Causes of death

One of the research-rabbits that I’ve had running for a couple of weeks was a request to Births, Deaths and Marriages at the Department of Internal Affairs for copies of the entries in the Nelson Register of Deaths for Ovid, Zoë and Alice. The papers arrived in the mail this morning – just over a week for turn-around time, so that’s pretty impressive of the folk at BDM.

Zoë, the second-to-last daughter, died in 1856 at the age of three weeks. Family oral tradition left us with no information about Zoë or how she died. My speculation was the all-purpose “failure to thrive”; Mum wondered if it was an early cot death (I wonder what they called it back then, and how they explained it away?). Anyhow, according to William, who registered the death himself, poor wee Zoë died of “hooping cough”. That would be a horrible way to see your baby go.

Zoë died at the end of April 1856. Sarah fell pregnant again in September that year, and Alice was born on 11 June 1857. She died just over a year later, at the age of 14 months. We had been told she died of croup, and the death register entry confirms that as the cause of death.

Then, a month later, in a terrible double-blow for the family, Ovid died. Family tradition tells us he died of TB. Aunt Emma (there are a few “great”s in there – she was Ovid’s sister) told Mum that “one lung was completely gone”. We’d always taken from that statement that they knew this from an autopsy and/or coroner’s inquest – but thinking about it, they would not have been likely to have done one for TB, it being a relatively common death at the time. Autopsies and inquests were for sudden and unexplained deaths, and TB hardly seems to be something that sneaks up and kills a person before they realise they are sick. I guess it’s possible for a doctor to know that someone only has one functioning lung from all that chest-tapping they do when listening through a stethoscope – so maybe that’s where Aunt Emma’s information came from. Interestingly, the death register entry for Ovid reads, “water on the chest” – I guess fluid on the lungs (or lung), so really a death from complications of TB. Mum commented the other day that having TB was a shameful or embarrassing thing - no-one would want to admit having TB in the family – so maybe the use of “water on the chest” was an acceptable euphemism to spare a family’s feelings? I’m still looking for background material on TB to give me more of a clue about this.

At some stage, I will check the indexes for coroner’s inquests at Archives NZ, just in case there was one – but usually the wording on the death certificate would say something like “verdict of jury” or “verdict of coroner” if there had been an inquest. An inquest would also have been reported in the local paper – I’ve found William as a witness to an inquest of a small boy who drowned near the Norgrove home – so if there had been an inquest into Ovid’s death, chances are I would have found it already.

It only dawned on me today that Sidney, the youngest child, would never have known Ovid, let alone Alice and Zoë. Sidney was born in March 1860, almost 20 years after Ovid’s birth, and a year and a half after his death. His eldest surviving sibling was Oscar, who was 17. The sibling next in age to him was Kate, at 7. Although a late addition to the family, I guess Sidney must have been treasured and probably rather spoilt after everything that had gone before.