Heritage et AL

Recently a customer called into the Central Auckland Research Centre looking for a photograph of his uncle published in the Auckland Weekly News in 1943.  He said the photograph was the first indication to his family that his uncle was no longer a prisoner of war. A search of the Heritage Images database produced no results, which is not uncommon as many of the images from the Auckland Weekly News have a caption but few of the people are named. There is, however, ongoing work to rectify this.  When the Italian Armistice was announced on 8 September 1943, Colin Tayler was a prisoner of war at Campo PG 107, about 9 kilometres north of Schio in Northern Italy.  Over the next three weeks he and his travelling companions, Privates D R Muir, R Kendrick, I Penhall and E Barnett, travelled approximately 566 kilometres south: by train to Pescara on the Adriatic coast, before walking some distance and catching another train as far as they could go.  They met allied s...

Did you know that June the 9 th is International Archives Day ? To celebrate, archive services from around the world were invited to submit an image from their collections and send a message to archival colleagues around the world. See if you can find all the contributions from New Zealand in the photo page , according to the NZ Records email list there are nine. Information about the gestation of International Archives Day and the reasoning behind it can be found at the International Council on Archives website . The hashtag #IAD15 was also really enjoyable to follow on Twitter throughout the day; happily Britain’s National Archives have collated them in Storify form . All of Auckland Libraries’ Research Centres hold archival collections, as does the Birkenhead Library which is home to the Chelsea Sugar Refinery’s archive . Through sheer coincidence the subject of both of Auckland Libraries’ contributions were the personal papers of decorated war heroes. Ref: Don ...

Ref: 7-A16555,  NZ POWs alongside camp huts, 1944, Sir George Grey Special Collections Margaret Pollock found the tattered blue diary of her late father Laurence after his death in 1989 in amongst newspaper clippings and prisoner of war artifacts. The diary details Laurence's time in German, Polish and Italian POW camps during the second World War. Laurence  was serving in the 20th Battalion, 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Forces in North Africa when he was captured by German forces. He risked his life to record the horrific and harrowing conditions inside the camps.