The Wiltons of Cornwall
Tony's great-grandfather, John Moore Wilton, was born near St Neot, Cornwall, in the copper mining area
on the south edge of Bodmin Moor, in September 1844. He arrived in New Zealand some time in the
late 1860s or early 1870s and settled in Thames, the scene of a gold rush, and worked as a miner.
We are fortunate that John Moore Wilton is noted on a family tree in the monumental work The Wiltons of Cornwall
(Phillimore, 1989) by Canadian kinsman Robert Wilton. This has saved us an enormous amount of research.
This effort was carried on by an American kinsman, John C. Wilton, in the shape of
The Wilton Family Website (the real one). It used to be at ...
... but the site seems to have been shut down. Fortunately a lot of the detail has been saved by Sue Earnshaw, whose mother was a Cornwall Wilton. The Earnshaw Family website is at
If you want to go straight to John Moore Wilton's page, try
By working up the tree you can follow the line right back to the 15th century. Enjoy!
The Wiltons in Thames, New Zealand
John Moore Wilton was joined in Thames by his brother, Frederick George Wilton. Both married and had
large families, which meant there were a lot of Wiltons in Thames until population mobility increased in the
latter half of the 20th century.
John Moore married Elizabeth Jones, from Staffordshire, in 1874. They had eight children, Charles (Charlie), William ("Weary" Bill), Albert, John Edward (Ted), Francis (Frank), Maud, Ernest (Ernie) and Lavinia (Vin). John died in 1903 from miners' lung disease. Elizabeth survived him for nearly 20 years and died in 1923. They are buried in an unmarked grave in Shortland Cemetery, Thames. (Current project: to prepare and place a plaque on the grave).
Ted Wilton, registered at birth as John Edward but always known as Edward John, was Tony's grandfather. Born in 1886, he also became a miner. At first he worked in Thames mines, including the Eclipse and the Lucky Strike. In the early 1900s he went to Waihi, another gold mining town, where he worked in the Martha mine. In 1907 he married Ellen Thomson Smith (Nellie). Nellie also came from a mining background, having been born in Silverton, New South Wales.
In 1912 Ted was involved in the great Waihi miners' strike, and was one of the miners' union members driven out of town after the government broke the strike. He and Nellie returned to Thames where they lived the rest of their lives. Nellie died in 1959 aged 69. Ted died in 1966. They are buried in Totara cemetery, Thames.
Ted was a life-long union man, and a founding member of the NZ Labour Party. He was blacklisted by the Thames mine owners and did not go back underground until appointed a mines inspector by the first Labour Government in 1935.
Ted and Nellie had eight children: Maud (born 1908), Olga (1910), Cathrine (1912), Edward John (1915), Bert (1918), Ron (?1921), Dorothy (1923) and Valerie (1925). They grew up in a little house in the Moanataiari Valley, in the heart of the Thames goldfield. Tony remembers the old house as a small child, and in particular Ted's highly productive garden and fruit trees. These had been of great value through the Great Depression, when Ted and Nellie struggled to raise the family on what Ted could earn from odd jobs.
Edward John Wilton (Jack, and later Buzz) was Tony's father. As the oldest son he carried a lot of family responsibility but also had the benefit of schooling until the age of 15. He attended the Thames School of Mines. When he left school he got a job with the Post and Telegraph Department as a morse telegraphist. He worked in various rural post offices in the Waikato and King Country, including postings to such places as Taupiri, Piopio and Aria.
When World War II broke out he enlisted as a signalman and was sent to the Middle East. He served with Divisional Signals in Greece, Crete, the Western Desert and Italy. When the war ended he was in Trieste. He had in those six years risen from the rank of private to that of major.
During officer training in Egypt in 1943 he met Honor May Bright, a London-born but South African-raised member of the South African Women's Army Service, also a signaller and also doing officer training. In September 1943, at the end of their training, Lt Wilton and Lt Bright were married at Maadi camp, Cairo.