The 70-year-old marriage

Every year we take a few seemingly ordinary people and tell their story. Genealogy Investigations believes there is a story behind every grave. And we haven’t been proved wrong yet.
So for Valentine’s Day (yes we know it was yesterday) we thought we would pick a couple with an extraordinary track record and tell their story.
On Christmas Day, 1936, George Henry Powley and Sarah Powley celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Seventy is an amazing number of years to be married and few couples reach that milestone.
George had been born in 1839 in Hobart in Australia to his soldier father Thomas and mother Harriet who had nine other children.
He came to New Zealand as a young child with his family on the barque Fanny Fisher.
George joined the Navy at the age of 15 and went to sea on the HMS Niger. One of his duties had him fighting West African slavers off the coast of America. He was eventually invalided out in 1866.
Later he travelled to England on a warship but had nowhere to stay when he got there, so the ship’s carpenter John Tooke gave him room. George found a job with a railway company.
It was there he met Sarah Tooke (John’s daughter) and married her at the Lambeth chapel in London on December 25, 1866, Sarah was 19. They left virtually immediately, spending their honeymoon at sea as they came to New Zealand in 1867 in the first clipper ship made from iron, appropriately named Ironsides.
Once back, he ran through a number of jobs, a coastal seaman and storekeeper before being one of the first from Auckland to head to Thames after gold was found. But it wasn’t for him and by 1878 he and Sarah were living in Dargaville where George was a hotel keeper.
In 1882 George bought a small factory and in 1889 opened the Cambridge Shirt Factory. He built large new premises and modernised the factory. It would be his business until he sold it and retired in 1902. Now called Cambridge Clothing, it is still in business today.
During his life he volunteered with the Naval Artillery, was a justice of the peace, a member of the Auckland City Council and a freemason.
Just five months after their 70th wedding anniversary George died and is buried in the Waikumete Cemetery.
Sarah lived until she was 101, remaining active and vital nearly her whole life. She died in 1949 as one of the oldest citizens of Auckland at the time. They had no children.
There were several stories about their milestones but no one thought to ask them what the secret of their long lives or marriage was so we are still in the dark.
Picture by Sandy Millar.