Biography

Mary Jane Milne 1849-1908

Mary Jane Veitch was born at Edinburgh on 8 June 1849. She married the Rev. Peter Milne, a Minister of the Free Church of Scotland, on 18 December 1868, and in 1869 the couple left for Nguna in the New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu), where for 37 years Mary shared her husband’s missionary work among the native people. During these years she endured isolation, separation from her children, illness, and the loss of her first-born son. In 1906 she returned to Dunedin to ‘gather her family’ together, and there, after a short illness, she died, on 26 February 1908. Her husband remained active in the New Hebrides mission, assisted by his son, the Rev. William Milne, until his death at Nguna, aged 90, in 1924.

A member of the Milne household who died at Dunedin in 1891 is buried in the Northern Cemetery at Block 79 Plot 14. She was Lei WIA, a young woman from Nguna who was a nurse to the Milnes’ children.

There are photographs of Mary Jane Milne and her husband at this page on the website of the Presbyterian Church Archives. The Archives home page is at www.archives.presbyterian.org.nz.