Starting Your Family History Journey

Always wanted to learn more about your family history but didn’t know where to start? Try these simple steps from the comfort of your home using your telephone and computer.

Letter from Mrs Elizabeth Davies to
her daughter, Bessie, Griffits, 1914
Hastings District Libraries'
Local History Collection

1. Start with yourself. Write down what you know about the life events within your own family. Gather together photographs, letters and any other printed information.

2. Talk to everyone in your family about their memories. Ask where and when they were born, lived, what their occupations were; get their growing-up stories.

Taken August 12 or 13, 1988, as part of Hastings Camera Club's
24 Hours Project. HDL Local History Collection

3. Write down everything you have learned. There are many free resources to help you keep your information in order. The New Zealand Society of Genealogists has family group and pedigree chart templates to download https://www.genealogy.org.nz/forms_and_charts__228. 

Family Echo helps you to build your family tree. 

https://www.familyecho.com/#edit:START

Unidentified family, circa 1900. HDL Local History Collections

4. Work backwards in time. Start with yourself and work backwards from generation to generation. For New Zealand information, search Births, Deaths and Marriages. 

https://www.bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/search.

Power Family house circa 1890. HDL Local History Collection

5. Fill in the details. For New Zealand government information, search Archives NZ. 

https://www.archway.archives.govt.nz/. You can find war and police records as well as wills.

6. Search old newspapers. Having difficulty finding birth, marriage and death dates or looking for information about family members, then search digitised NZ and Pacific newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries on Papers Past. 

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

7. Search genealogy databases. Using the library's temporary access to Ancestry and Find My Past, search for more information about your family members. In Ancestry use the family tree filter (left-hand side of search results); maybe someone has already started working on your family tree.

8. Find local Hawke’s Bay information. Searching both the online databases of Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank https://knowledgebank.org.nz/ and MTG Hawke’s Bay https://collection.mtghawkesbay.com/explore could uncover previously unknown information.

9. Search the rest of New Zealand. Check out the family history section of the local library for the area your family member lived in. As well as additional online information, they can also point you in the direction of other resources.

10.   Keep track of your research. It doesn’t take long to gather a lot of information on your family. New Zealand genealogist Michelle Patient has made available her family research checklist to keep you on track. https://www.evernote.com/shard/s172/sh/f86f3cc8-2051-4d3a-bffc-83d652d67d07/986edb2069a67190

Posted by The Rummaging Bibliophile