A while back a colleague from a sister research centre contacted us to see if we had a copy of the Jury List published in the Southern Cross issue of 16th February 1858.  Their customer was searching for an ancestor mentioned on that list, and they had found the issue on microfilm, but there was a problem. The jury list on the microfilm was incomplete. The list began on page three and went over to page four only to have the words at the bottom of the page read “For continuation see supplement.”

Supplement? What supplement? There was no supplement.

Did we have a supplement on our microfilm?

So I checked our copy and wouldn’t you know it, just like my colleague, there was no supplement. No separate publication at the end of the roll – nothing. For some reason, it had failed to be copied during the microfilming process many moons ago.

However. We did have the print copies of the Southern Cross in our news stack, those precious 150 year old originals, accessible only via Sir George Grey Special Collections. But did this original have the missing supplement?

Silence in the Court Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,  973-39

Yes, it sure did, and they were, with some difficulty I gather, able to scan a copy of the complete jury list from the original to send to the customer and also provide us with a copy to bind and add to our collection on the open shelves, located at 2 NZL COU AKD. A nice treasure to have here in the Central Auckland Research Centre.

As a bit of background on jury lists, each year in New Zealand the police magistrate in a district would come up with a list of men, aged between 21 and 60,  who could serve on jury. These lists were published in newspapers such as the Southern Cross and listed three things; name, occupation and street or suburb.
The Southern Cross as it was known from 1843 to 1862 was a weekly paper which became daily in 1862 – hence the change of name then to Daily Southern Cross. It merged with the NZ Herald in 1876.