kipa

Whakapapa notes

Ingested 11 November 2026. Three kinds of statement are kept apart:

Stated: said in the conversation being ingested.
Sourced: written on a named public page. Still someone else’s account, not a verified family register.
Unlinked: a likely connection that no source yet joins with a parent name.

Albert and Ira

Albert Skipper, also Mammy, died February 2010. On 24 March 2010 Rangi Kipa wrote, on a blog addressed to the descendants of Neha and Ngārere Kipa, that talk had turned to “Uncle Albert Skippers’ tangi in February at Katere Ki Te Moana/Tarereare”.

Ira Skipper, also Paddy, was his wife. She died at Riverside Lifecare on 4 September 2020. Her notice names children Marie, Ray, and Greg, and siblings Tui, Jack, Una, and Ted. It does not name her parents or a maiden name. No birth line for her has been found past those siblings.

Greg Skipper is the son of Ira and Montrose. He died on 1 April 2018, aged 59. His 2018 notice calls him son of Albert and Ira. His mother is Ira, his father is Montrose, and Albert was Ira’s husband. His wife was Sharron, daughter of Brian and Molly Jones. Their children are Neha and Nga Karu O Te Rangi Skipper. The 2018 notice writes that name as Karu. Neha is named for the ancestor Neha.

Albert’s father and mother are still unknown. Until those names are known, Albert cannot be tied to a particular child of Neha and Ngārere. “Uncle” in Rangi’s post places Albert inside the whānau Rangi was writing to. It does not say which generation, or which sibling line.

Neha and Ngārere

The 2010 blog exists to gather uri of Neha and Ngārere Kipa (the post writes the names without macrons). It is a single post, “Naumai Haere mai”, dated 24 March 2010, with five comments. It does not look maintained after that.

Sourced from Bonita Bigham, Haehae and the art of reconciliation (Massey University MFA exegesis, 2018):

Neha Kipa, whom she gives as Ngāti Te Whiti, Te Ātiawa, supported the Parihaka passive resistance and was imprisoned. He was taken to Ōtākou (Dunedin) in 1869 and returned to Taranaki in 1872.
He lived at Kātere ki te Moana, Tārereari papakāinga, above the Waiwakaiho River in Ngāmotu, with his wife Ngārere.
Bigham gives Ngārere as Ngāti Tawhirikura, Te Ātiawa. Ngārere was a weaver (kairaranga) and a gardener. Bigham’s mother Hinewaito is kaitiaki of a kawe Ngārere used to carry wood up from the beach below the papakāinga. The exegesis dates that kawe at about 1930.
Neha and Ngārere had 11 children. One daughter was Apihaka.

The chat called Ngārere “née Kihi”. That name is not in the blog post, the comments, the Barrett Honeyfield page, or the Bigham exegesis.

Hapū labels for Neha do not match across sources. Bigham says Ngāti Te Whiti. The Barrett Honeyfield page says Neha Te Manihera (Skipper) of Ngāti Tawhirikura. Both are recorded. Neither has been checked against whānau kōrero.

Children of Neha and Ngārere named in these sources

Bigham says there were 11. These notes only list children a source actually names.

John

Sourced from Bev Gibson’s comments on the reunion blog (27 March 2010):

John and Mack were brothers.
John was Rangi Kipa’s great-grandfather.

Rangi’s own comment on the same blog (26 March 2010), written as one of the Waitara Skippers:

He was earlier known as Peter-Rangi. He took the surname Kipa, which he calls the original family name, when he and Julie married at the mouth of the Wai-o-Ngona on New Year’s Eve 1998.
Born in 1966 in Christchurch, while his father Bert was training as a carpenter at Te Kaihanga.
He is the matāmua. Siblings named there: Kirsty, Glen, Lionel.
Bigham, writing about the same brothers, calls Glen “Kipa’s younger brother” and later Glen Skipper. She describes Glen’s carving, including the waharoa at Puke Ariki (2011), and his later work on the māra kai at Kātere.

Mack

Sourced from Bev Gibson, same comments:

Mack was a son of Neha and Ngārere.
Mack and Nganiwhi Skipper were her great-grandparents.
Their son Dave Ngaiwi Skipper (she names him as the second son) was whāngai to kui Roopu and koro Mohi Moeahu at Okaiawa, and was raised at Aotearoa marae, Hastings Road. She places Dave with Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Rahiri, Pukeariki hapū.
Dave married Polly Whatumaramara, whom she places with Ngāruahine, Okahu, Manuhiakai hapū.
Their daughter Mandy Te Hauoterangi Robinson (née Skipper) is Bev’s mother. Mandy married Ihaka Robinson of Maketu, Te Puke, Te Arawa.

Apihaka

Sourced from Bigham:

Daughter of Neha and Ngārere.
A tāniko weaver.
Married Spence Te Ahu Rei and lived at Waiokura Pā, Manaia, South Taranaki. Spence’s father Te Ahu Te Rei also supported Parihaka.
Mother of Hinewaito, born 1927.
Bonita Bigham, born 1971, is Hinewaito’s daughter and Neha’s great-grandchild.

Perere Neha Kipa

Sourced from Tarina MacDonald’s comment (2 April 2010). She writes as one of the uri of Neha and Ngārere, then gives this line:

Perere Neha Kipa and Mereana Kipa (née Keenan).
Their daughter Eileen Te Ringa Hana (née Kipa), who with Tari Hana lived at Waikawa Bay, Picton.
Their only daughter Julia Hana.
Tarina MacDonald, Julia’s daughter.

In the same comment she also speaks of photos of “Fred and Mereana (Little Nana and Big Nana)”. She does not say that Fred and Perere are the same person, and she does not explicitly say Perere was a son of Neha and Ngārere. Both are left as she wrote them.

Earlier generations on the Barrett Honeyfield site

Sourced from Paul Roberts, “Wakaiwa Rāwinia’s Āti Awa hapū connections” (Barrett Honeyfield Tūpuna / Ancestry, 21 February 2019), in the Ngāti Tawhirikura section:

Tautara, described there as a rangatira associated with Ngāti Tawhirikura and with Ngāti Rāhiri, lived for a time at Rewarewa pā, on the northern bank at the mouth of the Waiwakaiho River.
Tautara’s daughter Hineone, born in 1780, sister of Kuramai-i-te-ra.
Hineone was the mother of Kipa.
Kipa’s son was Neha Te Manihera (Skipper) of Ngāti Tawhirikura.

The same page discusses an Eruera who is Eruera Te Puke Mahurangi, father of Wakaiwa Rāwinia Barrett. The chat treated “Eruera Kipa (Skipper)” as Neha’s son. That person is not on this page. Do not carry that link forward unless another source names him.

The Barrett page is a research write-up of another family’s tūpuna. It is a lead for the generations above Neha, not a whānau manuscript.

Marae and hapū

Sourced from Te Kotahitanga o Te Ātiawa, as the pages stood in November 2026:

Katere ki te Moana (the page title is Te Ao Awatea Katere ki te Moana):

11 Cody Place, Waiwhakaiho, New Plymouth
Hapū: Ngāti Tawhirikura
Hapū email on that page: tawhirikura.hapu@gmail.com

Ngāti Tawhirikura hapū page:

Postal address: 109 Rifle Range Road, Waiwhakaiho
Trustees listed then included Glenn Toothill, Bev Gibson, Sam Williams, Sharon Wipiti, Glen Skipper, Rangi Kipa, and Te Rina MacDonald.

The Barrett page adds that Ngāti Tawhirikura’s rohe includes Aotere pā and what is now the Katere Scenic Reserve on the northern side of the Waiwakaiho, and that the hapū re-established the marae at Katere in the 1980s on part of the former Katere Native Reserve.

Spellings in use for the same places:

Form	Where it appears
Waiwakaiho	The conversation, the Barrett page, and Bigham, for the river
Waiwhakaiho	Te Ātiawa pages, for the suburb and the marae address
Katere ki te Moana, Kātere ki te Moana	Marae name
Tarereare	Rangi’s 2010 post: “Katere Ki Te Moana/Tarereare”
Tārereari	Bigham: the papakāinga at Kātere

What the chat overstated

Kept here so it is not repeated:

“Ngārere Kipa (née Kihi)” is not in the sources checked.
“Eruera Kipa (Skipper), son of Neha” is not in the sources checked. The Eruera on the Barrett page is a different man.
The Massey item is Bigham’s 2018 exegesis, not a biography of Neha. It is still the fullest public account found of Neha, Ngārere, Kātere, and Parihaka.
Mack and John are the sons Bev Gibson names. The chat is right about that. It does not follow that Albert descends from either of them.

Open questions

Who were Albert Skipper’s parents, and which child of Neha and Ngārere does that name connect to?
Who were Ira Skipper’s parents, and what was her maiden name? Her notice names siblings only.
Which hapū did Neha affiliate to, Ngāti Te Whiti or Ngāti Tawhirikura, or both?
Who were the other children among the 11, and where does Perere Neha Kipa sit?
Are “Fred and Mereana” the same couple as Perere Neha Kipa and Mereana Keenan?

Places named in the chat that were not opened for this ingest: Puke Ariki, the National Library whakapapa guides, and Whakapapa Online.