Dogged search unearths long-lost grave marker

By DAVE BURGESS - The Dominion Post Tuesday, 19 June 2007

BACK IN THE FOLD: Wellington man Donald Mackay with his great-grandfather's totara grave marker, found after 20 years.

An unusual series of events has been credited with ending a two-decade search for a 133-year-old totara grave marker, which is to be returned to the Bolton Street Cemetery in Wellington.
The long hunt for the memorial marker of Henry Preston, who was killed instantly when buried by rubble falling from an excavation site on April 20, 1874, was carried out by his great-grandson Donald Mackay.
The heart totara marker was removed in 1969 and Henry's body reburied in a mass grave in preparation for the construction of the motorway. The marker was lost after a family member gave it to an unknown museum in the early 1970s.
By the time Mr Mackay started his search 20 years ago, all family members who would have known its whereabouts were dead. So the self-employed Stokes Valley inventor and keen family genealogist contacted nearly every museum in the lower North Island.
"Somebody then made a comment to me about a museum in Rotorua. They had no record and I didn't know I was so close."
The marker had been on display in a New Zealand Forest Service information centre in the area, as an example of early use of totara. The centre changed ownership in 1993 and, unknown to Mr Mackay, the marker resurfaced in a shed of dump-bound office junk at Waipa Mill.
Worker Bruce Jamieson recognised its importance and put it aside. Later that day he had to save the heavy piece of timber again after somebody placed it on a rubbish truck.
Mr Jamieson and his wife, Marilyn, decided to keep the slab and it stood in a grotto, surrounded by native trees, on their Rotorua property for the next 14 years. They named it "Henry" and talked to it on a regular basis.
During this time, Mr Mackay searched tirelessly. He was to quit his quest at the end of March, but a last-ditch attempt on March 19 led to a group e-mail being sent around a Rotorua research institute where Marilyn Jamieson was just finishing a one-off, four-hour work stint. She recognised the attached photo as "her Henry" and the search was over.
Mr Mackay said the facts that he was about to stop looking, and that the e-mail was been seen by Mrs Jamieson, made him believe supernatural forces were at play.
"Somebody up above must have said, `There's Don, he is going to call it quits at the end of March, so we had better make it happen.' It is totally unreal."A spokeswoman for Friends of Bolton Street Memorial Park, Judy Bale, is thrilled that Mr Mackay will hand over the marker at the group's annual meeting on July 2.
She said it would have a permanent home in the Bolton Street Chapel.