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.

Ovid, Mrs Beeton and a wild Irish girl

Looking back over this blog, I think that from the outside, it must look like I’m taking a rather random approach to my research. I’m all over the place with the things I’m pursuing. The truth is, it’s not totally random. It’s not completely linear either, but there’s a method in my madness.

The organised, linear part of what I’m doing sits well behind the scenes. I have a huge spreadsheet with one workbook for each of the years in the 20-year period I’m concentrating on (1840 – 1860). Each year has a calendar, and everything goes in there – known facts and dates about the family; key dates in New Zealand history; notes on probable/possible dates of events. Most of the items are tagged with their source, so I can go from the date of an event to, for example, a newspaper clipping of it. I’ve got everyone’s birthday in there, every year, so I know how old each person was at the time of a particular event. And I’ve also (blush) charted the approximate duration of each of Sarah’s pregnancies, and colour-coded that block of dates in each year – which gives me an interesting perspective on the efficacy of breast-feeding as a mechanism of birth control – I can just about pick the date on which each baby was weaned!

The more random-seeming part is the research. I have lots of different things on the go at once. I’m chasing very specific bits of information in relation to the section I’m writing at any given time, but I’m also pursuing a whole range of other things as they crop up. As an archivist, I’m drawn to primary source material – there’s not a lot of Norgrove papers around, but there’s still a lot of useful material at National Archives and National Library. Their online systems enable me to identify particular documents or collections to investigate when I have time during the day when I’m in Wellington. There’s also a fair bit of primary and secondary material available via the internet, which is quicker for me to work with. Then there’s published secondary material – I’ve usually got two or three books on the go at once, and by the time I have finished with them, the pages bristle with neon marker flags. Sometimes I’m marking specific things to follow up and find more about; sometimes I just want to be able to go back and consider the relevance of something to Sarah and the family.

So, in no particular order, the last week’s work has meandered through the following :

• Background reading has been the book My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates – journal and letter excerpts from New Zealand women in the nineteenth century. I want to look at the complete source material from one or two of these women; also have lots of things to think about from their words
• Tuberculosis – Ovid died of TB at 18. According to Mum, who got it from great-great Aunt Emma, one lung was almost gone when he died. So I’ve been looking for general historical information on TB in nineteenth century New Zealand (not a lot of it out there), as well as more specific information on the treatment and nursing of TB at the time, and the social attitudes towards it. I know someone is going to ask why it matters – the answer is that having a family member with a disability or chronic illness has a profound effect on a family. It changes the family dynamic, and it affects the lives of the healthy family members. So it matters, because as far as I can see, Ovid would have been nursed at home by his mother and sisters. It could have been quite a long illness; he might even have contracted it while gold-mining in Victoria with his father.
• Which led me to see if I could nail down the dates of the Victorian gold-mining trip a bit better, by digging into what the various Australian archives have online. And although I still don’t know when William and Ovid departed for Australia (probably very late 1852), I know now when they came back! They sailed from Victoria on the Wild Irish Girl in April 1855, arriving in Nelson on 12 May.
• Nelson? But the family hadn’t moved to Nelson yet, and anyway, why didn’t my index search of the Nelson Examiner show their names on an inbound passenger list? As it turns out, they were in the Examiner, but somebody must have had lousy handwriting because they appear in the passenger list as “Mr Norysom and son”!
• Logically, William and Ovid should appear shortly thereafter on an outbound passenger list from Nelson to Wellington. Not according to the Nelson Examiner – so either they travelled on something so small that it didn’t make the newspaper (poor William – he did suffer so from sea-sickness) or maybe, having checked out Nelson, they went and had a look at the Wairau and sailed to Wellington from there. I can’t check that online because the relevant newspapers for the period aren’t there, so further pursuit of this line of inquiry is temporarily parked.
• Meanwhile, the search for TB info led to some bizarre recipes from Mrs Beeton (searching for nursing information); the effect of tuberculosis on architecture (ever wondered about all those enclosed sun-porches on old houses?) and Samuel Butler’s voyage to New Zealand (online books)!
  
  And so it goes on…………….