Orr Street in the suburb of Wigram, Christchurch

Orr Street in Wigram – Named after Eric James Orr (1897- 1961). Orr was a farmer of Hawkston in Hawkes Bay. He graduated from the Canterbury Flying School on August 24 1917. In the Wigram Aerodrome subdivision by Ngāi Tahu Property Ltd where the street names are either of aircraft or taken from the list of the first 100 students at the Flight School established by Sir Henry Wigram in 1917. Named in 2012. Great Britain, Royal Aero Club Aviators’ Certificates, 1910‐1950 as found on ancestry website. The Canterbury (NZ) Aviation Co. Ltd: the first one hundred pilots “Canterbury aviators”, The Press, 25 August 1917, p 8

A reasonable amount of information from the library website and I am not sure about the date of death. I actually walked this street on Friday before I lost my status as a novid on the Saturday. Nothing much on Papers Past apart from being fined for exceeding the speed limit on a motor bike in 1917. I started researching on the Ancestry website on the Friday only for the website to crash. It was a victim of the big IT crash. I also searched findagrave as there seemed to be a mystery with this man and his wives. His wife was Irene Madge Ballantyne and she died in 1960 but the cemetery where she is buried doesn’t have any photos of the gravestones. I found a death record for Eric James Orr and it gives a date of death as 1963. The gravestone also has this date of death plus it has his wife Muriel Hilton. I couldn’t find any marriage details for them but they were possibly married in 1961. The various family trees were of no help at all as they only said that they were married in 1961 but no sources were quoted. I am intrigued enough that I will possibly follow up this man by visiting the library. This will obviously have to wait until I am feeling better.

There was nothing outstanding about the street and the houses are all modern ones built in 2014 and 2015. Tautoru Park borders part of the street. No photos