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....