Born: 1812, United Kingdom (assumed)
Died: 14 December 1891
Country most active: New Zealand
Also known as: Eliza Palmer
This biography has been re-published in full with permission. Licensed by Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence. This biography, written by Sheila Natusch, was first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1990.
Wohlers needed assistance in the practical aspects of mission life: he sought a wife who would support him in his work, and provide him with companionship. He married Eliza Palmer on 21 September 1849 in Wellington. She was the widow of Richard Woodcock Palmer, a carpenter, whom she had married on 27 September 1838 at Bridport, Dorset, England. She had arrived in New Zealand with her first husband on the Slains Castle in 1841 and had acquired fluency in Māori language. Baptised on 6 September 1812 at Bridport, the daughter of Hannah Hinde and her husband, William Hanham, a labourer, she was an accomplished dressmaker, kind, pious, firm and severely practical, an ideal helpmeet for Wohlers who needed someone with ‘the courage of a Rebecca…and the mind of a Martha’. Eliza Wohlers’s domestic skills soon made life on Ruapuke more comfortable for all the inhabitants, and Wohlers’s health, which had suffered during the early years, improved. Souls aside, the Wohlers undoubtedly saved lives. Eliza Wohlers was kept busy with medicine chest, scrubbing-brush and broom, caring for and counselling people in their own homes, and taking orphans and other needy youngsters into her own. This work she later shared with her daughter Gretchen, also known as Margaret, born at Ruapuke on 31 January 1853. ‘I think they love us all’, she wrote to the North German Mission Society.