Former Masterton woman dies at 108

Former Masterton resident Olive Stains was a very petite woman who cast a shadow 108 years long at her death in Tauranga on Saturday.
Her eldest daughter and life-long Masterton resident Rena Fellingham patroness of the RSA women's section and Masterton Bowling Club said her mother, who like her was little more than 150cm tall, had died peacefully of old age at the Matua aged care facility she had called home for the past 16 years.
Mrs Fellingham, 88, said her mother had been born the youngest of a family of 12 at Waimangaro near Westport on October 25 in 1900. Mrs Stains and her mother, Fanny Ralph, moved to Wairarapa after the death of her father in 1911 and reconnected with family descended from her grandfather and one of the original settlers in the region, David Dixon.Mrs Fellingham said her mother went to school at Martinborough and Carterton, later working in a drapery store and also taking a second job as a waitress, in which each week she cleaned all the silverware.
In 1920 she married Gallipoli veteran Frank Stains at the Methodist church in Masterton. The couple lived in the Stains family home at 3 Miriam Street that Mr Stains built, where they raised their six daughters: Rena, Joan, Norma, Jocelyn, Audrey and Esme.
The Depression made times tough for the young family, but Mrs Fellingham remembers the strength of character her mother possessed and the hearty meals she daily prepared for her children in circumstances where others would have gone hungry, she said.
"She had a hard time but was always a happy lady and a wonderful mother.
"I think that could have been her secret to such a long life. And she never smoked tobacco.
"That would have helped as well, I'm sure."
Mrs Stains' husband died in 1961 and in later years she joined the Women's Section of the RSA, League of Mothers, the Townswomen's Guild and the Country Woman's Institute, taking an active role in all. In 1966 she moved to Bay of Plenty to be closer to family.
Mrs Fellingham went on to have six children herself three sons and three daughters and visits to the family matriarch in the north were gladly made, and often.
Mrs Stains had remarked at her 108th birthday last year it was family that was her lifeblood and of family she was never short, with at the latest reckoning 24 grandchildren, 56 great-grandchildren and countless great-great grandchildren spread throughout the North Island and as far as Australia.
Mrs Fellingham said she has lost two of her siblings and like her mother has never smoked. She suffers occasional "aches and pains" and is serene about the possibility of perhaps living a life as long and as happy as her mother.
"You never know what the years will bring and how many you will get to enjoy. But our family is very closeknit and I do know that I'm going for 89 and there's not many at my age who still had a mother."
She said family and friends in Tauranga had last year sought to discover whether her mother was the then oldest person in New Zealand, but their attempt had failed as "the privacy act meant they weren't allowed to know the ages of others who could have been older".
Mrs Fellingham is to travel to Tauranga tomorrow with family in preparation for a funeral service for her mother, which is set down for Saturday.