“Searching for Ellen”
Trust members are often giving talks to local community groups, genealogy groups, and heritage festivals, letting interested people know about what the Trusts does – digitising historical newspapers (especially those at risk) and making them available on our Recollect repository until they can be transferred to Papers Past. These papers have become invaluable for those interested in New Zealand’s past, whether they are historians, local researchers, school students or genealogists.
In October last year, one of our trustees, Felicity Barnes (also part of the teaching staff at the University of Auckland’s history programme) gave a talk to the Auckland Heritage Festival and talked about her own delving into digitised newspapers looking for information on her grandmother, Ellen May Coldbeck, born in 1906, at a time that the newspaper industry was flourishing, with the number of daily titles peaking just a few years later.
Ellen (right) and her siblings. Private Collection.
We don’t know which newspapers Ellen might have read, but we do know she could read them. Her name appears in the Evening Post’s list of Petone students who passed the Certificate of Proficiency in 1919. The paper also lists her sister, Zena, winning a school award for good conduct awards the following year. While newspapers of the time provided national and international news, it is often the smaller, more local stories that are so valuable to those looking for leads on individuals.
Evening Post, 16 December 1919.
However, the newspapers can sometimes show interesting, but less respectable stories about family members. Her father, James Isaac Coldbeck, was Petone’s dog catcher for a while. But he lost his job in 1921 – when she was 15 - for mistreating a dog kept in the pound, and wound up in the courts a year or two later accused of theft. Like many people in the late 1920s, he found himself in financial strife. Papers regularly reported legal rulings against debtors: James is among them, owing money to local businesses, like the Hutt Meat Company.
Ellen’s name does not appears again in the newspapers till 1934, when her husband, Frederick Morton Gabrielson, a hairdresser, petitioned for divorce. An account, from the Taranaki Daily News, tells us they married in Nelson and had lived in Wellington and New Plymouth. These are all sorts of details of the marriage that otherwise might have been lost. It seems Ellen had deserted her husband – and two children - in 1929, because, he claimed, he ’could not give her the amusement she wanted.’ Other factors may have led to her decision: we find Fred Gabrielson later captured in the print world as well, applying for a discharge of bankruptcy.
Taranaki Daily News, 27 November 1934.
By 1937, Ellen had reinvented her life. She now lived in Auckland, and had moved in with a new man, George. Once again the press gives us glimpses of her life. He too was a divorcee, abandoning his wife Florence, just five months after their marriage, to live with Ellen. George may have given her that amusement she craved.
Again newspapers tell us, that, among other things, he was a lyric tenor, singing around Auckland and live on the new, and popular 1YA radio station. Reports from the social ‘Athenian’ club, where Ellen’s brother Leon was a member, show George sang there. Perhaps this is where they met. It might also have been at Labour party events. We know she attended events like the Souvenir Ball in 1938 at the Orange Ballroom, at which she, and around two thousand other Aucklanders came to socialise and meet the Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, no doubt taking home one of his famous souvenir photos.
But we know, again from the press, that, even though she and George did not marry until 1940, she styled herself as the respectable “Mrs George Barnes”.
New Zealand Herald, 11 October 1938.
As with other women of her time, clues to Ellen experiences might be captured in the bread and butter reporting of our newspapers: social pages, club functions, sporting and school results, local body news, entertainment listings, court reporting, weddings, births and funerals and divorce reports. Genealogists and researchers can search for an individual ancestor, but historians can, looking at multiple individuals, chart the course of social , cultural, and political change through these pages.
All of the details on Ellen’s life above were gleaned from Papers Past.
But could any of the newspapers housed on the Trust’s own repository offer more? Several of the titles offered possibilities of her life in Auckland: the Northcote Athenaeum Meteor and the North Shore Gazette. These local newspapers (of which the Trust has digitised a number) offer us a much more fine grained, close-up view of a community than the metropolitan dailies, with more space for local identities, businesses, and entertainments .
While there was no trace of Ellen, her soon-to-be husband George, tenor and indefatigable entertainer about town, was caught in print’s sticky web, appearing as a singer at a charitable association gathering, the Devonport Orphan’s Club, in July 1929.
North Shore Gazette, 25 July 1929.
A small community newspaper added one more fragment, one more moment to the story of Ellen. That’s the magic of local papers: they are full of little details, the fine-grained individual stories, that helped Felicity track one person’s life story, and can also change those bigger stories we chose to tell.
No matter what you may be wanting to delve into, the greater number, and wider array of newspapers available allow the researcher to gather the best picture of their subject. As well as what remains on (and is being added to) the Trust’s own repository, there are a number of local newspapers, digitised by the Trust, that now sit on Papers Past, including the Marlborough Express, the Taupo Times, and the Waimarino / Ruapehu Bulletin.
This only scratches the surface, but as the Trust fulfils its aims, the details of more individuals like Ellen will become available to people today and generations to come.