I thought I would get back into the swing of looking up historical New Zealand earthquakes using archive newspapers by doing a live tweeting as I look through them this morning/evening. I have selected the month of April for the years 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893 & 1894 #eqnz 1/n

First of all, why these years? The 1890s are probably the best prior-researched decade by New Zealand seismologists of the period I am covering (1863-1928). Therefore I have largely stayed clear of the decade, so I thought today I would fill in some of the gaps in my database 2/n

The above pictures are the current state of my database for these years. As you can see almost all of the quakes done are for the last 2-3 months of each year (I did these late 2019), so April is virgin territory so to speak. Also magnitude estimates there given with caution 3/n

I start my searching on Past Papers ( https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ ) using the New Zealand Herald. The paper is almost the national paper in NZ today & for the period I am looking into it does a fair job at the same thing (biased towards the North Island & Auckland/Waikato) 4/n

I have sort of cheated at the live-tweeting here by doing this step already. These months look quite poor for NZ quakes at first glance - six quakes nationally found, three of which look slightly interesting. However not all quakes found are domestic - some are international 5/n

I have already covered the first such quake I found in this thread (1890 Santa Cruz Earthquake, CA): https://twitter.com/UKEQ_Bulletin/status/1247955003622543361

1892 has another California quake ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1892_Vacaville%E2%80%93Winters_earthquakes), this time a doublet on the 19 & 21 April. A telegram of the latter date notes many fires 6/n