Q - Quarantines

Q is by far the trickiest letter yet to find an occupation for.

When I saw Quarrel Picker in a list, I thought is this a person who fights for their rights, who rallies against injustices ? There are a few people like that spread through the family tree I thought I could focus on. 

But no. A Quarrel Picker (apparently) was someone who cut and installed glass windows. Who knew ?

Quilters, Quizzers, Quidditch players, there aren't many occupations to choose from with this letter.

No Queens either, although one ancestor did proclaim she was the Queen of Spain - but that is another story.

Queen is really a title rather than an occupation anyway. An interesting fact I happened across was that about 15 million people emigrated from Great Britain between 1837 - 1901 (Queen Victoria's reign), mostly to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Quarantines were Customs officials, in a role introduced from 1728. They had the responsibility of watching quarantine hulks anchored offshore to ensure nobody left them before their period of quarantine had expired after arriving from abroad. Some ports had quarantine stations situated just inside the harbour, as in Sydney, or on offshore islands as in Brisbane where I imagine guards, possibly still called Quarantines, were employed to ensure nobody left before their time was up.

A lot of the time they were the last point of defence stopping smallpox, typhoid and cholera from infecting the resident population. In 1919 it was the Spanish Flu they tried to halt. Quarantine camps were set up with tents or rudimentary wooden huts and patrolled to ensure nobody left.

Today Quarantines would be the equivalent of Managed Isolation Quarantine and Hotel Quarantine workers protecting the citizens of their countries while ensuring returned travellers serve their mandatory quarantine period to avoid the spread of COVID-19.

As there were in 1919, there are breaches and slip ups today. That's why half of Australia and all of New Zealand are in lock down again right now. There are other similarities too in the management of the crisis. Just as has occurred over the past eighteen months, Australia ignored their Federal structure of government and each State closed their borders and introduced management policies including closing all schools and making mask wearing mandatory.

I don't know if anyone in the family works in MIQ or Hotel quarantine, or whether anyone was involved in a similar manner for earlier pandemics, but you never know. Pandemics aren't going to go away, so there is every chance that in the future Quarantines will find themselves once more in the preferred job search stakes.

This document from the Royal Australia Historic Society has some interesting information and guides for finding original documents related to the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic and was produced for the centenary of that event.

https://www.rahs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Research-guide-final-version.pdf