The broken buildings and streetfronts where lives were lost.
The broken buildings and streetfronts where lives were lost.
Like any determined and devoted researcher, Christine Clement likes to the see the published records of history align with the facts.
Which, she said, had for so long not been the case with the recorded deaths from the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake.
The Te Puke-based researcher has been collecting informationabout the earthquake, and the lives it took, for several years as part of her website, New Zealand Disasters and Tragedies, and from day one, and through the following years, kept coming to the same conclusion.
There has been quite a variance in the "death toll" which was first estimated to be 350 two days after the February 3 event.
That slipped back to 235 on February 12, 1931, only to rise again to 260 on March 31, and that figure included 15 deaths recorded in hospitals.
Over the next few years more "official" deaths were recorded, although as Clement was to discover as she dug through newspaper reports and books, there had clearly been some misreadings of whatever paperwork officialdom had back then.
The broken buildings and streetfronts where lives were lost.
Like in the case of the same person being listed in some newspaper reports four times, as different people.
That was Antonio Anisy, although when he had attended St Bede's College in Christchurch he was known as Bodey Anisy.
His slightly unusual surname had also seen him recorded on occasions as Annisy, Ainsley and Hennessey, as well as Anisy Boddey.
He had been a seminarist at the Catholic Seminary at Greenmeadows when the earthquake struck.
"I went through tons of stuff," Clement said and it was challenging, as uncovering completely accurate records and details was far from easy.
"It got crazier and crazier," she said.
Which such variances in the figures she approached Ancestry.com and was given a grant which enabled her to purchase almost 300 death certificates of victims and possible victims.
Some were for people who had been sent out of Hawke's Bay to other hospitals around the North Island.
"I followed up these patient removals but it was soon obvious that some of these deaths were nothing to do with the earthquake," she said.
They had been in Napier Hospital at the time with conditions like tuberculosis and carcinoma, but some ended up on the "toll" record.
She also uncovered the death of a man who had been badly injured in his Waipawa shop during the earthquake, who died in Waipukurau Hospital two years later.
He had never been included on any lists.
Along with the man listed under four names, there was also the case of Reginald Williamson, who was a tailor.
In some records he appeared twice, also listed as Reginald Williamson Tailor.
In one book listing deaths one boy is counted twice — he was from Hastings but died in Napier.
"Confusion also happened when the unidentified burials were added to the toll when in fact, they had been issued with a death certificate."
Through the years, as she put it, "mistakes just kept getting repeated" and she was determined to clear things up through her intensive researching of the death certificate details.
She also worked in with other researchers and consulted with medical professionals and many others who worked on the Christchurch earthquake fatalities records.
There was a huge amount of "double checking and crossing off" and she has what she is confident is the right figure now.
"I have 247 deaths plus another 10 whose deaths were probably earthquake related."
Like a baby born on February 3, 1931, who died the same day due to what was recorded as a difficult confinement.
And three men who were killed in a plane crash near Wairoa on February 8 while carrying out deliveries from Gisborne to Napier as the roads were closed.
Of the list of 247, 94 were from the Hastings district, three from Mohaka/Wairoa, 149 in Napier (including four removals from the area and one at Havelock North from Napier, and one who died on the way to Waipukurau Hospital) and one in Waipawa (who died later in Waipukurau Hospital).
By date, 222 died on the day of the earthquake and another 21 by March 31.
There were four more deaths recorded in 1933, 1935, 1936 and 1944 — those four from paralysis caused by the earthquake.
