Marriages and Daughter
Rhodes married firstly Sarah King (died 1862), then Sarah Ann Moorhouse, sister of William Sefton Moorhouse. They lived in a large house, The Grange in Wadestown, Wellington. He had no children by either wife, but fathered a daughter, Mary Ann Rhodes, by a Maori woman called Mary. William and Sarah Ann loved his daughter, and Sarah Ann adopted her. She was provided for in her father’s will, but she challenged the will, losing in the New Zealand Supreme Court but being awarded £750,000 by the Privy Council.
Mary Ann Rhodes married her stepmother’s younger brother Edward Moorhouse in Wellington in 1883. They moved to England and raised four children, including William Barnard Moorhouse. Shortly before he married in 1912, as required by the will of his grandfather, he changed his name to William Barnard Rhodes-Moorhouse. He was the first airman to win the Victoria Cross.
William Barnard Rhodes is buried at Bolton Street Memorial Park, and his grave is part of the memorial trail.
Read more about this topic: William Barnard Rhodes
Famous quotes containing the words marriages and/or daughter:
“Good marriages are made in heaven. Or some such place.”
—Robert Bolt (1924–1995)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)