The New Zealand Gazettes Archive

When was the last time you looked in the New Zealand Gazettes as part of researching your family history?

After some years of having LexisNexis New Zealand Gazette Archives accessible on one of our family history computers we now have it available on all five. Of course we still hold the hard copies but doing a database search (when you don't know what issue you are looking for) is so much easier.

The gazette archives consist of the New Zealand Gazette, the New Ulster and New Munster Gazettes, and the provincial gazettes for Auckland, Hawke's Bay, Taranaki, Wellington, Marlborough, Canterbury, Westland, Otago and Southland. The indexes are updated yearly, running from 1841 to present day.

That is a lot of coverage for events ranging from finding a bankruptcy notice for an errant relation or your grandfather's school certificate results.

You can see when your great grandparent was signed up to fight in the war or find your doctor ancestor on a medical practitioners register.

There are two ways of searching the gazettes.

One way is through the Table of Contents. This is particularly useful if you have the year, date and page number of the gazette you want to search. All you need to do is click on the year of the Gazette and select date, issue or page number.

The other way is through the Acrobat Catalogue. This is the way most of us search when doing our family history. You can limit your name or place or subject search by selecting a decade or decades to search within.

The examples above are from my own personal searches for family information, searching via the archive. Exciting stuff, come and give it a go.

Bridget