Scouring death records for details
Funeral home ‘angels’ uncover tales of demise so nobody is lost in dusty records
One of geneaologist Marise Morrison’s “greats” died after being seen sitting on a chair on a table, moments before the chair toppled off.
“She ‘went funny’ and kept sleeping,” says Marise. “I would say she got concussion and it killed her.”
That was in the 1880s, and the details of her ancestor’s strange, yet sober, behaviour before her demise was recorded in the notes in her death records.
It’s these and other details of how people die that Marise, a volunteer geneaologist, has spent hundreds of hours researching.
The Thames woman is not playing detective through the records, she’s setting the clues.
Marise is the leader of a group of 10 who meet weekly at Twentyman’s Funeral Directors to pore over the death records held at New Zealand’s oldest serving funeral home.
Their goal is to record and eventually digitise the records of people’s deaths, records that
would otherwise remain sitting in a pile in an office, so that future genealogists and family members can fill in the gaps and learn more about their ancestors.
The records stretch back to 1933, although the funeral home itself has been around as an undertakers since 1868.
The women call themselves Adrian’s Angels, in reference to the funeral home owner Adrian Catran who encourages their work.
Among fascinating titbits
and useful information is where ashes are scattered, allowing people to find a place to connect to and reflect, says Marise.
“One record that I saw today said ‘ashes were spread over the hills at Komata’, another said a particular rose garden in Auckland. It gives people a complete acceptance or ending of a loved one.”
The group’s work is completely independent of any other organisation including The Treasury in Thames, and
was instigated by Marise because she saw the value in it.
Heart wrenching stories sometimes surface, such as that of a young girl in Thames who had been sick and died at Thames Hospital. Her father had gone to register her death and on his way home had himself died of a heart attack.
It’s a record that can be further researched by anyone so inclined.
Geneaologists like Marise call it “putting meat on the bones”.
“With this work we are really putting it out there for people fishing around. Separate papers such as requests for flowers also give us a better picture of the person and their connections. It’s publicly available now because once a person is dead there’s no privacy.”
The group treats the information with respect, acknowledging that it holds weight with the living.
Their purpose is to make it easier for people to fill in some blanks about people they are interested in — and these may literally include a “Blank”: Charles F.W. Blank, who was born on the ship Lady Jocelyn off the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and died in the Thames-coromandel district.
“You get a good feel for a character,” says Marise.
“A lot of those in the records who died between 1930 and 1945 were born overseas, probably coming over in the Gold rush years. We’ve seen people from Tahiti, Switzerland, England,
Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Denmark and Germany.
“It’s possible that Charles F. W. Blank was given the surname Blank because he had no other surname — it was just left blank.”
But then, that may not be the story after all.
It’s certainly great fodder for a novelist, but Marise is a stickler for keeping the truth separate from fiction.
The novel The Forbidden Marriage, written in 1970 by Ivy Hutchison, includes people from her own family as well as embellishments — including the title — that Marise makes sure people know are not true.
“I’ve had people say ‘that’s the full history’ but it’s not. The New Zealand Herald wrote an article interviewing the author and she explains that it is not the full history.
“I put a copy of that Herald article in every copy I can find, including at Thames Library,” says Marise.