Theme: A Record I Read Differently Now

Perhaps I should retitle this to “A record I read differently after obtaining further information.” (!)

My great great uncle Robert Wentworth Wade was the Mayor of Hokitika, NZ in 1892 to 1894, and a Councillor for several years on either side of those dates. I knew he had married an Irishwoman, Kate Behan, although it was some years before I found the actual record of their marriage. Having a reasonable amount of information about Robert, I decided to investigate Kate a little further.

I ‘knew’ when she arrived in Hokitika as I’d seen the shipping record – Miss Behan aged 19, in the saloon of the Otago from Melbourne, in 1868. Kate then disappeared from public records until 1893 when she reappeared on the suffragettes’ roll and also on the electoral roll as a property owner. What happened to her in between?

I checked the original passenger list and noticed there was another young Irish girl and a gentleman of about 35 in the saloon of the Otago, and they were the only other saloon passengers who disembarked at Hokitika. Why would two apparently wealthy, unaccompanied young women go to a wild rough frontier town? Having recently read a fictitious novel of life on the NZ west coast, it was easy to romanticise that Kate and her companion were probably high class young ladies brought over from Melbourne by the gentleman to run an exclusive saloon where the miners would soon be divested of their gold. Also that Kate must have managed to remain sufficiently respectable to marry the Mayor!

I ordered their marriage certificate, and when it finally arrived the picture changed a little. Kate or rather Catherine was styled a ‘Lady’ with a suspiciously great flourish – and her age was given as 36. If she was 19 in 1868 then she would have been about 45 in 1894 – did she exercise a Lady’s privilege to take a few years off?

But with the known marriage date it was easy to search the local West Coast News around September 17th 1894, and I soon discovered an account of the wedding and realised my romantic notions had led me astray. Miss Behan was the highly respectable niece of one of the town’s leading doctors, Dr. Rossetti. Ooops!

A fuller story was Published in The NZ Genealogist Jan/Feb 2007.