Feet Up; Time to Think

 Recently, I was doing some research into my 3x great aunt, Mary Ann Seldon Buck née Salmon and her husband George Green Buck. They arrived in Wellington on the Birman in 1842   and were among the earliest settlers in the Hutt Valley. Mary Ann died at Taita aged 50 on 4 July 1867. On the 15 October that year, her nieces, Alice and Mary Ann Grey, left London for Wellington on the Wild Duck, and as I had never checked the exact dates, I assumed the young women had come out to New Zealand to support their uncle in The Travellers' Rest at Taita after their aunt's death. The dates suggest this is unlikely to be the case. News like this would have taken two months to get to the United Kingdom even by mail steamer .  On their arrival, they would have had the double shock that not only had their aunt died, but also their older brother, William, had drowned some weeks later. These deaths must have been an horrific shock for their mother, Sarah Grey, in Bath who lost her sister and son,

And still this disease is with us, though we in New Zealand have it very easy stuck on our waka in the middle of the Pacific. Life fairly much goes on as normal - unless you want to go on an overseas trip or have family who can't get home.  We've had a few glitches along the way though. An Auckland outbreak in August saw us return to Level 2. Auckland was on Level 3 for some weeks, and sadly three more lives were lost: two brothers and a well-respected Cook Island doctor. So what did that mean for us in Motueka? Not a lot really. There was supposed to be only one person from each family in the supermarket, we had to sit at an assigned table in a hospitality establishment and have table service, we continued to use our Covid Tracker app. The bubble buddy asked yesterday where it kept our visits recorded and I showed him. Back at level 1 now, the biggest concern is a group of several hundred Russian seamen who have been imported to work on fishing vessels. Despite a number of pre