The family descends from the iwi of Te Tau Ihu, the top of the South Island. Karen's whakapapa was recited in sworn testimony by her own brother, eleven iwi deep, and traced back seventy two generations to Kupe.
Karen wrote it down. Sixty feet of paper, in her handwriting, names all the way back.
There is a Scottish sea captain in there too, who came ashore at Port Underwood and married into the family. He is buried at Tahuahua, Blackwood Bay in the Marlborough Sounds.
Karen wrote down how that came about, and it is the hardest month in the whole sixty feet.
October of 1911 was the black month in which death began to take its toll of the Tahuahua families. On the 4th a baby girl was born to Mrs Tom Woodgate at their home in the bay, her eleventh child. In a weak state after giving birth she contracted pneumonia and was taken to Picton, to the hospital, where she died on the 10th at the age of thirty eight. Her baby only six days old.
Mrs Woodgate’s mother, Mrs Huntley, who probably attended her daughter at the birth, caught the infection, and four days later she too was dead. She passed away at home without being taken to hospital.
The next was the Woodgates’ eldest son, Thomas Junior, who the following week, on the 21st, died at the Picton hospital of acute pneumonia, aged eighteen.
Yet another tragedy was to come. Old Captain Huntley, who in the space of eleven days had lost his daughter, then his wife, and then a grandson, himself succumbed on the 29th. The cause of death was stated as “influenza pneumonia” and his age was given as sixty eight.
All four were buried on the spur just south of the Huntleys’ home in Tunaamai. As far as Karen knows these were the first interments there, although several more were to follow.
People who made things. People who wrote things down. It runs in the family and it did not skip her.
