Is Nancy Wake Australian

Answer 1

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born in Roseneath, Wellington New Zealand on 13 August 1912. She was my 4th cousin. Nancy Wake was born in the gusty heights of Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, on 13 August 1912 to Charles Augustus and Ella Rosieur Wake, the youngest of six children. "Ella Rosieur Wake came from an interesting ethnic mix, her genetic pool bubbling with material from the Huguenots, the French Protestants who had famously fled France so they could pursue their religion freely, and Maori, as her English great-grandmother had been a Maori maiden by the name of Pourewa. She had been the first of her race to marry a white man, in the person of Nancy's English great-grandfather Charles Cossell, and they were wed by the Reverend William Williams at Waimate Mission Station on 26 October, 1836. Legend has it that the great Maori chieftain, Hone Heke, had loved Pourewa himself and had sworn death to them both, but had been killed in the Maori Wars before fulfilling his threat. In sum, Ella's people went a long, long way back in New Zealand, and physically she was like the land itself, rustically beautiful. "Young Nancy's father, Charles, however, was of solid English stock...an extremely good-looking, tall man of easy, extroverted charisma and enormous warmth, he was a journalist/editor by trade, then working on a Wellington newspaper. He was a dapper dresser who never seemed to have a worry in the world." When Nancy was 20 months old, her parents moved to Sydney where she grew up, chafing under the confines of genteel society. She was much younger than her brothers and sisters, and strongly independent. "I was a loner and I had a good imagination." She was a rebel, in particular shunning her mother's strict religious beliefs.