There were three Vaughan sisters, Julia, Margaret and a much younger Annie, daughters of Patrick and Julia Vaughan of Feakle, County Clare, Ireland. Their mother died shortly after Annie’s birth in 1845, leaving her much older sister, Julia, who’d married a man named Frank O’Connor, to care for her. Margaret Vaughan, left Ireland for Australia about 1863, when she would have been 33 years old. It is known that she sent the money home for Annie to join her when her much younger sister reached 18 years of age. It is also known her Irish family did not wish Annie to leave, according to a descendant (Imelda Devaney) who visited Ireland some decades later. Apparently Annie had been destined to look after other family members in their old age.
Both Margaret and Annie Vaughan then left Australia for New Zealand about 1865 and ended up on the West Coast. Annie eventually married a much older Michael Carroll, a cousin of Laurence Sullivan, in 1869, and they also took up residence at Gillespie’s beach. A photo of the Carroll homestead appears in Margaret Hall’s Black Sands & Golden Years. Despite being much older than Annie, her husband lived into his 70s, whereas Annie died in 1902 from an illness of the auto-immune system, - amyloids disease.
When their sister Julia’s husband, Frank O’Connor, died in Ireland, Julia also came to New Zealand with her daughters, Brigid and namesake Julia, the girls then being in their teens. This daughter Julia O’Connor married Thomas Devaney at Rimu on the 29th of October, 1891 and they eventually owned the Club Hotel in Hokitika, then known as Devaney’s Hotel, which explains why my father, Bob Clarke, always visited the Devaneys on trips up to town, when we children would be given the special treat of a raspberry drink. I recounted in Westland Heritage how this pub had originally been purchased from the proceeds of a gold nugget. Julia, senior, lived with her daughter and husband at the hotel and was reported to visit her two sisters at Gillespie’s Beach quite frequently. Julia is buried in the Devaney family plot in the
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