People Australia

Emily Jane Waite, née Hill (1856-1925)  community and church worker

Birth: 1856 at Pitt Town, New South Wales, daughter of English-born parents, Henry Jacob Hill (1833-1913), an agricultural labourer from Tollard-royal, Wiltshire, and Louisa, née Harvey (1832-1896), from Durweston, Dorset. Marriage: 4 September 1880 at the Wesleyan parsonage, Tamworth, New South Wales, to George Waite (1860-1941), labourer. They had five sons and one daughter; three of the children died in infancy.  Death: 5 August 1925 at North Sydney. Religion: Anglican. 

• Her parents had arrived in Sydney aboard the Gloriana in July 1855, under engagement to work on the John Macdonald estate at Pitt Town. Her father worked at Busby’s tannery.
• After their marriage the Waites lived at North Sydney. From 1889 to 1890, at St Leonards, George Waite was secretary, and Mrs Waite, marshal, of the No 1 Progress Lodge of the Australian Order of Progressive Templars, a breakaway group from the Grand Lodge. The Waites resigned from the lodge in 1891.
• Mrs Waite was an active community worker and Anglican at the Pitt town co-operative settlement, of which her husband was manager from 1893 to 1894.
• She moved to Broken Hill in 1894, then to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, with her husband and family. In about 1905 they returned to North Sydney.
• Obituaries stressed that she was “very well known in charity and church social work for very many years”.