Whenever I visit the NSW State Archives reading room, I am struck by how much tragedy is held there.

Tragedy; along with despair, adventure, love, jealousy, suspicion, joy, hope and madness. Just to mention a few. The quiet, carpeted room with its wide tables, microfilm readers and helpful archivists contains evidence of almost every human experience and emotion I can think of.

On a recent afternoon spent poring over brittle papers retrieved for me by those helpful archivists from the vast collection held behind the scenes, I was again reminded of this. The stories of two people, in particular, were among the documents I was examining.

To look at the selection of documents from the Probate Pack of a woman called Jane Florence Tucker (above), you might imagine they tell us nothing more than what Jane owned at the time of her death in 1915, and how her estate was dealth with afterwards. You might think that, but you’d be very wrong.

What I already knew, and what the documents refer to in a dispassionate way, is that Jane’s death was a tragedy of indescribable horror. She was brutally murdered by her estranged husband, along with her brother, who’d chosen the worst possible time to visit his sister, and was likewise killed in a fit of insane violence, the killer later sent to a ‘lunatic asylum’ (as mental institutions were called in this period). Heaping tragedy upon tragedy was that Jane’s teenage son, her only child, was forced by his father to watch this horror show.

You might now be wondering what does the manner of Jane’s death have to do with her subsequent probate documents?

Jane died intestate, without a will – not surprisingly as she was still a young woman and had probably not yet considered the need for one. So the Public Trustee stepped in to direct how her property (a cottage in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Stanmore) should be disposed of.

Here’s the thing: lawyers for the Public Trustee had to apply to the courts for an answer to this question:
‘Was Jane’s killer entitled to a one-third share of her estate despite having been found guilty of her murder?’

Quite a few of the dry documents in Jane’s probate folder were centred on this question. I was relieved to read that the answer to the case was ‘No’. This was before NSW had a Proceeds of Crime law barring criminals profiting from their misdeeds once found guilty. Fortunately the court relied on the common law principle of ‘the forfeiture rule’ which basically said the same thing.

So Jane’s traumatised son inherited what had been their family home. No doubt he never set foot in the cottage again. Several years later, when he turned twenty-one, he had the cottage put up for sale. At least his mother was able to leave her boy a financial legacy of sorts.

So, those documents that appeared to be about the legal arrangement for a deceased estate, told a much more tragic and difficult story once I began to read them.

The archives are full of such stories. The way people come into the world, who their parents and other family members are, how they are educated, the illnesses or accidents that befall them, crimes they may have committed, how they die and who inherits any wealth they accumulated – these are the building blocks of the records held in a typical public archive. Each of these documents speak of a lived experience of a person; each of those experiences resonate with the emotions attached to that event.

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A second bundle of documents I examined at the archives that day were from an earlier period, the late 1850s and early 1860s. They were Insolvency files pertaining to a man named Charles, the eldest son of my 3 x great-grandfather Thomas. Charles had been left a handsome legacy by his father when Thomas died in 1858, including a life interest in a farm and cottage in the district now known as St Marys in Sydney’s west, and interest in numerous properties in Sydney’s growing, busy central district.

Yet within a year he was being declared insolvent and his property sequestered in order to pay his numerous debts. In colonial NSW this wasn’t an unusual occurence. Young men were frequently involved in speculation and property deals, buying, leasing, selling or mortgaging land. That’s how Thomas had made some of his wealth to begin with. But Charles had inherited his wealth so recently. Was he foolish with money? a gambler? or did he just make poor business and financial decisions?

However Charles ended up in Insolvency court, the folder I looked through contained incredible detail of his financial life: every creditor was obliged to complete an affadavit stating the money owed them, often including receipts with long lists of purchases made by Charles or his household, money loaned, and so on. This information is gold for a researcher: a granular level of detail of what Charles or his family bought: grocery items, farm equipment and livestock, fabric for making clothing, even liquor purchased at the local public house!

There was also a lengthy document itemising the furniture and effects on Charles’ farm and in his home. I found this the saddest. Apart from the inevitable shame that the family must have felt at having their lives exposed publicly in this way, there were some very poignant details here.

Here’s one: Charles’ father Thomas had been a master cabinet maker in his younger years, before he took up farming. In his will, he had explicitly left two particular pieces of furniture to his eldest child, Charles: a chiffonier (a traditional wooden cabinet) and a writing desk. My guess is that both items were made by Thomas himself and held a special place in his heart. He wanted his first-born son to have them.

Looking at the household items in the Insolvency documents, I felt some sadness but no suprise to see both a chiffonier and writing desk on the list. I was glad that Thomas never knew that these prized pieces were likely to be sold cheaply to pay his son’s debts, and so soon after Thomas’ death.

It’s easy to dismiss old documents such as these. But they are a reminder that the lives of humans are made up of moments of joy and moments of despair. Many of which are recorded and carefully preserved in archives of one kind or another.

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