Samuel Kennedy Bassett descends from John Bassett of County Down, Northern Ireland as follows:
John Bassett and wife Agnes Welshman
John Bassett and wife Mary Casement
William Bassett (b. 1797) and wife Ann Jane Parkinson
Samuel Kennedy Bassett (b. 1840)
Family Migration to New Zealand:
A Case Study of the Bassett Family
Of Ballygawley, Downpatrick, Co Down
Excerpt
The success of the Morrow Bassett company in importing agricultural machinery into Christchurch in the 1870s must have been considerable. Family anecdotes record that, such was the demand, they sold boatloads of reapers even before they had been unloaded. Sinclair writes ‘the introduction of American reapers and binders led in the seventies to ‘bonanza’ wheat farming, which reached its peak in the early eighties when wheat accounted for nearly one-fifth of exports. For a short time parts of South Island looked like Eastern Australia or the American mid-west. As late as 1894 thirty-five reaping machines were to be seen on one farm on the Canterbury Plain.
Evidence of the Morrow and Bassett success in Christchurch must have become well known to relatives in Downpatrick over the next few years and was an encouragement to some at last to emigrate. James McClurg, a cousins of Mrs. S.K. Bassett, put his 38-acre farm at Ballygawley on the market in Jaunary 1883 and emigrated in June 1884 on the Florida, and old transport ship which had previously taken troops to India and China, and landed on September 1. He was provided with a rent free house by Sam Bassett, and Thomas Bassett (Mrs. Sarah Bassett’s son) got him a job as caretaker at Plumpton Park, a mile from Templeton, with the instructions he was to help himself to a sheep whenever he needed one. Later the Park was broken up and sold and the McClurgs lived in Richmond until Sam Bassett moved one of his Johnston Street houses to the corner of Redway Street where James cleared a section of several acres. Sam’s two nephews, William and another S.K. Bassett, emigrated to Christchurch around 1890 and William married Minnie McClurg in 1894, a romance which possibly originated at home.