Families are a treasure trove of entertainment

Phew, if it had rolled like this, I might have stuck with church longer.

Sadly, it didn’t end well for Charles, who took his own life by self-inflicted gunshot in his late 50s. The details surrounding the suicide were canvassed in incredible detail in the Hawera & Normanby Star, including the graphic testimony at the inquests of his 10-year-old daughter, Mary, who found the body. Charles’ death, the Star concluded, ‘‘was undoubtedly a release from great bodily, as well as mental, affliction, under which the balance of the deceased’s intellect at the last gave way’’. Tragedy aside, it’s hard not to admire the rhetorical flourishes of 19th-century journalism.

As it turns out, Charles was not the only early Quin to find himself in legal trouble. His son, William Alphonsus, was successfully sued for ‘‘breach of promise’’ by a spurned fiancee, a Wellington dressmaker who had gone as far for him as converting to Roman Catholicism.

The letters between the two were published verbatim in an extensive Evening Post account. Ultimately, he was ordered to pay his oncebetrothed £175 in damages, roughly his annual income as a hardware store proprietor.

He later found himself in another convoluted scandal, this time over conflicting libel claims involving his eventual wife and another woman who, one can only infer, was also less than impressed with his shenanigans. Quite the cad.

My direct ancestor, Alphonsus’ brother John Thomas (ahem), was a more upstanding sort, a veritable town elder: the extent of his legal wrongdoing involved once failing to feed the horses.

None of this is to say my family history is any more noteworthy than yours, but to illustrate the deep and rich resource available to all of us. I have a history degree, but it would have taken me months of tireless research to uncover a fraction of these juicy details – and this itself is a fraction of what we as a family have managed to find using Paperspast and other digital resources in New Zealand and beyond.

It also casts a spotlight on how newspapers once covered the minutiae of local news. It seems no event was too small, no issue too trivial, to warrant careful and detailed reporting.

It must have played a vital role in creating a sense of community in early Pa¯ keha¯ New Zealand. It’s sad to reflect on that but, as we jump from one digital-age moral panic to the next, Paperspast should be a reminder of how truly illuminating the internet can be.