"We picked out 100 different pioneer settlers who had diverse stories, success, failure, rich, poor, women, men, all sorts," Mr Brosnahan said.
"We were all over the UK telling these stories and we came back to New Zealand, and tallied up all the stories we’d told and thought, we’ve only got 99 but we said it was going to be 100."
The historian, along with exhibition developer William McKee and audiovisual technician Chris Kwak, launched into a journey of telling the story of Christina Kelly, who was one of the first settler women to come from Scotland to Dunedin.
"We had to find one person who would be a fitting finish that we could make a good story of. I thought of my children’s great-great-great-grandmother, Christina Kelly, who was more commonly known as ‘Granny Kelly’ within Māori circles."
She left Greenock in Glasgow and arrived in Dunedin with her first husband and several children on the Philip Laing, "which was the first of the organised Otago Association ships in 1848," Mr McKee said.
"Now was an excellent time to be able to put them to script and bring them to life. Only a year after [Christina’s] arrival, her husband died up there and so she quite quickly remarried to south coast whaler John Kelly and then moved first down here to Bluff and then to the location of modern-day Invercargill."
Mrs Kelly was one of the thousands of immigrants who made Otago and Southland their new homes during the period from 1840 to the 1860s.
Mr Brosnahan said marrying John Kelly, who lived in Ruapuke, transformed the life of the Scotswoman from widow to wife and mother of a blended family.
"She linked up with John Kelly, who’d been here for years down the southern coast.
"He’d lived in Ruapuke and had a couple of Māori wives there.
"He came up to Dunedin, somehow met Christina, and said, what about we make a blended family, which was pretty modern.
"So they brought some of her children down with her and his children, and they formed a blended family there on Ruapuke.
"She was one of only two European women amongst a very important Māori community.
"The other one was the wife of the Lutheran missionary, Johann Wohlers," Mr Brosnahan said.
The whanau lived in Ruapuke for four years before moving to Bluff.
He said following their time in Bluff, they ended up at what was the New River estuary and became the very first non-Māori settlers to set themselves up in Invercargill.
"There was a lot of tragedy in her life, because she’d already lost a lot of children back in Scotland. Though some of it was positive.
"Through it all, this woman, was really quite a staunch sort of person," Mr Brosnahan said.
