The mystery of the vanishing barque

I've never been able to find out what happened to the good ship Gertrude, which brought the family to New Zealand. It doesn't really matter - it's not germane to the story - I was only looking to find more documentation about the ship. I had assumed that like many of the migrant ships, Gertrude would have made more than one voyage to New Zealand. And if she did, I could imagine that William and Sarah would have taken the children down to the harbour to show them the ship that Mother and Father and Ovid came to New Zealand on. So I checked for later voyages, and found none. There was another Gertrude, a much smaller brig, that made a couple of migrant voyages later in the century, but the barque Gertrude never returned. I wondered if she had gone on to do migrant voyages to America, Canada or Australia, or had even been wrecked, but despite the plethora of websites - and the multitude of fishing boats and steamers called Gertrude - I can't find her. I'm curious. I'd like to know, but it's a side-track.

What's more annoying is the mystery of the disappearing ship's papers. The passenger lists of the New Zealand Company migrant ships, and in fact the passenger lists of all the later migrant ships carrying assisted immigrants, survived because they were essentially accounting records. Other records of the New Zealand Company ships, such as the captain's and surgeon's diaries, and the plans of the steerage accommodation, survived because they were part of the official record - they might have been required, for example, if there were complaints about a particular voyage. These papers are held by Archives New Zealand.

When I was a very new assistant archivist at National Archives, as it was then, I was very excited to discover this. As soon as I had a chance, I pounced on the box of records for Gertrude - in those days, the papers for each ship were in distinctive, individual green boxes, although I think they were probably re-boxed when we moved to the Mulgrave Street building. I was gob-smacked to discover that all of the really good stuff - the diaries and the ship's plan - were missing. They had been there, but at some point when security was rather slacker than it is today, someone had taken them. It's hard to believe that someone could be so unbelievably selfish as to think, my ancestors came on this ship, so it's my right to have these. There were 175 people on that ship - the descendants probably number in the hundreds of thousands by now! The whole point of archives and manuscript repositories is that everyone can share and have access to historic documents. Aaaargh! Twenty years later, it still makes me furious!

I never planned to write the story of William and Sarah's five-month journey to New Zealand on Gertrude. From the time I first planned to write Sarah's story, I knew these critical papers were missing. Subsequent research has shown that if any of the passengers were keen diarists, their observations on the voyage either haven't survived or are still in private hands. All Sarah left us were some poems containing recollections - nothing of the voyage - but at least a little about their arrival in New Zealand. So that's where my story starts.

The Gertrude arrived in Port Nicholson on the 31st of October 1841, but the passengers were not landed until the second of November - this would have been because of medical inspections as well as the sheer logistical nightmare of unloading an anchored ship via small boats - there were no quays for the big ships in the 1840s. For those two days spent on the ship anchored in the harbour, I do need to know a little more. The immigrants were shocked and surprised on discovering that Wellington was not what they expected, that it was nothing like the towns and countryside of England, and it was far less developed than they had been led to believe. Those last few days on Gertrude were the last link to their old life, and the end of the ordered shipboard life they had experienced for nearly five months. For me, this is where Sarah's story really begins. As soon as immigrants set foot on the shore of this strange new country, they were on their own, and they were left to make their new lives out of very raw materials.

Back on a bike

It's been a tiring week, the first week back at work, and it was only four days instead of the usual five. It's the getting up early that does it - I've been falling asleep on the train in the morning; the first day back I fell asleep going home, which I never do. I also fell asleep on the floor under my desk at work (I do my reading on the floor - it's more comfortable than a chair). I was just resting my chin on my hands. I was just resting my eyes....next thing I knew, a small, distant voice was asking, "Helen, are you awake?" I couldn't exactly hide that I'd been asleep, because when my eyes creaked open I couldn't focus, and it must have been pretty obvious that although the lights were on, no-one was home. Now my team think it's a great joke to put their heads around the corner of my bookcase and ask if I'm awake!

I didn't ride my bike seriously last week because all my energy was going into working on the house. I made a few quick trips down to the shops and the public library, but that was it. I didn't bike this week because I was so tired that I just wanted to go to bed when I got home. The one night that I planned to go out on my bike, Tranz Metro stuffed us around and we were an hour late home. Most of the hour waiting for the late train to arrive was spent in the pub at the railway station, which was completely the opposite of my fitness-enhancing plans for the evening. So it's been a bike-free couple of weeks, while the emails from ActiveSmart kept arriving with reminders of my current training plan, making me painfully aware that I was getting seriously behind.

Yesterday, in the course of catching up with the variety of environmentally-friendly, carbon neutral and sustainability issues that are part of my job, I realised that Bike Week is bearing down on us like a runaway train. Last year it was a mad scramble to Bike Week. I was a non-cyclist then, but publicised the event to the cyclists at work, who embraced it with enthusiasm, formed a BUG (Bicycle User Group) and got things happening for Bike To Work Day. My contribution was to upgrade the facilities for cyclists in some of our buildings, and generally make encouraging noises to all those participating. At some point during the post-Bike Week celebrations (our organisation won a prize or two), our Chief Executive and I shook hands on a "next year, I'll do it if you do it" kind of arrangement. Hence my purchase of a second-hand road bike at the beginning of summer, and my rather unexpected falling in love with recreational cycling after 30 years of not riding a bike.

So - I've registered the organisation for the Bike Wise Business battle, and put my name down as an entrant. Bike To Work Day won't be a happening thing for me - I'm not quite up to a 90-odd kilometre trip that includes a mountain range and a major state highway! The Bike Wise Business battle, however, runs for just over a week, and all kilometres on the bike get counted for each entrant's total. So I need to start gearing up to do as much mileage as I can during that period. I don't have a chance of winning the individual prize - last year it was some nut-case who can't have spent much time at work because he was so busy clocking up about 700km - but if I can add 50 or 70kms to my organisation's total, it will help our overall score. And more to the point, Bike Wise Week is about encouraging people to choose cycling - as a way of getting to work or school, as a way of getting around town, for fitness and leisure - and it seems to have succeeded with me.

This morning I got woken up early, so I went out and rode for half an hour out into the countryside. I could feel the difference that two weeks of not cycling had made - it felt like hard going in places that are usually a cruise. The first hill felt like Mt Everest, and now that I'm back home, my legs and butt are definitely feeling it! But it was great to be riding again. I taught myself to ride a bike when I was 7 or 8 - it was Mum's bike, so it was far too big for me, but great was my triumph when I made that first wobbly circuit of the house! We used to cycle to school back in those care-free days when it was safe enough for kids to do that kind of thing. My bike was my only form of transport when I was in high school. So it's funny, but when I'm out riding now, some of that childish joy about being able to ride around by myself comes back. Especially going down hill - the 8-year old part of me is thinking, wheeeeeeeeeeee, while the adult part of me is worrying about how long I'm going to spend in hospital if I fall off! So far, I've managed to stay on, but the road bike's size and skinny tires make me feel way more unstable than my old Raleigh-20 clone. I've been looking longingly at the mountain bikes with their fatter tires on my new favourite website, Torpedo7. A mountain bike would also mean my cycling routes would become more interesting, as I wouldn't have to turn back when the roads change from tarseal to gravel like I do now - out here in the boonies, the tarseal doesn't extend very far into the countryside. But until I can afford a new toy, I'll just keep pedalling on the old one and just enjoy being back on a bike.

Back to work

It is very early in the morning - just after 5am. After a month on holiday, I've forgotten how to get up before dawn, before the birds even. It's back to work today, and I have that back to school feeling. I've made great progress on the house painting, in large part thanks to Mum and Dad, who have been helping out with gardening, painting and household repairs so that I can spend the afternoons in 1841. Anyway, I still have to finish the final top-coat of paint, and do the window trims, but one side of the house looks vastly improved - so much so that I kind of want to keep going and finish the whole lot. If the weather stays like this for the next few weekends, I will see how much I can get done.

Yesterday was incredibly hot and humid. It was a relief to be indoors with the fan going - which some of the time was a gentle November breeze blowing on William and Sarah as they stood on the deck of the Gertrude and surveyed their new home. I can till taste the salt-laden air. This morning I'll be back there - a literal commute to Wellington, rather than 1841, although I see the city in layers - as it is now, as it has been over the almost 30 years that I've lived and worked there, as it was during the early days when William and Sarah were there. I walk past them in the street sometimes - every night when I walk to the railway station (which is on reclaimed land, in an area that was water in 1841), I walk right past the place where they lived, past the Thistle Inn where William might have had a beer after work, and I think about them.

But for now, breakfast and 2008 await!

Burns, bites and bruises

Painting the house has turned out to have some unexpected hazards. Not sunburn - after a childhood of pinkness, burns and blistering, I am very careful about avoiding the sun, and plastering myself in sunscreen when exposure is unavoidable. So I'm not sunburnt. I am bitten though - yesterday, I got attacked by a combined squadron of mosquitoes and sandflies when I was up a ladder, one hand holding onto the house and the sander in the other, unable to swat or even jump out of the way. Later in the day, I accidentally knocked over one of the painting trestles and it landed heavily across my right forearm. A potentially spectacular bruise is forming, although at the moment it's just a darkish smear that looks as though I haven't washed for a while.

So I set out on this morning's painting effort well-anointed - first with arnica, on the bruise; then copious amounts of sunblock, and finally some spray-on insect repellent that comes with so many warnings on the can that I can't believe it's actually safe to use. I made it to the end of the day without further injury, although it took some considerable effort to wash all of the above, and a fair bit of spattered undercoat, off myself when I had finished. It certainly gave me plenty of time to consider how great-great-grandma would have coped with such things.

For a start, I guess she wouldn't have had to worry too much about sunburn, because year-round, she was probably swathed head to toe in voluminous garments and multiple layers of underwear. Add a hat and gloves, and the sun wouldn't have got a look in. Neither would the mosquitoes and sandflies - they would have had great difficulty in finding skin. (But great-great-grandpa seems to have managed all right, judging by all those babies.) Heat-stroke would have been more of a risk for Sarah than sunburn. But if she or the kids did get sunburnt, the remedy was probably the same as when I was younger - vinegar, dabbed ever-so-gently onto the burns. It took the sting out, even if it did make you smell like salad dressing. To repel insects, if she had some essential oils like citronella, she could have mixed them with oil to rub on the skin. I found a recipe for an old herbal repellent made by simmering half a cup of feverfew blossoms in a cup of oil for 20 minutes, cooling and then adding vast quantities of chopped garlic. The resulting brew had to be sealed in a jar and spend two weeks on a sunny windowsill before use, so it was obviously something that required forward planning. I suppose if the feverfew wasn't in blossom, that just left garlic - some by mouth, to make your blood unappealing to the bugs, and the rest smeared on the skin - guaranteed to repel insects, along with friends, family and vampires. If the bugs did break through the defences, then rubbing the bite with garlic helped. So did lemon juice. (This is starting to sound like a recipe for salad dressing.)

As for the bruise, arnica is a pretty old-fashioned remedy, and Sarah probably had some in her medicine chest. If not, a liniment made with eucalyptus, camphor and wintergreen oils would probably have been available, as would witch hazel. A family health manual of the 1830s suggests wormwood, the dried leaves moistened with a little vinegar. I think that stuff might be illegal now! The local remedies, which Maori would have used and possibly shared with the early settlers, included boiled kahikatea leaves bandaged to the bruised area, or boiled tutu shoots in a poultice. First find your tutu; this might be easier than obtaining kahikatea leaves, which tend to be at the top of very, very tall kahikatea trees and you would be risking more than bruises to get them. Ice is also good for bruises, not that there would have been much available to great-great-grandma in the summer of 1841. Ice is, however, available to me, although at this stage I feel it is going to be a lot more effective bobbing around in a large glass of rum and coke............

Portraits

For the last couple of days, after the sun and heat have driven me indoors from sanding and scraping at old paintwork, I've been trying to get to know Sarah a little bit better. I started with photographs. Unfortunately, there are only 3 photos of her in existence, all of them taken later in life.

This one I've dated to 1864, so she would have been around 46 years old. Immediately I see that we have two things in common : (1) neither of us photographs well; and (2) we both have a tendency to portliness. Interestingly, the hair style dates from the early 1840s, so is probably how she wore her hair as a young woman. Back in the nineteenth century, people tended to get all dressed up in their Sunday best to have their "portraits" taken, so the hairstyle may have been Sundays-only. Although her hair looks as though it might be wavy, those corkscrewing ringlets would have meant going to bed with her hair twisted up in rags, and you wouldn't be wanting to do that every night of the week!

I've got no idea what Sarah looked like as a young woman. The best I can come up with are photos of one of her sisters, and one of her daughters, as likely guides to how she may have looked.

This is Caroline Hall, Sarah's youngest sister. The last time Sarah saw her sister in person, Caroline would have been a six-month old baby - Sarah's mother had Caroline six months after Sarah gave birth to her first child. Cal (as her father called her) and Sarah knew each only through letters and the occasional photograph.

And this is Kate Norgrove, the youngest of Sarah's daughters to survive childhood, and the one I think looks most like her. She is probably about 15 here, and obviously went to a lot trouble for her portrait - curling her hair in ringlets and finishing it off with a flower.

Painting and time travel

Yesterday I became slightly side-tracked from the research by needing to get started on my other summer holiday project - painting my house. Painting one side of it anyway - the master-plan being to paint one side every summer. I meant to start last summer, but procrastinated my way into winter. The weather over the intervening months has removed a large quantity of old paint for me, so being down to bare boards in a number of places, I really have to get on with it.

I spent yesterday morning and this morning, while that side of the house was in shade, water-blasting and scraping. And of course, most of the time I was thinking about what great-great-grandad William, the professional house-painter, would have thought if I could have zapped him through time to lend a hand. Once he had got over the shock of time travel, not to mention the sight of a woman in t-shirt and shorts, he would probably have agreed with me that the previous owners of this house did an appalling job last time they painted it (and possibly the time before that as well). I have to assume it was the owners - I hope nobody got paid to do a job this bad! Anyway, I think William would like the power tools. I am sure he would love the water-blaster, because I sure do - in fact, I might have to fight him for a turn with it. I just love blasting away and seeing great chunks of really bad paint come flying off. Scraping and sanding is not quite so much fun, but there is clear evidence of progress being made. At least it now looks like a work in progress, rather than the neglected dwelling of a slothful home-owner.

It's funny how I have more of a sense of William as a person than I do of Sarah. Maybe it's because I've spent most of the last week chasing him through old newspapers. Maybe it's because I'm more like him than I am like Sarah - not in the sense of looks or characteristics (I'm very much my father's daughter!) but in how I think, and what I do. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to be a married mother of ten with no life outside the home. I have very little idea of what Sarah's views on her life and her world were. If I zapped her through time, instead of William, how would she react? What would interest her about life in 2008? It might be a good idea to exercise my mind with that next time I get back up the ladder to scrape and sand.

Plumbing part II

My musings on plumbing provoked some parental memories. There was, of course, the incident where the long drop on the farm got blown up by someone disposing of an illicit cigarette down it in an attempt to avoid being caught smoking (I'm sure an almighty bang and a shower of dunny parts was easier to explain.....)

And then there was the nightman - the night-soil man, the night-cart man. How could I have forgotten that? Mum says that when she was young, the Dillon St house (that's the one in the painting) still had an out-house, as did Tomo Mai, the house where she grew up. The night-man came around on Saturday nights and emptied the can. That's a job to add to my I'm Having A Crappy Day But At Least I'm Not A....... list, along with the modern equivalent, being the person who empties the sanitary bins in the office toilets.

So more questions - when did the night-cart service start in Wellington? Who was the nightman? Was it a family business? It's not something I've seen in the newspaper advertisements, but then, I don't suppose it was something people wanted to be very public about. You don't see recruitment ads for sturdy young lads willing to work by night, either...

Washing the dishes

A couple of months back, the dishwasher completed its last cycle in a cloud of smoke, with a tremendous bang that blew all the electrical circuits in the house. Since then I have been washing the dishes by hand, the old-fashioned way. I hate housework of any kind, but usually when I'm doing it, I can distract myself by thinking about how Sarah would have done her housework (and how much she would have appreciated modern labour-saving devices - I especially think this when I'm up to my elbows in hot soapy water and really missing the dishwasher!)

Oddly enough, although some of the books I have about our pioneer women go into extensive detail about washing clothes - a process that seems to have taken up three days of every week - they are strangely silent about washing dishes. Is the assumption that the process isn't that much different to hand-washing dishes today? There are some differences - I have a plumbed sink with a drain, which Sarah wouldn't have had in the early days. My hot water comes from the tap - I don't have to boil great pots of it on the stove. My soap suds come courtesy of a bottle of environmentally-friendly dishwashing liquid - not sure what Sarah would have used. Washing soda? Home-made bar soap, like the Sunlight bars my Mum still uses for the dishes? No fancy pot scrubbers for Sarah, either, or a plastic dish-brush, or rubber gloves.

But many things are still the same :

• the way the steam from the hot water sets off your sinuses and you end up sniffing because your hands are wet and you can't blow your nose;
• the way you look out the kitchen window and notice things - like the roses need dead-heading and there's a tui perched on the flax eating seeds;
• the way you always get interrupted - me : the phone rings, the cat comes in with a bird that it wants to disembowel under the dining table; Sarah - kids crying or fighting, someone comes to the door, husband wants to know where his socks are
• the way you think about the dishes while you're scrubbing away at them - Mum gave me these plates; those old silver forks came from my grandmother; that chip in a favourite bowl happened when the kids were scuffling over a wish-bone;
• the way you think about the meal you cooked and put on the plates - what you could have done differently; what you might try next time to please a fussy eater or use up something that's getting close to its best-by date...

I still think Sarah would have wanted a dishwasher......

Debts and dangers

William seems to have had some problems with debt - something not mentioned in the stories handed down by his daughter Emma to my mother and her siblings. The first incident occurred before she was born, and the second when she was 9 or 10, which might account for the omissions - possibly not something widely the discussed in the family in later times ("remember the year when Dad went bankrupt?" - I don't think so!)

Anyway, trawling through the New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, I found an advertisement on 15 November 1845 :

IN THE COURT OF REQUESTS
Harry Hughlings, Plantiff : and
William Norgrove, Defendant.
By virtue of a writ of execution against the
goods and chattels of the above named
Defendant, the Bailiff will sell on Monday, the
17th inst, at one o'clock, on Defendant's pre-
mises, Lambton Quay, a quantity of Window
Glass, Oker, Whiting, some Lead Piping,
Painters' Implements, &c. Also, the interest of
the said William Norgrove in a dwelling house
and Premises.
John Barry
Officer of the Court
Wellington, November 15. 1845.

Whoa! This does not look good. The Court of Requests was a small claims court, for the recovery of debts of less than 20 pounds. The Court had a Commissioner who made the judgement after hearing both parties - or only the plaintiff's version, if the defendant didn't turn up. The Commissioner, if finding against the defendant, would issue a warrant of execution against the defendant's goods and chattels. The bailiff could then sell these to raise the sum owed plus any costs. If an insufficient sum was raised, the court could issue a warrant against the body- meaning the defendant went to jail - for a month, if the debt was less than 5 pounds; two months for 5 - 10 pounds; or 3 months for 10 - 20 pounds. The creditor had to pay 4 shillings a week towards the maintenance of the prisoner, which would certainly make you think twice before leaping into litigation!

I haven't found any more about this yet, so as usual, I have more questions than answers. I know times were bad in the mid-1840s - lots of the settlers were out of work; it certainly looks as though William was struggling with his painting business, and there seemed to be no shortage of other painters in Wellington, likewise plumbers, which was his other trade. Earlier in the year there was a period where his mail was unclaimed at the Post Office - so did he go out of town to get work? Was he out of town when all of this happened? Did he even make it to the court hearing? Was everything sold, and he and Sarah had to start over? Who was Harry Hughlings and why did William owe him money? I suspect he might have been the owner of the land William's house was on - Hughlings appeared to have interests in several town acres in Wellington, as well as owning land in Australia. Did William even spend time in prison?

Then there was the bankruptcy, which I discovered a couple of days ago in the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle. At the beginning of 1859, William, now in Nelson, had to assign all of his property to bankruptcy trustees. By June, the trustees were selling everything. By 1860, William was reduced to working as a painter again, and in 1861 the family packed up and moved to Blenheim. What went wrong in Nelson? Everything seemed to go so well at the start - William was active in local affairs, elected to the local Board of Works and the Education Committee. The plumbing business seemed to be going well. Then, in 1858, the youngest daughter, Alice, died of croup at the age of 13 months. One month later, the eldest son Ovid, died at 18 of TB. Towards the end of the year, William and a couple of friends or business partners had the brilliant idea that what Nelson really needed was a public bath house. They advertised the following prospectus :

It is proposed to erect a BATHING
ESTABLISHMENT in Nelson, combining
Hot, Cold, Vapour, and Swimming Baths, with all
necessary conveniences, both for ladies and gentlemen.
The subscription to the baths will be--
Family tickets, per annum 2 pounds
Single tickets, per annum, 1 pound
Single tickets, per quarter, 7/6
Paid in advance
Warm baths, 2s 6d extra; to non-subscribers, 3s 6d.

The baths were up and running within a couple of months, open daily from 6am to sunset during the week, and 6am to 9am on Sundays (presumably so everyone could be nice and clean for church). William seems to have been running the baths, which were just along the road from his plumbing business. But just two months later, he was bankrupt, so it seems likely that it was the baths that pushed him over the edge financially. It doesn't look as if anyone took over the baths - the materials from the building were also later sold to meet William's debts, so the citizens of Nelson were bath-less from August that year.

The financial disaster doesn't seemed to have harmed marital relations - babies had been coming along at a steady rate of one every two years, except in the mid-1850s when William was in Australian goldfields, but the last baby had been born in 1857 - this was Alice, who died a year later. In the midst of the financial crisis in 1859, Sarah, at the age of 40, became pregnant with Sidney, the last child to be born to the couple. William went back to painting, and carving the odd gravestone to provide for his wife and seven children, and in May 1861, the family packed up and moved over the hill to Blenheim to start again.

Plumbing

I've been reading C Hodding Carter's Flushed : How the Plumber Saved Civilization, which gives a general overview of plumbing (mainly toilets and sewage) and a history of plumbing in the US. Actually, the book has been in the loo, and I've been reading chunks on each visit, so it has taken a while to finish it. The reason for the interest is of course that one of William's trades was plumbing, so I'm trying to get a handle on what plumbing might have involved in the second half of the nineteenth century. I'm not all that much wiser really - more questions raised than answered. What exactly was the state of domestic sanitation in Wellington 1841? And did Sarah perhaps have a slightly better deal, being married to a plumber, or was she like most tradesmen's wives, living in a series of unfinished projects? Did William install the latest state-of-the-art facilities (whatever they might have been) at home? Did they have an earth-closet or a cess-pit, and whatever it was, did they have to trek halfway down the back yard in full view of the neighbours to use it? Did a chamber-pot lurk under the marital bed? What about loo paper? I think it had been invented by then, but would it have been available in a primitive town at the uncivilised end of the world? And if it was available, was it affordable? Was it something you wanted to spend money on? Or was the newspaper carefully ripped into squares and rationed economically - the local paper at the time only came out twice a week, and it wasn't very big, so would it have gone far enough? Or perhaps both local papers were purchased, to ensure wide coverage of local politics as well as sufficient sanitary coverage?

And am I completely and utterly twisted for wanting to know about my great-great-grandparents' toilet habits?

Discoveries!

Apparently it takes the first 10-14 days of a holiday to relax properly, which for most people taking a two-week vacation probably means they are only just getting into the swing of it when it's time to go home. I realised yesterday, which was roughly two weeks into my annual leave, that I had finally stopped vegging on the sofa in front of the TV and felt like doing something. Good thing I have another couple of weeks before I have to go back to work! I've ripped back into research for Sarah's story, and I've already made some exciting discoveries!

It surely can't be a year since I last visited Papers Past at the National Library website - it can only have been a few months? Since my last visit they have machine-read a whole lot of the old newspapers archived there, including a couple of the papers which up until now, I have had to read page by page looking for any mention of family. Now I can just plug "Norgrove" into the search engine and boom, a surprising number of hits in the Nelson Examiner and the New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian!

I'm only about one-third of the way through processing all the goodies I found, and fitting them into the timeline, but there were a couple of jaw-dropping moments - like William's advertisement in the NZS&CSG that he had taken over a private hotel and was fitting it out with a view to opening it as a boarding house! Huh? That definitely wasn't amongst the known facts of the family's early life in Wellington! So Sarah not only had 6 children and was pregnant with the 7th, but she was running a boarding house???? And then there were the advertisements in both the Wellington and Nelson papers advising creditors that William had assigned his property to third parties - was this some kind of receivership or were these agents? Was great-great grandpa some kind of dodgy dealer or just crap at business? Or were they simply handling his affairs while he was out of town, and if so, why third parties and not Sarah?

How I love research! Way more questions than answers! I'm itching to get back to it....

First names

The annual list of most popular baby names has just been released by the Department of Internal Affairs. The old-fashioned and Biblical names are clearly still trendy with modern parents - Jack, James, Joshua, Daniel and William for boys and Sophie, Olivia, Emma, Charlotte and Emily for girls. Good to see that none of the mis-spelled variants that I see so often in the local birth notices (Shavaughn, Makayla) are in wide-spread use - are these people trying to be different or are they just plain ignorant? Anyway, I've been on a baby name quest myself lately, trying to figure out why William and Sarah called their second-born Oscar. It might seem like a suitably old-fashoned name, but it turns out that in 1842, Oscar was not even remotely trendy. There weren't any great literary Oscars, no well-known public figure Oscars, and definitely no family Oscars that I can find. There weren't even any Oscars in Wellington in 1842, not among the jury-qualified, electoral-franchise-holding males. The occasional Oskar turns up amongst the Scandinavian immigrants, but I can't see any connection to my family.


So, as my Mum asked, why does it matter to me to know why my great-grandfather was named Oscar? To tell Sarah's story, I've got a bunch of facts (including the names of all the kids) but the bare, discoverable facts alone aren't the whole story. If I've got to write fiction in the gaps between the facts, it has to be logical fiction - it has to be appropriate to the context of the time, the place, the people. It has to matter - and things like baby name choices matter a great deal to parents, in 1842 and 2008. There's a lot of thought put into it, usually a fair bit of debate and discussion. Logically, this happened when William and Sarah chose names for each of their children - Ovid certainly wasn't named for some forebear; and Gertrude was definitely named after the ship that carried the family to Wellington. They chose Oscar for a reason, and while I can figure out the likely story behind Ovid and Gertrude, I'm stumped on Oscar. (And after that I've got Horace, Emma, Walter, Kate, Zoe, Alice and Sidney to go!)