When I first noticed the name John Blackmore listed in Row 0 at Timaru Cemetery, I expected to find at least a death notice to anchor him in the historical record. Instead, there was nothing. So I began looking in Papers Past, Timaru Cemetery registers.
I had a breakthrough in the hunt when I spied a public auction advertisement in the Timaru Herald on 9 February 1870. It read: “Re Blackmore’s Estate – To be sold by public auction… the lease and goodwill of the Otaio Accommodation House, with 150 acres, buildings, furniture, and stock-in-trade.” So I think this could confirm that John Blackmore had died before that date, and that he had been running the Otaio Accommodation House, a rural inn south of St Andrews. If this is the case, and that is the same person, then his estate required a trustee, and the auction listed a substantial amount of property, proving that perhaps he was not a destitute man.
So why was he buried in a public (pauper) grave? Well who knows... But I guess we could factor in that inthe early 1870s, this often happened not through poverty, but through circumstance. If a person died with no family or friends nearby, and no immediate cash available, the burial had to be carried out by the authorities. Estate funds could not be touched until after probate, which meant many perfectly respectable settlers ended up in public plots simply because there was no one available to arrange anything different.
In the end, what emerges is a very human story. John Blackmore was probably an early innkeeper on the Otaio, working and living in a remote district, and he died too suddenly for anyone to place a notice or purchase a plot. His grave in Row 0 may be unmarked, but thanks to a few lines in an 1870 newspaper, his life is no longer lost to the archives:
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THD18700209.2.15.2?end_date=31-12-1870