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| Where did all this stuff come from? | List of contributors |
People. Dedicated pesons who have slaved for years, keenly aware that history is melting away as the older generations leave us.
Almost every family has somewhere in its ranks one person who has taken it upon themselves to find out about and record details of their family history. This becomes a kind of obsession, but without these same obsessed people we would soon lose the connections with out family roots, and become less than we could be. There is a richness in history, a sure knowledge that in some small way your family too has moved and moulded events in the past.
There are skeletons as well, details that earlier generations preferred to hide or overlook, apparently unaware that all families have such events, that shame is a human condition equal only to the event giving rise to it...
The following is a list of obsessed people without whom these pages would never have come to be what they are today.
 Alice was the beginning. She has been the matriarch of the Wagener Family for many years, and has gathered unbelievable amounts of information about our family, and about families associated with ours. She has researched diligently in an era without the net and computers, and has a sensitivity for details that few can match. | Over the years she has freely supplied information to countless other researchers, including Maria Beniston and Mike Subritzky-Kusza, and accordingly it must be said that much of the material they have in turn supplied has come from base material from Alice, enriched considerably by their own researches. Alice has written two books, 'Mt. Camel Calling', and 'Teatree Berry Kid', both drawing on her personal experiences of times past in the Far North. |
Beniston  Maria was born a Subritzky, and at some point decided to record the threads that constitute that clan. Today she ruefully admits that if she'd known the sheer size of the family, she may have never started. | In addition, she soon ran into the complexities of 'Black, White and Brindle' Subritzkys, for at least one ancestral line married into proud Maori families, with the result that there are today probably more of these than the 'Pakeha' ones! She also ran headlong into several family skeletons, and this sometimes put her at odds with other members of the family, for on at least one occasion she proceeded in a direction that subsequently re-ignited smouldering fires. Such is the danger of investigating family events; she should be commended at least for her tenacity!
Maria has authored a series of books about the Subritzkys and associated families, being Vol 1 - 4 of 'The Subritzky Family 1843-1993' |
Subrizky-Kusza  Mike comes across as a little brash, pushy, perhaps, with a keen interest in promoting things Subritzky. It is only after a longer association that one finds this is merely the superficial, surface Mike, that beneath that is a strong drive to record and present history, particularly history associated with his family. It is even harder to learn about his personal past and present circumstance; he is a more private person than his public persona admits. | Originally he set out to pursue an oral tradition in the family that said the family was of noble origin, that they were 'royal' in some sense and that for reasons unknown they had left Europe to start a new dynasty in far away New Zealand. Starting with the name 'Subritzky' he eventually established links to Poland's 'Sobieski' family, and although people like Alice Evans steadfastly disagreed, the legend remained. There is still a faint possibility that there is a connection, but with Alice' s help Mike dug deeper and found an equally prominent, and somewhat more verifiable family line, that of 'Subrzycki', which he has been able to personally investigate and validate. Mike has written a number of books, including 'The Subritzky Legend' and more recently 'Subritzky Shipping (A Heritage of Sail) 1843-1993'. |