Ginn Gunn Gum Digger New Zealand

[Barmouth]

Can anyone tell me what a Gunn/Ginn/Gum digger is please?

It is written as the profession of my great Grandfather Jacob Marshall on his marriage certificate in 1891. The area is Auckland if that is a clue?

regards

Linda

[Ali from NZ]

Hi Linda,
Up around the Auckland / Northland area of New Zealand we used to have huge forests of Kauri Gum tree. The gum was collected and used for many different things.
So I would say that he used to collect the gum from the trees.
Hope this is of some help.

Best wishes
Ali from NZ.

[Coromandel]

In the nineteenth century huge quantities of kauri gum were exported to make varnishes and lacquers.

As well as the gum that could be collected from living trees, there was ancient solidified gum underground from long-gone trees. Gum diggers would use spears to locate lumps of the underground gum and then dig them up. Try googling "kauri gum": there's lots of info online. There are some great photographs on Auckland Libraries' Heritage Image site:

http://www.
aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/heritageimages/index.htm

(try gumdiggers or kauri as keywords).

[daleaway]

You can see the world's biggest collection of kauri gum here:
http://www.
kauri-museum.com

It was a rough old life. Most of the diggers lived under canvas and dug up the swamp gum. They all hoped to make their fortune but it was a subsistence existence for most. Not a life for family men, either. No amenities out there in the swamps. It was a way of life chosen by the unskilled and desperate, or by optimistic types with nothing to lose.

(The gold rushes had run out by the time the kauri gum extraction industry got going in the late 1800s, and some thought it was to be another gold rush. That never happened.)

Dale in New Zealand