THREE GENERATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 128, 2 June 1942, Page 6

THREE GENERATIONS

MARRIED BY ONE CLERGYMAN

It is not often that a clergyman has! the privilege of solemnising marriage for three successive generations of the same family. Such a series was com- j pleted recently at Whakatane, "when i Archdeacon E- M. Cowie, of Auckland, I officiated at the wedding of RadioMechanic Walter John Goodare, Royal New Zealand Air Force, to Miss Marie Mavis McKenzie. Archdeacon Cowie in 1895, at Mangonui, had married the bridegroom's maternal grandparents, Mr. John! Thompson Gillibrand and Miss "Violet Grace May Sobritzky, and in 1918, atj Hamilton, he had married the bridegroom's parents, Mr. Walter Walton Goodare and Miss Violet Emma Gillibrand. ■ The bridegroom's mother and maternal grandmother were.present at the Whakatane wedding, but owing to the wartime shortage of farm and other labour their husbands could not undei--take the three days' travelling that would have been involved. Mrs. Gillibrand, the grandmother, was born in Warsaw, the daughter of a Polish nobleman. Before the last partition of his country prior to that of the present war, her father sent his wife and children to New Zealand, but he was later killed by invading Cossacks. When she was married in 1895 her age was only 14. Her family of seven are all living. Archdeacon Cowie was 25 when he "performed the ceremony. The Archdeacon believes that the late Rev. Dr. A. G. Purchas, for many years vicar of Onehunga, could claim to have married three generations, but he has never heard of another instance.