Sir George Grey Special Collections, AWNS-19360506-45-4

Do you have any family members who had/have wedding anniversaries, or died between 1934 and 1970? If so, have you checked The New Zealand Herald anniversaries and death notices 1939 – 1970 [microform] : index & transcriptions slips? You may just locate information that you have previously missed.

The names index was extracted from more than 22,000 handwritten transcriptions of death and anniversary notices. The second part of this resource contains the microfiched transcription slips.

The transcription slips contain the full text and date of the notice as it appeared in the newspaper. Usually the names of the people involved are included as well as a date and place. Sometimes there is even a reference to another source of information that may be followed up on later.

Often five or more people are named in an anniversary transcription slip. All of these names have been included in the index. There are over 100,000 individuals indexed, of which about 62,000 names are those of couples married. There may be more transcription slips connected to a marriage, for example when there is a notice for a couple’s silver wedding anniversary as well as one for their golden wedding anniversary.

The microfiche includes a guide on how to use the resource, including a key to abbreviations used in the transcriptions and the principles the compilers followed when putting the names of people in alphabetical order.

Have a look … You never know what (or who) you might find!

The 1995 edition of the index and transcription slips is held at the Central Auckland Research Centre; the South Auckland Research Centre and the West Auckland Research Centre hold a 2004 edition (updated with minor amendments).
Lynn (South Auckland Research Centre)

www.nzmusicmonth.co.nz

Mr Alfred Hill, composer. 1905. Sir George Grey Special Collections  AWNS-19050622-7-1

Music in Auckland Scrapbook, v.2, 1890-1930. Sir George Grey Special Collections.

Index Auckland, Record ID 69996.

Index Auckland, Record ID 69886.

Another excellent database that has material  from Special Collections is the Ephemera Index. For those of you not familiar with the word ephemera,  it is a term for printed material originally intended to have a limited life-span, such as programmes,  posters, tickets, flyers and cards - which are essentially the typical items that are associated with musical events.

Good luck with finding your family's musicians.

Karen

As mentioned in my 18 December blog about searching for passenger lists, particularly for those of us with ancestors who arrived through the port of Auckland, things are looking up!

Landing passengers, c.1910. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19100721-3-1

There is another online source which might help. The free website offered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints now includes NZ passenger lists digitised from microfilms held by Archives New Zealand. An online name index is gradually being built up by volunteers (they still want help if you feel like joining in) and is worth checking. If you don't get a hit on the family name, there is an alternative, but be warned it is not a quick fix.

It is possible to browse through the more than 350,000 images of ship passenger lists for the period approximately 1855 to 1973. Now, I am not suggesting this for someone who hasn’t a clue on what ship or in which year their ancestor came into Auckland. However, if you have got a hit in either the Auckland Area Passenger Arrivals Index, or the online newspapers' shipping news, which means you have a ship name and date of arrival, then the task, although onerous, is possible!

The images of passenger lists are arranged by port and year, with different sequences for Auckland. For instance there is 'Auckland',  'Auckland (inwards)',  'Auckland (other ports also listed)', 'Auckland and Hawkes Bay' and so on. Each of these categories needs to be checked in turn to see if they cover the year in which you are interested. Where that year is listed you need to check through the listings of that year to see if your ship name appears. Where it does, scrolling through the images will reveal the original record and date of the passenger list(s). But be warned. Some vessels, particularly Trans-Tasman ones, made multiple trips into Auckland in the same calendar year so care is needed to check you get the right date of arrival.

So what do you get as the reward for all this effort, I hear you wondering?

Image from NZ, Immigration Passenger Lists, familysearch.org

Well, the results are variable. Some passenger lists are hardly more useful than the brief stuff in the papers, but others yield details such as ages of passengers and ethnicity. Some include occupation and (at least by the 20th century) some give a basic address from their place of origin.

The results may be rewarding or disappointing, but that is the essence of all family history research, is it not?

Good luck!

Janelle

Oh, and I should add, these search strategies and techniques work for other ports as well. For a discussion about finding passenger lists and some of the online sources that exist for other NZ ports, see my blog post from 25 May 2011.

We have a lot of delicious family histories that have been donated to us, or purchased by us, in our collection. They come in every shape, size and format.

When we receive a new family history we pop the details of it into our family history database. In this database we input the family names of generations of a family. It’s a wonderful tool for searching for a surname that may be found in someone else’s family history - that also happens to be yours!

At the moment I am inputting a door stopper of a family history called From River Thames, England to peninsula waters, Canterbury, New Zealand : the story and history of Arthur and Louisa Waghorn, 1850-2000 onwards.

                                                
In her forward, the author Virginia Mayo writes, “I make no apology for mistakes and the lack of much background history – our elder generations did not keep diaries and so the recording of their lives and the early happenings are lost – we can only piece together with a lot of guess work their early days and times in New Zealand.”

As shown on page 244.

At 690 pages there has been a lot more than guess work in this family history. Full of clear illustrations, maps, genealogical trees, portraits, memorabilia (including autograph books and a photo of Louisa Waghorn’s best black satin hat) the book is much more than the history of a family.

Bridget

Do you know what the source was for the Auckland area passenger arrivals database?

Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19100217-1-2

Some of us have been lucky enough to get hits on our ancestors' names in the Auckland Libraries' online index of passenger arrivals for the years 1828-1889, 1909-1921.

However, many of us have had no luck. The index was based on newspaper lists, signatories to a book celebrating Sir George Grey's birthday in 1886, and a few records obtained from Archives New Zealand. All of these sources have gaps in the information they offer, and for a long time, there was little else available in the way of online sources for Auckland. But things have changed.

The website Papers Past offers an online and keyword searchable versions of historic NZ newspapers, including the Auckland Star 1870 to 1945 and the NZ Herald 1863 to 1924 – which will also eventually go up to 1945. Papers Past is a free website run by the National Library in Wellington. These two Auckland papers offer hope to people whose family names never appeared in the Auckland Area Passenger Arrivals Index. Many people who 'hopped across the ditch', were not indexed in the original project but their names, regularly published in the port news of the Auckland papers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, are now available amongst the lists of passenger arrivals from Australia.  Of course, those of you familiar with the way the newspapers of the day published the lists, are aware that often only family names were published e.g. Messrs Smith, Brown, Jones.... This can make identification difficult if you don't have a distinctive name to search for, so it is not necessarily a 'magic fix' to your research problem.

For additional information about Auckland and New Zealand passenger and immigration lists, consider looking at the resources section on Auckland Libraries Heritage et AL blog.

Janelle

P.S. Check back soon for Part 2 about other sources for NZ passenger arrivals.