Sir George Grey Special Collections,  Auckland Libraries, 1-W1814

Was your ancestor an engineer in NZ? If so, here are some sources of possible interest for you to explore. 

The Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand (known to its friends as IPENZ) operates an excellent website on NZ's engineering heritage. It includes a small database of biographies of significant engineers.

If you know the engineering field your ancestor was involved in, some of the works in the 'recommended reads' section may also prove of value as background material.

Auckland Libraries has both reference and loan copies available of Early New Zealand engineers by F.W. Furkert; revised and edited by W.L. Newnham. This work is a collection of alphabetically arranged mini-biographies of engineers who were born prior to 1866.

Along with some other sources on engineers, the names from Furkert's book have been indexed into the New Zealand Card Index; for example:



The New Zealand Card Index was closed in 1996 when Index Auckland started. As the name implies, this index has a strong emphasis on Auckland, but also contains references to places and people from further afield; it is worth checking for engineer ancestors even if they are not Aucklanders.

Among the items indexed are obituaries and other biographical mentions of engineers appearing in selected issues of the Proceedings of the Institution of Professional Engineers 1938-1952 and the journal New Zealand Engineering, 1946-1972 (indexing not yet complete).

Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 7-A15208

If your ancestor was already a qualified engineer when they migrated to NZ, or spent part of their working lives in the UK, then they may have joined one of the professional engineering societies in the UK. Some membership records of these are now available as searchable databases on Ancestry.com.

The contents vary, but some have considerable detail, such as the Institution of Civil Engineers’ collection of applications to join the society 1820-1930. Entries often include date of birth, nationality, and summary of education and career, sometimes with supporting correspondence and certificates. Engineers are a highly mobile occupational group, so such information might well include details of service all over the world.

Janelle

Found a NZ doctor lurking in the family tree? There are a couple of very useful research sources that you should know about.

The Central Auckland Research Centre in Auckland Central Library holds a biographical dictionary by Rex Earl Wright-St Clair: Medical practitioners in New Zealand, from 1840 to 1930.  As the quote from the work's preface states: "In this work are listed alphabetically all medical practitioners known to have been in New Zealand between 1 January 1840 and 31 December 1930, whether registered here or not, providing at least one forename is known".

Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries AWNS--19080806-16-4

Entries vary in size but typically contain details of education, career and death. In many cases they refer to an obituary in a medical journal.

Which leads us to the second source: the New Zealand Medical Association runs a helpful website offering the NZ Medical Journal online.

It includes an index of obituaries appearing in the NZ Medical Journal 1887-2013 and archived issues of the journal itself from 1999. For an obituary earlier than 1999, the website gives contact details for the NZ Medical Association and states that one-off requests are supplied without charge.

Janelle

The Central Auckland Research Centre has 13 new family history eBooks on CD-Rom about South Africa including:

Brothel, lunatic house and slave lodge – the building at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street’s many functions under British and Dutch rule are explored in this eBook. It also includes the register of the slave lodge census of 1714, and the death register of lodge slaves spanning 60 years.
This eBook documents British pioneers who made the Cape their home during the first British occupation 1795-1803, and the second occupation beginning in 1806 - after which the country remained a British Colony until the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910.
This first South African Jewish Year Book includes over 700 biographies as well as documenting many aspects of Jewish life such as The Jewish Gold Pioneers, United Hebrew schools, Jews of Griqualand West and Bloemfontein Jewry.


These eBooks come from online publishers Ancestry24, (no connection to Ancestrydotcom) who also have a very large amount of online South African genealogical records.


LR