Monro home page

MONRO

This is a site dedicated to the history of the sons and relatives of Prof Alexander Monro Tertius and their successors who travelled to New Zealand from Scotland in the early1800s. It is prepared for the benefit of the living descendants of our time.
Monro intermarried with Inglis in Scotland. This relationship can be viewed at the Inglis family website
David Monro married Jean Watts. WATTS settled in Hawkes Bay and their genealogy is included.
This site has been prepared by Peter Monro in Nov 2000, as a retirement project at age 63. However his resources soon became depleted and consequently his nephew, David Barker who has for many years conducted genealogy research as a hobby has supplied a large amount of information. The Watts data was given by my third cousin, Gaye Maddox.

The site consists of six pages. They can be viewed by clicking the mouse on the coloured words below.

The MONRO pages are: The WATTS pages are

Please advise me of any errors. The content of these pages is our best presentation based on our understanding of the facts. If you have information you would like included contact me on my email address pmonro@gmail.com. Relatives especially are invited to forward material.

Introduction

When I stopped working for wages in March 1999 I decided to catalogue some photos I had received from my mother's estate along with with some items I had been given by my Aunt Jean. Having started with this process I extended the investigation to include the life of my grand parents and their forebears.

To make my findings available to my relatives and to encourage contact with those others of interest, this website was started and an unpublished book written named "Monros of Valleyfield and Langridge", which is held by the National Turnbull library in Wellington New Zealand. The book and this website, which are the result of now 20 years of investigations, are focused on the life of my forebears and although they include some detail of those who are peripheral to the focus, they may not include extensive details. This focus is intentional because I do not intend to inhibit the right of my peers to present their own report or to intend to mis-represent their history. Subsequently there are no details of living persons.

We are very fortunate indeed that John Inglis, in 1911, produced the book the Monros of Auchinbowie and Cognate families . which contains a full chapter 12 named "David Monro Binning and his descendants". . A copy of this book is available for download by clicking the mouse on the preceding coloured words.. It is from this book that the majority of web pages (by others) on the subject of Monro are based. A book by Wright St-Clair named "Doctors Monro" published in 1964 contains a small amount of relevant information.

A second source of information for this website is obtained from Sir David Monros diaries which I have transcribed from the microfilm of the National Turnbull Library The transcriptions are available at the National Turnbull Library in Wellington. This gives details of the Monros in the Marlborough district up to his death in 1877.

A third source is the Papers Past website of the National Library where News papers papers over the period of interest (1860 - 1900) and for the WWII years can be read online. At the start they were not word searchable but later word search was available.

A fourth source was the unpublished records of Charles Monro's estate held by Dr Paul Monro who gave me permission to digitally copy relevant information. There was much of interest in them including photos and many private letters from David Binning Monro, of Oxford University and minute details of life in Marlborough.

As the years roll by more information is published on the web to embellish the record and a recent publication is of the sheet music written for David and Sophia which I will soon make available through sound and so the memory of our forbears will continue to grow as a living document.

I hope you will find this information of interest.
Peter Monro March 2019



The map below is referenced in later script and is positioned here to allow easy access. a map
This map of Otane is referred to the Watts section