OBITUARY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18265, 7 December 1933, Page 11

OBITUARY

MR. DAVID DONALD With the death at bis residence in Masterton on Tuesday of Mr. David Donald, yet another link with the early settlement of the Wairarapa has been severed. The late Mr. Donald, who was in bis eighty-eighth year, was born at Crieff, Perthshire, Scotland. He came out to New Zealand in the sailing vessel Weymouth, which brought out the first Cook Strait cable. Disembarking at Wellington, he immediately set out for tho Wairarapa, where he purchased a property at Homebush, Masterton. In 1872 bo married Miss Helen Gordon, a daughter of the lato Mr. and Mrs. James Gordon, two stalwarts of the pioneering days. For a time the lato Mr. Donald, under Government contract, followed the surveyors, who were then piercing the hush in the vicinity of Kopuaranga. Mrs. Donald accompanied her husband into the hush, and was the first white woman to penetrate so far north in the Wairarapa. He retired from active fanning operations in 1904. On February 23 of last year the late Mr. Donald and his wife celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of their wedding. The late Mr. Donald is survived by his wife and a family of three sons and two daughters. The sous include Mr. Arthur Donald, Tolaga Bay.