Families with children were encouraged by colonising companies because they were more likely to settle in a community. Children were also a useful labour source. This is an application by Francis Sinclair for his family to gain assisted New Zealand Company passage – note the annotation made a company employee declaring Sinclair ‘to be a very respectable and intelligent man’.

The application was successful, and the Sinclairs arrived in Wellington December 1840. The family settled in Pigeon Bay (Banks Peninsula) in 1843 where they established a farm. Tragedy struck three years later when Francis and his son George were lost in a shipwreck. His widow Elizabeth and the remaining children continued to farm until the family moved to Hawaii in 1863.