Muriel Elizabeth 'Betty' Powell (nee McLeod)
16 April 1929-20 December 2011
With the passing of Muriel Elizabeth 'Betty' Powell (nee McLeod), some valuable anecdotes of Waipu's collective memory will be lost forever.
Surprisingly, though Betty worked at the Waipu Museum for 33 years, she was not a descendant of the followers of Norman McLeod.
She did, however, have Scottish heritage.
Her mother's parents were English from Lancashire and Durham in York. She traced her mother's side back to 1600 and her father's mum was a Dickens - maybe related to Charles.
One of Betty's favourite family stories goes like this: Both Betty's grandfathers came to New Zealand in the 1870s and jumped ship.
Both were born in 1852 and both married their wives (her grandmothers) in February 1891.
Betty was born in Auckland at her grandmother's home in Grey Lynn in 1929, to parents who were farming in Okoroire and Betty remembers being told of her nappies freezing on the clothesline.
Betty's family moved to Northland in 1932 on to a serviceman's block that her father won.
After they had to walk off it because it was uneconomical, the family moved into Whangarei.
Eventually Betty worked at Bindon's and met Alon Powell, whom she married in 1949.
In 1950 the couple moved on to the Powells' Waipu farm.
Betty was active with the Seventh Day Adventist health and welfare group, the Women's Christian Temperance organisation and the Country Women's Institute and was the Waipu representative in 1965.
The Waipu group had a lot of fun with their "skiffle" or "jug" band in which Betty played the comb and paper kazoo.
When the farm became too much for them and neither of their children, Tom or Ann, wanted to take it on, the couple moved into Waipu in 1972 and 1979 was when Betty's involvement with the Waipu Museum began. It was closed.
She told a local "descendant", Trevor McKenzie, she didn't like coming to a town where the museum was closed.
"Well you know what you can do about it," he replied.
Trevor talked Betty into volunteering for a couple of weeks to keep the museum open which turned into six weeks and then became a lifetime passion of working with others to expand the family histories collected at the museum. They built on the family trees available at the time, and learned to use the ship registers to criss-cross the families. Betty had a photographic memory and visualised the families on trees with branches.
Betty was honoured to be asked to be the resident genealogist for the museum and in 2008 to receive a Civic Honour from Whangarei District for "outstanding community service, generously given, for the wellbeing of the citizens of Whangarei".
For the last several years while Betty suffered with gout, arthritis and eventually cancer, the museum workers tried to "download" her brain. It was not easy and there are still stacks of paper on Betty's desk which will need to be uploaded over years to come.
Betty is survived by her two brothers, Rod and Ronald McLeod of Whangarei, her son, Tom, and his wife, Raewyn, of Hamilton, her daughter, Ann, and husband, Ray, of Pitcairn Island, 10 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.