page 75).
(An extract of  “From Devon to  Dannevirke” - with Ray Rossiter’s permission- is attached to Mabel Jensen’s, and Martha Jensen’s name).

The other branches of our family were in all likelihood, involved in the Irish “Plantations”, or English colonies which developed in the early years of the seventeenth century after the flight of the vanquished Catholic Irish chiefs to Europe. The Plantation system began in earnest in the reign of Henry VIII and continued systematically with the Tudors, Stuarts, and Oliver Cromwell.
 To qualify as a settler in the plantations, intending immigrants had to be English speaking, swear allegiance to the British crown, and equally important, be Protestant. In Northern Ireland especially, many of the settlers, like the McGaws, were Lowland Scots.
 The essence of the plantation system was that land confiscated from the Catholic chiefs would be allocated to “planters”, or tenants, who had to come from England or Scotland, although in practice, many of the original inhabitants effectively stayed in their localities, and passively resisted conversion to both the English tongue and Protestantism.

 Another key Crown policy, and of significance to our own family history, was that the Protestant Church of Ireland was granted all churches and lands previously owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Henry VIII’s rift with the Roman church is often simplistically portrayed as a method by which he circumvented papal authority so as to marry, and divorce, women of his own choosing. However, by breaking with the Vatican, he also effected control of the vast estates of the Catholic Church in England and its dominions. Accordingly, Henry’s key appointments were made to further his own connections and control throughout the kingdom.
According to family lore, we are descendants in one branch of one of the brothers of Primate Christopher Hampton,and if he had not been appointed as head of the church in Armagh, then our ancestors would not have moved to Ireland. Christopher was born in Calais, another English colony in the Middle Ages, and his father was listed as a “clerk”, which meant at that time, a clerk of the church. Christopher’s rise through the church hierarchy was relatively fast. There is the suggestion in the excellent booklet “The Exodus of the Hamptons from Ireland to New Zealand”, compiled by Barbara and Peter Hampton, that Christopher‘s promotion may in fact have been partly due to the patronage of eminent people, notably Sir Henry Dockewray, who was prominent in the Irish war in the reign of Elizabeth I. Conjecture aside, it was unusual for a churchman to be promoted to Archbishop, without previously having been a Bishop. 

Christopher had at least  three brothers, and research by Alison Hadfield suggests  that it is likely we are descended from his brother Francis. On the Hampton family tree chart, we are descended from William Hampton, and his second wife, Mary Rountree, who is not shown on the chart.
Interestingly,  like many of our whanau, Christopher was fascinated by birds and he was a keen falconer; in the Hampton booklet, he is quoted in a 1619 letter to Sir John Oglander of the Isle of Wight, promising to send Sir John a goshawk, and goes on to say he has a “fair falcon in the mew” for him (a mew was a cage used to hold prey birds such as falcons and hawks when they were moulting). More importantly, as Primate, Christopher had the power to utilise the church property  as he thought fit, and accordingly  was entitled to allow his brothers to settle on the church estates, which our distant relatives have farmed to the present day. 
Despite the natural wealth accruing from their lands, successive generations of large families and consequent subdivision of titles inevitably led to the emigration of Irish people to the new colonies in America, Australia and New Zealand. This process was accelerated by the Irish Potato Famine, which devastated the rural economy of Ireland during the mid nineteenth century. Te Papa, our National Museum In Wellington, has an interesting section on immigration to  New Zealand. According to the museum writer, the Irish famine resulted in approximately a million deaths, and double that number, including some of our ancestors, emigrated to the “New World”.
Eliza Hampton, Johnny Duffield’s future wife, migrated from Armagh with her brother and sister in the late nineteenth century. By then the worst of the Potato Famine was over. The Hamptons settled in Christchurch, where Eliza met, and later married Johnny Duffield. (Eliza’s life, and her marriage to Johnny Duffield, whose life ended tragically  on the banks of the Heathcote river, has been researched and shared by Alison Hadfield , and you can read their story in the attachments to their names). Eliza was determined to maintain her Irish heritage, and family lore records that after Chris Duffield, her grandson, had his birth registered as “John”, she visited The Christchurch Registry Office, and convinced the officals to change his name to “ Primate Christopher Hampton Duffield”.
 Eliza died on a voyage back to Ireland, and was buried in the Indian Ocean. She bequeathed her assets to the children of her first marriage, and her second husband, John Butterfield sued for a share of her estate. However, the judge refused his application. The  Press report of the case  can be read in the photo attached to Eliza’s name.

For several years Johnny Duffield, our great-grandfather, resisted attempts by many of us to unearth anything other than his most basic details. It has been said that there are two distinct Duffield families: the Irish/Scot, and the English. Duffield village is near Derby, and there is also a North and a South Duffield close to York. Given the common English custom of adopting surnames based on places (or occupations), it is quite possible that our ancestors came from one of these three villages. Duffield is derived from “dufa”, the Old Norse for little bird, or dove, and “ Feld” which in Old German - the mother of most Northern European languages -  means “ field” or “open country”. The place name dates back to the Domesday Book where it is listed as Dufeld. There are many derivatives of the name including Duffell, Duffill, and Duvelle. 

However our first defined link with the Duffield name is from family records in Northern Ireland, so it is possible that our Irish ancestors migrated there as “planters” to join the Ulster Plantation. Alternatively  they may have moved, as part of the greater Scot exodus across the channel to the north of Ireland. Certainly, we know they were Protestant; Johnny Duffield joined the fiercely Protestant Orange Lodge which flourished in many provincial New Zealand towns like Christchurch in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Johnny, in family lore, was a musician who played in an Irish band in Christchurch; his son, John Henry Duffield, as did his grandson, Bill  Anderson, played the (Irish) tin whistle with flair, and from (childhood) memory, many of their tunes were Irish melodies, like “Molly Malone”.

 Johnny was born in Templepatrick, not far from Belfast, just after the middle of the nineteenth century, when the privations of the Potato Famine were near their peak. Accordingly, he was part of the great Irish exodus as he arrived in Lyttelton aboard the Varuna in 1874. Johnny died tragically, escaping from Sunnyside Hospital. Wendy Duffield Telford explains his death like this; 
"I was told as a young adult by family that my Great Grandfather John was an alcoholic and in those days they could be put in the Asylum ( Sunnyside Hospital) for treatment. He did escape and ran all the way to the river and died of a brain hemorrhage from being so hot and hitting the cold River. He was a very loving man! All the Duffield men that I knew closely were loving men who loved family." 
Eliza, his wife was seven months pregnant at the time of his escape, and it was also near his wedding anniversary.  Accordingly it is small wonder that he was at that time wanting to be home with his family.
After his death, his friends at Sunnyside held a concert  and raised  over £16 for his family, that is more than $4000 in today’s values.
The report of his death has been attached to his name. 

  The family of Johnny’s mother, Margaret, were kin to the McGaw sept, and (like Duffield and Rossiter) the name has many derivations, such as Megaw, McCaa, and McCaw ( yes we are possibly fortieth cousins of Richie McCaw).  Their whenua was centred about Loch Sloy, which provides the title of their magazine, a copy of which is attached to Doug McGaw’s name. (There is a photo of Doug and his wife Mary in MacFarlane colours at the McPherson Highland Games in Kansas on page 82 of the magazine.)

 After their ancestral lands were sold in the late eighteenth century to cover the clan chieftain’s gambling debts, the clan dispersed and  it appears that some of our ancestors migrated south to the Wigtown Bay/ Port William area. Alison Hadfield and Alison Ashton both have independent DNA matches with McGaws from Kirkmaiden. The subsequent migration of our McGaw forbears across the North Channel suggests they were probably joining the plantation based in Ulster. The McGaw sept is linked to several other larger clans, but Doug McGaw believes we are affiliates of Clan MacFarlane. (If you are interested in our Scottish ancestry, useful links are the copies of “Loch Sloy” and the shared MacFarlane site: www.clanmacfarlaneworldwide).

Although Carolyn Duffield believed it was likely that we weren’t in fact direct descendants of  Duffield lineage, missing pieces of the family jigsaw have been unlocked by Y DNA tests linking us to Duffields (notably George Duffield ) who emigrated to the United States in the late 17th century. Our DNA Y link to Daniel Duffield (in the United States) confirms Johnny Duffield's  ancestry with the Duffield clan, but also raises doubts over our continuity from the English Duffields. I quote from Daniel's letter as it is especially pertinent to our own heritage:

"Daniel Duffield here from the United States.  My people have been in the USA a very long time.  My original ancestor that immigrated here was named George Duffield.  He was born in 1690 in Ireland and left Ireland in 1730 headed for North America.  I would guess that George Duffield must be a brother to the male Duffield line that produce your John Duffield. I had my DNA tested by both FamilyTreeDNA and Ancestry DNA companies.  FamilyTreeDNA noted that my Y chromosome was a direct descendent of Niall of the Nine Hostages who was high king of Ireland. That is not surprising as 1 in 5 Irish males descend from Niall. Niall lived around 300 to 400 CE. There was a clan of Duff or Duffy that lived on Colonsay Island off the coast of Scotland that I believe the Scot/Irish Duffields descend from. There are also English Duffields that are not related to us as they derive their surname from the town of Duffield in England. 
When I found out that I was descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, I wrote some historical fiction books with a mix of fantasy about him and his descendants. You might be interested in reading them. They are pretty interesting legends and are fun stories. Go to my author website to read more about me and my books. The website is  https://danielduffield.com/".
In his book, “Niall and the Irish Pirates” which is available on Kindle, Daniel weaves together and embroiders the ancient legends around Niall. On his last raid to the Loire River in France, Niall visits a woman and her son, whom Niall had fathered many years previously. Unaware that Niall is his father, the boy explains that his name, Dovsfield, is derived from the turtle doves, “peaceful and sweet birds” which abound in the fields about their home.

 Niall’s descendants evolved into the powerful O’Neill clan, one of whose branches were the Donnellys, so it is quite possible that Jimmy Donnelly and Judy Duffield were very distant cousins. The genetic code linking us to Niall of the Nine is M269, which we share with thousands of people descended from Irish emigrants, including, interestingly, the family of the USA President J F Kennedy. Other sources claim that in all of Ireland, one in twelve males are descended from Niall, but in the north- west, it is one in four. Most of our ancestors lived further east about Lough Neagh.

Another link to our Irish forbears is provided in the writing of Amanda Knapper, who in her article on the site
 http//:silly mummyfamilytree.ca  traces back the family of Samuel Duffield- Johnny Duffield ‘s brother - from Canada to Belfast. Amanda has a very readable style, and her research has also unearthed stories and documents which are relevant to our New Zealand family history (see especially Amanda’s story “Finding the Irish Duffields “).

Another especially interesting article is that by Lawrna Myers, who in the Vernon and District Family History Society publication in British Columbia wrote ...”My Duffield ancestors are believed to have been French Huguenots who fled to England because of religious persecution in France and settled in Derbyshire and Yorkshire Counties. My branch of the Duffield family later migrated to Northern Ireland, probably in the early 1600's.”
She continues with...”My earliest recorded Duffield ancestor is my eight-great grandfather named, William Duffield who was born about 1660 in the British Isles. He married Mary, daughter of Charles Willington of Ballymena, Ulster, Ireland.
Their son, George Duffield was born in 1690 in Ballymena. George, with his wife Elizabeth, came to America in 1730 settling in Pequea, Salisbury Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. By 1759, they owned 100 acres of land in Lancaster County. Their home, known as the Duffield Place, was owned for many years by the descendants of their daughter, Mary (Duffield) McIlvaine.”    (https://vdfhs.com/resources/5252/2018/wk37/Duffield.html)
Note that George Duffield had a younger brother, Samuel born in 1697, and who appears to have stayed in the Antrim area when his older brother migrated to the USA.

Lawrna Myers research provides us with another link or association; Johnny Duffield’s in-laws, the McGaws were centred in Kilgreel, which is about thirty km from Ballymena. The Duffield family lived in Templepatrick, which is slightly closer to Ballymena. In 1729, the year before he  left Ireland for America, George Duffield made a will which records him as living in the parish of Connor, which with the adjacent twin village of Kells, is located only fourteen kilometres from Templepatrick.

Note that the names and dates quoted here exactly match those of Daniel Duffield’s above, with whom we have a direct Y DNA link. Interestingly, in 1664, a William Duffield was born in Sherburn- in-Elmet, Yorkshire, only 24 km from North Duffield village, which also accords with the history of Lawrna Myers’  forbears emigrating from Yorkshire. William appears to have no burial record, one reason for which it’s suggested he may have emigrated. In that period, a likely destination for intending emigrants would have been the Irish Plantations.
 
Accordingly our connection to the Scot/Irish Duffield clan must be thought of as being unresolved, because family histories, and research have provided us with three possible sources of the Duffield surname. Firstly the original link to any of the three English villages incorporating Duffield in the name. Secondly there is the link to Clan Duff, and the Isle of Colonsay in Scotland, as suggested by Daniel Duffield ( as quoted above). Thirdly we have the link to the Huguenot name of du Fielde. 
The reference to the Huguenots comes from Wikitree.com, where in the search for George Duffield, a source given as the Biographical Annals of Franklin County,  states ”The Duffields were of Huguenot origin, their forefathers having escaped from France on account of religious persecution. The name was originally Du Fielde, but became Anglicised after the family settled in England.”
This family story for me has the feel of authenticity, but is problematic in some ways. The Huguenots mostly migrated to England after 1680, when the persecution of non-conformist worshippers became intolerable in France. Like most refugees, the group settled together in the same towns, notably London, and the districts to the East, and Bristol. There seems to be no evidence ( that I can find) that they moved relatively quickly to the North of England, and then on to Ireland, although it is possible. Some Huguenot weavers were induced to move later to the Irish colony, and our forbears may have been part of this group.
For me, there are also questions over the name, which in French would possibly have been Deschamps, which the libraryireland.com site lists as an immigrant Huguenot name. There is another ( undated) cross reference to this name in www.huguenotsofspitalfields.org which lists a Marthe Susanna Deschamps of Soho, wife of Pierre Pegus. (The former  Spitalfields Market was close to the Tower of London).
It is also possible that  an anglicised version like du Fielde could have been adopted when the family migrated across the English Channel. However the surname of Duffield clearly was held by many in England ( especially in the north) at least 600 years before the Huguenots found their religious haven in the British Isles. We may, of course, have definite links to all of these branches; they are not necessarily exclusive. Perhaps  further research which links our Belfast ancestors to George Duffield may clarify this issue.

Note: if any family member, or visitor to this site, has additional information or photos  of our forbears, or thinks the narrative contains  factual errors or description which could be improved, please contact Ian Duffield at ruakakaduffield@gmail.com
It would be interesting to complete the story of our ancestors’ lives in  Christchurch and other districts of Aotearoa from the early days of the colonial settlement to the First World War. If any readers have resources for this period, please contact me. It is also worth mentioning that those listed in the tree can add relatives, and photographs immediately close to , and above and below themselves.
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