Broomfield Terrace in the suburb of Burwood, Christchurch

Broomfield Terrace in Burwood – Formerly Bone’s Road. Named after the Bone family. Re-named Broomfield Terrace. The name has no significance. Bones Road first appears in street directories in 1909. Esther Mary Bone, Clara Charlotte Bone and Minnie Mary Bone are the only residents. Re-named Broomfield Terrace by the Waimairi County Council on 27 March 1935 at the request of 44 local residents. It was stated in their petition that only two persons had ever lived in the street and “while “Bones” was a good surname, it was not a happy choice for the name of a road”. [A 1929 request to change the name to Willow Ridge had been refused.]

A reasonable amount of information from the library website. The earliest mention of Bone Road that I could find in Papers Past was a brief mention in 1896. Most entries are in the 1930s when there was the petition to change the name. The petition was forwarded by J Liggins and it said that he couldn’t give a reason for why the name Broomfield was requested by the residents. Apparently out of the 44 people who signed the petition only two actually lived on the street. I couldn’t find anyone with the surname Broomfield living in the area but it was a common surname in North Canterbury where there is now a district called Broomfield. It is also a place name in the US. Several city in the UK have suburbs with this name. I searched various ancestry records for the Bone family but couldn’t find out much about them and the surname is more common than you realise. George and Charlotte Bone had a farm here and they possibly came to New Zealand in late 1874 or early 1875 on the ship called Rakaia. George and Charlotte were married in June 1860 and possibly had three children when they came out to NZ. The others were born in Christchurch. Charlotte died in 1906 but I can’t find a grave for her. I couldn’t find out when George died and there were at least two other men with that name in Christchurch. By 1919 the three daughters were living at the property by themselves and by the 1930s onwards they were living in Stanmore Rd. I can’t find cemetery records for any of them which is really strange.

This street runs from Kingsford St and this end is in the red zone. Then there is Burwood Park on one side and then a few houses until you get to Lake Terrace Rd. No houses on the other side and it is all Horseshoe Lake Reserve. There were a few houses on this side before the earthquakes but they were looking fairly rundown with flooding issues.