My Aunty Mary Riordan as a nurse

 It's often trickier to find out more about our female relatives than our male ones. I have been trying to find out more about the career of my Aunty Mary as a nurse for a while, and more recently I was searching (unsuccessfully) to find a NZ Gazette that had a Nurses' Register with her name in it. Instead I published an article in our local genealogy newsletter about the NZ Gazette, and the range of 'name' lists I had found in it. Once I had finished that I turned to Papers Past and did a deep-dive for any "Riordan Nurse" kind of snippets- quite successfully in the end as it turned out. I must have wiggled my nose correctly and sent a proper message to the genealogical ether!

Previously I had actually found an electoral roll entry from 1935 where a Mary Margaret Riordan was living in the Timaru Nurse's home.

 

I doubted that could be my aunty though, as why would she go that far away from home (in New Plymouth) for her training? Perhaps at that time in the 1930s, there simply weren't enough training positions around. And she did have Riordan cousins in Christchurch. I had in fact been told many years earlier by one of the Christchurch cousins that Aunty Mary had helped nurse her mother Bridget (Ryan) when she was dying in 1935.

As it turned out, my Papers Past rabbit hole soon threw me lots of bits and pieces. The earliest was this extract from November 1931 saying that M. M. Riordan of New Plymouth had been placed on the waiting list of probationers. You can see that people were applying from all around the country, and in fact Aunty Mary was the only applicant listed from Taranaki.

I soon found lots more snippets. The fact that my aunty was living away from the family home in New Plymouth seemed to lead to bits in the newspaper every time she came back to or left home. In January 1936 was the following information. And this confirmed that the entry in the 1935 electoral roll was actually my aunty.
 

And finally, something I had been searching for, a date that showed when Miss M Riordan became registered as a nurse. Her success in the Nurses' State Registration examinations  was recorded in the Taranaki Daily News on 15 July 1936.

More details were found in Papers Past as her early career continued. She did maternity training, as well and midwifery training and a Plunket stint. She was mainly in Auckland, but also Hamilton and Karitane. She even had a very brief stint in Palmerston North before she moved to Auckland to start her maternity training at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital. 

A marvellous thing  happened as I was doing this research. Because of an article about his NZ Ancestor Search Helper that I had included in our newsletter, I had sent the magnificent Luke Howison a copy of our May newsletter. He saw what I had written about the NZ Gazette, and replied to me with a copy of the register page from the 1931-1940 Register of Nurses (R22227911) at Archives NZ, that included the entry of my Aunty Mary Margaret Riordan as a registered nurse #8627 in Timaru, on 6 July 1936. Also written on her entry were her qualifications as a midwife, postgraduate diploma, a Plunket Certificate and as a Maternity Nurse.

This of course is just the 'preliminary' to Aunty Mary's career as a nurse. She spent many years as a Public Health Nurse in New Plymouth. But I'll finish with this one piece. Vaccination was obviously an issue then as now. She was being quoted as giving advice for the whooping cough inoculation in 1944.

Library visit

I've known for a while that my local Palmerston North library provided access to both Ancestry (library edition) and Find my Past- but I had never explored using either of them. Sunday afternoon was my time to remedy that. I took my laptop with me in case the library computers were busy, as you can access Ancestry once you are on the library wifi. FindMypast you actually have to be on a library computer to access. The library had two computers with these websites on, and fortunately there was no problem at this time of the day/week getting access.

My great-grandfather, Jeremiah Malone has always been a bit of a mystery to me. I knew the family was living in Ballinadrideen, near Charleville, Co Cork, Ireland. I also had a precious family photo of him, but I knew little more about him.

Jeremiah Malone

I had seen the 1901 census return for the family before on the National Archives of Ireland website, when his age was stated as being 75. Somehow the way FindMyPast set out his details from the census helped his age 'jump out' at me. He was 75, and 20 years older than his wife Margaret. FindMyPast also listed his birth year as 1826. An exploration for another time will be to investigate whether this is just an estimate, or whether a record actually exists. (After coming home I tried looking up the Ballyhea Parish baptismal records, which do exist for the 1824-8 time period, but they were hard to read, and I didn't 'find' him there on a quick look.)

It turned out that findmypast had transcriptions for Irish deaths 1864 -1958, and I was able to find the transcription of the likely death entry for my Jeremiah Malone in 1906, but no image. I noticed the copyright was listed as being FamilySearch, so I investigated further on there when I arrived home. Still no image though. It took me a while before I found the link for historic Irish civil registrations, and now knowing his death date, bingo, I found the image of the death registration for Jeremiah Malone, resident in Ballinadrideen, Ballyhea. It's strange how it suddenly feels as if I 'know' Jeremiah a little more, as if he has some clothes over his mystery.

 The death entry of the time didn't list the names of any parents though, but that is something I might explore 'next time' I go and use the library computer. "Maurice Malone" who was informant who was present at the death, is a brother of my grandmother, Margaret Malone, and thus my great-uncle.

I was able to print off pages from findmypast at the library for just ten cents a page, which was handy.

Using Ancestry Library edition was interesting. I couldn't directly sign in to the family tree I have created- so next time I will take details of any 'hints' I want to investigate with me. But I navigated a few things, like electoral rolls in Canterbury where I found Patrick Riordan listed over a wide time period. It was handy to know I could e-mail this home, check it again on my home computer, and leave it sitting there on my 'discoveries' page.