Canadian Naturalization Database 1915-1932

Ottawa, July 22, 2009 - Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is pleased to announce the release of a new version of the Canadian Naturalization 1915-1932 online database. It now includes the names of 206,731 individuals who applied for and received status as naturalized Canadians from 1915 to 1932. This database is one of the few Canadian genealogical resources specifically designed to benefit those researchers with roots outside of the British Commonwealth. References located in the database can be used to request copies of the actual naturalization records, which are held by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
The database is available at: www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/naturalization-1915-1932/index-e.html.

New Zealand Obits at Ancestry

Ancestry.com just updated their obituary collections for Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Caribbean, UK and Ireland and the US.

About Australia and New Zealand Obituary Collection
The collection contains recent obituaries from hundreds of newspapers. We scour the Internet daily to find new obituaries and extract the facts into our database. We also provide source information and links to the full obituary text. If you're searching...

For more information about this database, click here.
The collection contains recent obituaries from hundreds of newspapers. We scour the Internet daily to find new obituaries and extract the facts into our database. We also provide source information and links to the full obituary text. If you're searching for a recently deceased ancestor, a living relative who might be mentioned in an obituary, or former classmates or neighbors then this is a great place to start.
The wealth of genealogical and biographical information to be found in an informative obituary certainly makes the effort of searching for one worthwhile. For many of our ancestors (and relatives), the obituary is the only "biographical sketch" that was ever devoted to that individual. In addition to names, dates, and places of birth, marriage, and death, the obituary often identifies relationships of the deceased as child, sibling, parent, grandparent, etc., to numerous other individuals. Obituaries may even suggest other documentation of an individual's death - a death certificate in another county because the hospital was located there; church or cemetery records (by identifying the place of burial or the officiating minister); or records of a coroner's inquest because the death was sudden or unexpected. And, of course, the wealth of detail in an informative obituary may open up many research avenues.

In an obituary search, it is necessary to investigate the files of all likely newspapers. It is impossible to know beforehand which, if any, paper is going to have the best or fullest obituary. Many cities have more than one paper and an obituary for a specific individual could appear in more than one place. Also, when considering possible obituary sources don't just check in the community where the individual died - also check the community (or communities) where the individual lived. Many people in their later years go to live with children and often die far from where they spent most of their adult lives. But, if they still had connections with the home community, there is a good chance that an obituary will appear there, perhaps a more detailed one than will be found in the community of death, where that person was just a new or temporary resident. However, the opposite may also be true.

To search thoroughly for obituaries from past newspaper editions, the best approach is to use a variety of tools including Ancestry's Obituary Collection, Ancestry's Historical Newspapers collection, and offline research through local libraries and newspaper offices.

TalkingScot.com back online

The TalkingScot.com message forum is back online. Has a special section for New Zealand.

Scottish Newspaper Archive

The Scotsman Digital Archive: Here you can search every newspaper published between 1817 and 1950. Find significant moments in the history of Scotland, major historical world events or discover if your ancestor appears in our births, marriages and deaths notices, or even in a news story.

64M UK MARRIAGE RECORDS NOW FULLY SEARCHABLE ONLINE

Ancestry.co.uk and FreeBMD partner to launch fully indexed General Registers Office marriage indexes

30th July 2009

Just months after launching the fully indexed General Registers Office (GRO) England and Wales birth records, Ancestry.co.uk, in partnership with FreeBMD, has made the complete marriage records for England and Wales, 1837 to 2005 available and fully searchable online for the first time.

The 64 million GRO marriage indexes now available on Ancestry.co.uk are composed of two separate collections. The first is the 1837 to 1915 marriage index, which was transcribed by FreeBMD, a group of independent volunteers dedicated to transcribing civil registration birth marriage and death records for England and Wales.

The second is the 1916 to 2005 marriage index, which has been transcribed by Ancestry.co.uk.

Previously, the GRO marriage index was indexed by surname range only. A search would return a list of all pages on which the searched name might appear, referenced by the first and last name on those pages only. Now, every name, marriage date and district in the GRO marriage index is individually searchable and includes:

Year
Year quarter
Name of spouse (from 1916, when the GRO began recording this information)
District (each county in England and Wales was divided up into registration districts)
Volume
Page number

Ancestry.co.uk and FreeBMD are currently working to fully index the GRO death indexes. When complete, more than 250 million individual birth, marriage and death (BMD) records will be fully searchable – only on Ancestry.co.uk.

As ‘core’ record sets for all family historians, this major enhancement to Ancestry.co.uk’s BMD collection will be of significance to all UK family history researchers.

Ancestry.co.uk Managing Director, Olivier Van Calster comments: “Birth, marriage and death records are among the most important of all historical documents and by making them fully searchable, family historians around the world will now be able to discover even more of their ancestors, and much faster.

“By the end of this year all of our England and Wales birth, marriage and death indexes will be fully searchable, which will be a breakthrough for anyone researching their family history online.”

FamilySearch Indexing: New projects for New Zealand

New indexing projects added in July: New Zealand—Passenger Lists, 1871–1915(this project is just starting and not available for search yet)

Go to http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html

GPS Technology Used To Create New Zealand Cemetery Database

Wairarapa residents may soon be finding their long lost aunty from Tinui without ever leaving home using the latest satellite technology.

Wairarapa Archivist Gareth Winter said he suggested the Masterton District Council add data from cemeteries not yet on its online burial register, but use GPS technology to give it a little extra information.

A few weeks ago, photographs of headstones at Tinui cemetery were taken and the GPS location of each headstone recorded to create a database where, in the future, families and historians could use the internet to see precisely where their ancestors are buried.

You can read the rest of the story at http://www.times-age.co.nz/local/news/gps-technology-used-to-create-cemetery-database/3901914/.

NZ Post Office Directories

Directories are books which are designed to provide specific information about particular people. The directories discussed here were business-residential directories, lists of householders along with their addresses and occupations. Directories of this type were usually published annually and often contained elements of the almanac which had preceded them. The purpose of business-residential directories was, and still is, commercial: to bring buyers and sellers together. They were produced in large numbers in New Zealand from the 1860s and, while they are still produced in a reduced format, their popularity began to dwindle in the 1950s with the emergence of the telephone book and the yellow pages.

The first business-residential directories produced in New Zealand were based on English examples. They were compiled, published and distributed by immigrants, usually British. Yet the conditions that publishers such as Henry Wise, John Stone and Arthur Cleave met in the colony were radically different from those they had encountered at 'home'. Directories had existed in Britain since the street guides of Elizabethan times, but the rural, under-populated and non-mechanised society of New Zealand was very different from the highly urbanised factory economy of 19th-century Britain.

Directories in New Zealand fulfilled three main functions: to boost the local and regional economy by bringing producer and consumer together; to provide a compendium of useful information to benefit the local population as well as the would-be migrant; and to create in printed format a resource which would help meld isolated communities together.

Directories commonly contained as many as eight distinct sections. These included an almanac, an alphabetical list of residents, a list of occupations together with names of those who practised those jobs, a street directory, official information pertaining to local and central government, non-official information, advertisements, and a selection of maps. In the earliest directories, those which preceded the publications produced by Wise and Stone, the almanac was an essential ingredient. An almanac gave directions for the current year in the form of tide tables, new constellations, seasons, the physical landforms and so forth. It was of great assistance to early settlers because subsistence farming and fishing helped those newly arrived through lean patches.

Between 1840 and the early 1870s there were literally dozens of directories published annually throughout New Zealand. Nearly all of these were regional, providing information about the local community. Most small directories were produced by newspaper proprietors. Moody's Royal Almanac for the Year 1842 was the first almanac ever printed in New Zealand. It included a trade and official 'Directory of names, &c.'. Other early directories included Chapman's Auckland Provincial Almanac and Goldfield's Directory of about 1869, and further south the Otago Almanac and Directory, published between 1858 and 1859 by William Lambert of the Otago Colonist newspaper. These directories were not only for local consumption: Lyon & Blair's 1876 Almanac and Descriptive Handbook of the Province of Wellington answered 'the questions continually asked by the people at home [the United Kingdom]' and the provincial government ordered 500 copies for sale in Great Britain.

There were two early efforts at providing New Zealand with a national directory. The first was The New Zealand Directory published in Melbourne and Wellington between 1866-67 and 1867-68. The second was Wright's Australian and American Commercial Directory and Gazetteer published in New York in 1881 and 1882-83. These were short-lived and it was not until Wise's went national in the early 1870s that New Zealand finally had a directory of some substance which was destined to survive for over 100 years. Between the early 1870s and the mid 1950s, three firms dominated the market. These were the directories published by H. Wise & Co. (NZ) Ltd, directories published by Stone Son & Co. Ltd, and Cleave's directories which covered the Auckland provincial district. Their directories represented a break with the past because the almanac component was either dropped (by Wise) or included (by Stone, but only reluctantly). What Wise and Stone also had in common was a desire to promote large scale business, both within the colony and between New Zealand and other countries, most notably Australia and Great Britain. Wise was to create the country's premier national directory while Stone (in conjunction with Cleave) produced its provincial directories.

Wise produced his first directory of Dunedin in 1865 and in 1872-73 went national with his Wise's New Zealand Commercial Directory. In 1881, Wise won permission to refer to his directory as the official New Zealand Post Office directory. Wise's continued to publish their mammoth directories in a single volume until the mid-1950s, when they adopted the provincial format copied from Stone's, who had ceased producing directories in 1954. Wise's continued producing directories from their Dunedin office until 1972 when they sold the publication rights to Universal Business Directories in Auckland, who still produce them today, albeit in a reduced format (and now also on CD-ROM).

John Stone's first directory of Dunedin appeared in 1884 and within three years it had grown to include all of Otago and Southland. By 1891 Stone was producing a directory of Wellington and by the turn of the century Canterbury, Nelson, Marlborough and Westland were included too. For the next 60 or so years, Stone was a formidable rival to Wise. As Stone's directories did not include the Auckland provincial district, his position was strengthened by his 40-year working relationship with Arthur Cleave. Cleave's directories covered the Auckland provincial district between 1889 and 1930. The last of Stone's directories were published in the mid 1950s, after which time the cost of producing such a detailed work became untenable.

By the late 1960s Wise's, too, were having problems in sustaining the production of such a publication. Smaller, nimbler rivals such as Cook's New Zealand Business Directory, which listed occupational groupings only, had emerged in the mid 1930s, as had the Business Who's Who. In addition, the postwar growth of New Zealand's cities meant canvassing on foot was no longer feasible. There were more towns, too, as company towns like Tokoroa (a forestry town) and Twizel (built to house hydro-electric workers) emerged. As the number of domestic dwellings increased, so had the numbers of telephones, as well as a newer reliance upon the telephone directory and its Yellow Pages. The Equal Pay Act 1972 made the cost of paying female canvassers prohibitive. All these factors conspired against Wise's.

Information for the three main sections of business-residential directories (the alphabetical list of names, the names attached to the list of occupational headings, and the streets directory) was acquired by means of a house-to-house canvass of the country's metropolitan areas and of homes in the surrounding countryside. The name of the head of the household was listed, as well as male lodgers aged 18 years and over (21 years in some cases). The spouse was excluded unless he or she owned property on his or her own account, as were children over the age of 15, even if they were in the workforce. Those who only rented property were also usually excluded. Official information (such as customs tariffs) was gleaned by writing to the particular government department concerned. Non-official information (such as the names and opening hours of recreational bodies, cultural societies and church groups), was had, again, by writing to the representatives of those bodies. Maps were seldom compiled from scratch as copies of local street maps were usually provided by a local printer or by the town council. For maps of the country, the assistance of the Surveyor General was usually called upon. Business houses were solicited for advertisements.

In the case of small directories, the publisher was usually the owner of a newspaper who had ready access to type, paper and the necessary printing skills. When directories grew larger, a local printer or publisher was commissioned to produce the item. Stone's, operating from Dunedin, at first used the presses of the Evening Star. Later they bought their own presses, not only because it was cheaper but because the production schedules were tight and the company could not afford to allow their printing needs to become secondary to those of the Star.

Both Wise and Stone encouraged buyers to take out subscriptions to their directories. This made the economics of producing directories easier as the number of directories to be printed could be estimated with some accuracy. Copies were also available through most bookstores and from catalogues. Wise and Stone aimed not so much at the householder but at those in business: hoteliers, mercantile houses, and manufacturers. Wise's, however, as the publisher of the country's quasi-official directory, had to provide one free reading copy in each Post Office.

It is remarkable that for such a small country, New Zealand should have possessed not one, but two firms producing outstanding directories, three, if Cleave's is included. Clearly the emergence of significant directories rested largely with the personal initiative displayed by Henry Wise, John Stone and Arthur Cleave. Wise's directory had succeeded in part because the Post Office had assisted him, while Stone and Cleave had boosted their fortunes by promoting those of the provinces. But there are other reasons. Nineteenth-century New Zealand was settled by Europeans whose culture was a print-based one and they needed a printed resource which helped them come to terms with, and understand, a new country. Secondly, New Zealand was settled by small craftsmen and -women, and the business-residential directories described in this section were a necessary aid to people in business who had neither the time, expertise or finances to advertise their wares and skills for themselves.

There have been few studies of the directory-publishing industry in New Zealand. Keith Maslen's pioneering study of Wise's directories which appeared in the BSANZ Bulletin in 1988 was a start. Maslen's study was complemented by a 1995 study of Stone Son & Co. (coincidentally Wise's rival) by Michael Hamblyn in the same journal. This was followed by the same writer's 1996 thesis 'Kei hea to whare? Titiro ki roto: John Stone's New Zealand directories 1884-1954'. Prior to this research, A.C. Penney of Wellington had produced Almanacs and Directories: The Alexander Turnbull Library Collection of New Zealand Almanacs and Directories (1979). In 1994 Donald Hansen published The Directory Directory, based on the holdings of libraries nationwide. Another recent publication is Maslen's 1994 'Early New Zealand directories: a brief guide' which details almanacs and directories held by the Hocken Library in Dunedin.

Future research remains to be carried out on almanacs and directories printed in Māori. As well, work on the emergence of the telephone directory and the Yellow Pages needs to be done. This is particularly so as the telephone directory played a major role in dislodging the business-residential directory from its position of pre-eminence. Research is also needed on more recent directories specialising in sport, commerce and the arts, such as the Air New Zealand Almanac published between 1982 and 1989.

Source: http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-GriBook-_div3-N122D9.html

New NZ Databases at WorldVitalRecords.com

http://www.worldvitalrecords.com has added two new databases for New Zealand:

New Zealand PO Directory 1892-93 (Wise) and New Zealand Gazette 1883

NZ Records added to WorldVitalRecords

Just Added - New Zealand Databases at WorldVitalRecords.com

These records are courtesy of The Archive CD Books Project. The Archive CD Books Project exists to make reproductions of old books, documents and maps available on CD to genealogists and historians, and to cooperate with local libraries, museums and record offices in providing money to renovate old books in their collection, and to donate books to their collections, where they will be preserved for future generations.

Industries of New Zealand. 1898 (available 7/2/2009)
This volume summarizes the level of industry and commercial development across New Zealand town by town. It devotes a significant section (over 300 pages) to examining individual commercial activities in some detail. It contains numerous biographies and hundreds of photographs of the industries and people of New Zealand.

Early History of New Zealand. 1890 (available 7/3/2009)
This volume of extensive material and illustrations covers the history of New Zealand from the first contact by Europeans prior to Tasman through to Cook and the French in the late eighteenth century. The first section also examines the missionary and settlement period to 1840 in detail. The second part covers the period of British settlement from 1840. A very useful list of visitors and residents 1642 to 1839 is included along with their residence. A second list of the founders of the British Colony 1840-1842 is also included.

Six Colonies of New Zealand. 1851 (available 7/6/2009)
The author of the 1851 work, Six Colonies of New Zealand, Sir William Fox (1812-1893) was an explorer, businessman, politician and author. He was one who helped shape the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852. He also served as the nation's Prime Minister for a period. After emigrating to New Zealand with his wife in 1842, Fox became editor of the New Zealand Gazette and Britannia Spectator. He became an agent for the NZ Company the following year and it's Principal Agent in 1848. His lobbying in England (1851-52) was probably responsible for the addition of Taranaki to the five original provinces in the Constitution of 1852, which granted self-government.

Published in 1851, this book is Fox's description of the events leading up to the Constitution. It gives statistical and descriptive accounts of each New Zealand colony, as well as details relating to the Maoris, and government. Fox's leading role as an explorer, NZ Company agent and one of the first colonial politicians gives this book an authority and pungency lacking from so many other contemporary accounts.

The History of Otago: Origins and Growth (available 7/7/2009)
The History of Otago: The Origins and Growth of a Wakefield Class Settlement was written by A.H. McLintock in 1949 and dedicated to the pioneers of the area. 'Those humble souls, who, having little except faith, achieved much'.

The contents of this book includes a description of the early history of Otago, an area of the South Island of New Zealand. It also contains information about the history of the Maori people who occupied the area. There are details pertaining to the sealing and whaling years and early settlements of European communities and the provincial era of Scottish settlers.

The New Zealand Division 1916 - 1919 (available 7/8/2009) Free for Ten Days!
This book was published in 1921 because of a request made by the New Zealand government to provide the general reader with a descriptive and informative account of the movements and engagements experienced by The New Zealand Division during the First World War.

Written in narrative form, the information was derived from a wide range of records which were used to create a historically accurate account of the experiences of The New Zealand Division. These records include war diaries from units within the Division, operation orders and summaries, as well as personal diaries, private letters, and dispatches to name a few.

Divided into 17 chapters, the book documents the different battles and movements of The New Zealand Division, such as the Battle of Stomme in 1916 and the Battle of Messines. Illustrations are included throughout the book, providing a wider glimpse of the experiences encountered by the Division.

Famous Kiwi Russell Crowe Genealogy Book

Where The Crowe Flies is a new book about the documented family history of actor Russell Crowe. It traces his family history around the globe. Learn about his ancestors and what brought them to New Zealand.